When academic-support staff members in athletics departments talk about their jobs, they use words such as “passion,” “fulfilling” and “rewarding.”
But lately, they also are using words such as “grind,” “burnout” and “pressure.”
It’s always been like walking a tightrope. Some who work in academic advising lose their footing and drop out of the profession; others find the right balance between the upside and the downside of the job.
After five years of academic reform in the NCAA, the lofty goals of that high-wire act – keeping student-athletes playing games while steadily working toward and ultimately earning degrees – seem more within reach in Division I than ever before. But the downside hasn’t disappeared, and more and more advisors are warning that recent reforms are shaking the rope a bit.
In many ways, the extra attention that observers – ranging from institutional presidents to journalists – are paying to student-athletes’ academic success has been positive for academic-support staff. Their work is more valued. They get more recognition for a job well done. The pay is sometimes better.
But expectations are higher, stress levels have increased and downtime has become almost nonexistent.
‘You’ve got to monitor everything’
As academic standards have increased, so have the requirements for documentation, monitoring and paperwork. Some institutions have hired staff specifically to collect and analyze academic-performance data generated by student-athletes.
That’s the case at Minnesota, where Mark Nelson is director of the McNamara Academic Center. Minnesota hired an analyst to work full time with the registrar’s office and compliance office, searching data to reveal trends indicating who is successful and who is not – and why. Nelson spends much of his time examining graduation rates and Academic Progress Rates.
But the challenge goes well beyond tending to marginal students. Before academic reform, “good students” mostly were left alone after initial discussions about classes and schedules, unless they asked for help. Not so anymore, said Steve McDonnell, associate athletics director for academic services at Texas A&M.
“You’ve got to monitor everything,” he said. “We have to make sure all students know what the rules are and what they need to keep us informed about. While that’s not a bad thing, it is more demanding of your time.”
Jim Rost, director of the student-athlete enhancement center at Middle Tennessee, cited increased monitoring of student-athletes as the most significant change in his job since academic reform began, and he believes it is creating a dilemma.
Academic-support units must pay attention to all student-athletes, but they also must allocate resources appropriately and effectively. It’s getting tougher to focus on individual needs, and even to know what those needs are, as academic advisors find themselves dealing with more student-athletes.
“If you don’t know what’s happening, how can you possibly know how to intervene?” Rost said. “You can’t use your resources effectively if you don’t know the student-athletes and what their needs are.”
That problem cuts right to the bone for academic advisors. Most, such as Kim Durand, associate athletics director for student development at Washington, entered the profession precisely because they want to help student-athletes succeed outside the arena.
“I’ve always been challenged, impressed with collegiate student-athletes at every level,” Durand said. “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t get up in the morning and I’m excited to go to work.”
But she admitted that excitement is tempered when she runs into some of the unintended consequences of academic reform.
“Sometimes, advisors will tell you that they struggle a little with what is good, solid academic advice and what they need to do to make a student-athlete aware that these choices might impact their eligibility,” she said. Examples include stiffer progress-toward-degree requirements and a rule requiring student-athletes at schools on the quarter system to pass six hours of coursework per academic term.
Academic advisors are trained to consider “what’s best” for a student, but those who work in athletics oftentimes find themselves toeing a fine line.
They might encourage student-athletes to stretch their limits by taking challenging courses. But they also must consider that student-athletes need to meet specific grade standards and show progress toward a degree in order to compete – and to retain a scholarship. The resulting advice always is tempered by the need to keep a student-athlete eligible for competition.
“In your heart, you might believe that part of the college experience is having some academic freedom to fully explore what a university has to offer,” Durand said. “But sometimes, that advice could be at a detriment to the student’s progress.”
Tomás Jimenez of LSU described the conundrum this way: “Academic advisors are kind of caught between two worlds – the powerful enterprise of college athletics and the pure education of students.”
Upside/downside
Balancing the requirements of those worlds can be tough, but the effort can yield rewards.
Many academic advisors believe that recent reforms have created a positive environment for student-athletes, encouraging them to always be aware of eligibility standards and their own academic standing. More student-athletes are thinking for themselves about such things than in years past, said Donald Reed, associate athletics director for academic services at Buffalo.
“They do feel a sense of urgency more now than before,” he said. “I look at it as stimulating life lessons. When we go into our professions, there always is some level of urgency as far as completing tasks or meeting standards to be successful. This is helping our student-athletes understand the academic commitments and that there are standards that must be met.”
Another benefit: Not only has the advisors’ relationship with the student-athletes shifted, but they also are seeing a change in other relationships – opportunities to build more partnerships outside the walls of the athletics department.
Whether they call it north campus, upper campus or something else, academic staffers are spending more time with people who work there: admissions personnel, registrars, financial aid officers, deans and others. They have meetings, they review paperwork and they make sure student-athletes are on the path to graduation.
And some say that relationships with coaches are stronger than before. Many coaches respected the work of the academic professional even before academic reform, and now that respect has grown.
“They see us more as professionals,” Texas A&M’s McDonnell said. “When you talk to coaches, they tell you we have the toughest job, that they wouldn’t have my job for anything. In general, they have a genuine respect for what we do in our profession.”
As penalties for classroom failures have become a Division I reality, coaches who rarely dabbled in the academic side are beginning to realize the true value of the academic-support staff. They’ve become more knowledgeable about academic issues, which makes for a strong partnership. After all, coaches can provide the carrot, or wield the stick, of playing time in urging student-athletes toward better academic performance.
Meanwhile, others who have desired, and perhaps even demanded, academic success from student-athletes – university administrators, faculty and staff – also are becoming more directly engaged in achieving the goal. “It’s more of a partnership,” Middle Tennessee’s Rost said. “Our president is tremendously involved. It really starts at the top and moves on down.”
The academic/eligibility vise
But even with such help, academic advisors still bear the basic responsibility for achieving results. In fact, one type of help – in the form of increased financial resources for academic support – seems to be heightening the pressure by increasing that accountability.
As the media report APRs and Graduation Success Rates of football and basketball teams at championship selection time, academic personnel get more public scrutiny. When schools pour money into academic programming but results still are slow in coming, the glare of the spotlight can be harsh.
“Universities have put in a lot more resources to these units, staffing and money for programming,” Rost said. “That puts a little bit more emphasis on our department to have a succinct, clearly defined mission in place to make sure we are using all the resources we have for the student-athletes. There’s more accountability when things are missed. Universities are saying you have all these resources available, you should have known about this.”
Academic staff may be responsible for advising errors, but some suggest it’s unfair to hold advisors responsible in cases in which student-athletes simply are ill-equipped or unmotivated to perform in the classroom.
“I don’t believe it’s uniquely our responsibility to make sure student-athletes succeed,” Rost said. “It’s up to the student-athletes to be intrinsically motivated, to value their education and do what they’re supposed to do. There is a fine line between babysitting and actually teaching them.
“It’s the student-athletes’ responsibility to go to class, to take the tests, to write the papers. It’s our responsibility to provide the best environment for them to be as successful as possible.”
Jimenez said academic support may not be enough to help student-athletes who enroll unprepared for college studies. In such cases, he said, it’s not the academic staff’s job to provide remedial education.
“We certainly can’t perform miracles,” he said. “It’s a societal issue. We’re talking about education and the educational attainment of our young people. When we work with young people, we provide support services. We try to supplement their education using different resources, different programs. But we can’t recapture what they didn’t learn in grades K through 12. We can’t re-teach them everything they didn’t learn.”
The price of caring
Such pressures are creating personal issues for academic advisors.
As more and more sports become “year-round,” more and more student-athletes stay at school for summer sessions and freshmen arrive early for the “summer bridge” programs on many campuses, there is no real break – no “downtime” – in advisors’ work.
The summers don’t look much different than the academic year for many academic-support programs. They still conduct orientation programs, offer tutoring sessions, operate the study center, do advising and run study halls. The pressure for student-athletes to get ahead and stay ahead means that more of them stay at school year-round than they did 10 years ago. Sometimes, academic support is even more crucial in the summer, when student-athletes take classes in a compressed time frame.
Reed acknowledged that it’s tough but said that academic-support staffs are simply mirroring what is going on in athletics programs overall, especially in football and men’s basketball.
“Summer is just a continuation of the spring in a lot of peoples’ minds,” he said. “We, as academicians, had to come up with a way to assist these students just as we would in the fall or spring, The only way we know it’s summer as opposed to spring is there’s a few less students and it’s a lot hotter.”
Add certifications and quarter-school schedules into the mix, and the squeeze gets tighter. Not only has summer downtime disappeared, Durand said, but breaks between terms are nonexistent.
“It’s frustrating and concerning to me because the workload of our advisors has quadrupled,” she said. “We ask our advisors to not take vacation (at certain times of year). We have had to add staff. The costs associated with doing business have gone up. It seems like every couple of weeks you’re reviewing work or projecting their next quarter classes. There’s not a time when our advisors are not focused on eligibility.”
Student-athletes may be paying a price, too. Instead of spending summers working in jobs, pursuing internships or tackling other interests, they are on campus – full time.
“It’s a grind for the kids, the coaches, for us,” Rost said. “But with the (competitive) culture the way it is, it’s tough to do anything else.”
As the spotlight on academics grows brighter and the pressure on those charged with assisting student-athletes to succeed in the classroom builds, more and more program directors are seeing burnout among their staffs.
Like many in athletics, those who coordinate the academic lives of student-athletes care deeply about the success of those in their charge, and some have difficulty finding a balance between work and life outside of the athletics department.
Sometimes, academic personnel approach the work with expectations that are different from the reality of the job. Sometimes, they simply think it will be “cool” to work in big-time college athletics. But the hours are long and the pressures are real. Advisors and tutors often don’t know when to let the phone ring or to go ahead and take a vacation.
“It is such a high burnout rate,” Jimenez said. “The hours they work, the stressful situations they are placed in, it’s hard to eliminate stress. There’s always something to do. There’s always a student who needs you. There’s always an issue that needs to be resolved.”
Most agree that the pace is different for advisors who work with student-athletes compared to those who work with the general student body. More factors must be considered – athletics commitments and academic activities must be balanced, and every decision must be carefully considered with future eligibility in mind. In fact, Jim Pignataro at Michigan State said that academic personnel working with student-athletes can really no longer be called “advisors.” Instead, he said, they serve as academic coordinators, helping to manage and synchronize every aspect of a student-athlete’s academic career.
But despite all the pressure and the danger of burning out, many advisors wouldn’t consider doing anything else. A new father, Jimenez compared his feelings about his job to his feelings on fatherhood: He wants to see student-athletes succeed, just as he loves to see his toddler mature and grow.
“It’s the moments that you capture when a student graduates, or a student succeeds, or a situation that didn’t seem like it could work itself out works itself out, or you see a staff member achieve a positive result,” he said. “That’s what it’s all about. You’re going to be successful if you’re in it because you really want students to succeed academically and in their lives.”
It is a labor of love, even if the safety net seems a little skimpy.
“By and large, people are very passionate about what they’re doing, and they really care for the welfare of the kids,” Rost said. “It’s a really rewarding field, but it takes a lot out of you, too. When the day is over, you need to let it go. Sometimes, it can be an emotional roller coaster – you want them to do well. But I will do nothing else. I really love it.”