Becoming a college president is not for everyone. The demands — including long work hours and crisis management — and increasing public visibility of the job may be why many college presidents are serving shorter terms than in recent decades, some experts say.
According to a 2023 report from the American Council on Education, college presidents were in their position an average of 5.9 years in 2022, compared with 8.5 in 2006. The decline in average time served over that period was steady.
“I am talking with a number of young academics who are in deanships and some who’ve aspired to consider presidency and they’re saying, ‘Do I really want to do this?'” says Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, president emeritus of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
“We are at a critical point in our society when we see how some of our presidents have been treated by elected officials and by the public,” he says. “The question is, does somebody really want to be attacked every day? It’s a major challenge. So it is uncomfortable when you know you are going to have to go to work to be in that position.”
Sometimes used interchangeably, the definition of a “college president” and “chancellor” often varies per school or state. However, a chancellor is commonly used in the context of a university system, rather than a single institution. Provosts, on the other hand, are primarily responsible for overseeing an institution’s academic programs and policies.
Here’s what to know about college presidents, including their day-to-day responsibilities, career pathway and challenges of the role.
Responsibilities of a College President
Though every day isn’t the same for a college president, typical responsibilities include fundraising for the school, ensuring the budget is balanced and being the outward facing leader, voice and representative of the institution.
“I think there’s a notion somehow that presidents … can delegate a lot of that work and things just run along and you entertain, shake hands and recruit students, funders and donors,” says Janet Holmgren, president emerita of Mills College in California, now known as Mills College at Northeastern University. “But it takes a lot of really hard, intense listening and communicating to try to resolve issues and resolve them in a way that moves the institution forward.”
Helene D. Gayle, president of Spelman College in Georgia, says the role of a college president in many ways is not that different than a chief executive officer of a company or organization.
“Your primary responsibility is setting the overall strategy for the institution,” she says. “Making sure that you have the right staff to manage the different operations of the college and generally set the tone for the campus culture and the overall running of the organization.”
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Ultimately, a college president’s goal is to help students achieve their goals and dreams, and be successful, experts say.
“If we do a good job here at Marquette, or any institution, and we have students go out and change the world in a positive way, that’s really why we do all this,” says Michael R. Lovell, president of Marquette University in Wisconsin. “And that’s what motivates me. With all the challenges we face in these roles and in higher ed today, that’s what keeps me going every day is when I send to graduation several thousand students out in the world knowing that they are going to make society better.”
College presidents don’t work alone, however. The governing boards of colleges and universities, referred to as trustees or overseers, for instance, hold college presidents accountable for developing and implementing the institution’s strategic plan. Trustees also hire college presidents, set their salaries and benefits, and provide support.
Challenges of the Job
Higher ed faces numerous challenges, including diminishing confidence in the value of a college degree, especially as the cost of attendance has risen rapidly over the decades.
“As president, when I’m in front of a group of potential students and parents, I have to be able to very clearly state why I think Marquette is worth their investment,” Lovell says. “For college presidents, it’s so important to be able to articulate your values. It’s not just to parents, but it’s really to the broader society today.”
Other challenges include debates around free speech, bans on DEI, and concerns about faculty salaries, campus safety and students’ mental health.
“If there’s some problem within an institution, it often lands on the president’s doorstep as that person being the only one who can address or solve the problem,” Holmgren says. “And there sometimes are pressures from various constituencies to say, ‘OK, well, whatever has gone wrong, it is the president’s fault. And the president has the capacity to fix whatever needs to be fixed.’ Obviously, there are conflicting ideas about what a problem is and how it should be fixed.”
The schedule of a college president is demanding personally, as well as professionally, since it’s a 24-7 job, says Jonathan Koppell, president of Montclair State University in New Jersey.
“You are interacting with people most of the day, from first thing in the morning ’til usually well into the evening,” he says. “And they rightfully demand your full attention and your full energy. So most jobs, there’s a couple of meetings a day or whatever where you are sitting in the back and you maybe close your eyes or take out your phone and start surfing the net or something like that. University presidents never do that. You are ‘on’ the whole day. You are the focal point of every conversation. So I think (for) some people, that gets understandably tiring.”
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Some college presidents also say the job can be lonely or isolating. According to the ACE report, the majority of the 1,000-plus presidents who responded to the survey said they have a support system with which they share their feelings, but some reported difficulty finding people who understand the experience of being a college president.
“There are a lot of pluses and you have a lot of interaction with people,” Holmgren says. “But when you’re faced with some of those decisions that are going to be hard on any one group as you make them, then it feels somewhat lonely at the top. And it’s good to have organizations and good to have support groups and connections that really bring you together with others who are doing the job. Especially if you’re going into a new community … the more you can learn, the less isolating it is.”
What Attributes Does a College President Need?
Foremost, a college president needs to have a “passion for education,” Holmgren says. “You have to care about the mission and the value of the institution’s work. Because you really represent the institution, both to the community and to a larger community in terms of the institution’s place in its community and state, among other institutions.”
Presidents interact daily with students, parents, alumni, donors, elected officials, government agencies and other constituencies, so it’s important to “be good at listening to different types of people and being responsive to different types of questions and issues,” Koppell says.
“You wouldn’t necessarily engage the state legislator who’s reviewing your budget the same way that you would interact with a student on campus,” he says. “It’s not that one deserves more or better attention. You just would interact differently and you’d have to be sensitive to different needs and different desires of those constituencies.”
[READ: 10 Things Your College Professors Won’t Tell You.]
A college president should also be attentive, flexible, a good communicator, a goal-setter and someone who understands the current complexities of higher education, experts say.
“You have to be pretty comfortable with yourself in the sense that you know that you are always going to have people who take issue with the decisions you make,” Koppell says. “Most of the things you do as a university president are not a black-and-white, right-or-wrong matter. You have to make judgment decisions and people will always disagree with those judgments. … So if you don’t like being criticized, if you are somebody who takes that personally or feels like that’s an insult, this is a tough job to do.”
Pathway to Becoming a College President
For decades, the traditional route of becoming a college president is by going through the academic administrative pipeline. That could mean, starting as professor or faculty member and eventually becoming a dean or provost, for example.
The pathway to become a college president has been changing lately. Now, there are some presidents with no professional ties to higher education. Instead, they may have previously served as political leaders, lawyers or corporate leaders.
No matter their career background, however, Lovell says it’s important for the public to understand that college presidents are “people like everybody else” and students shouldn’t be afraid to say hello on campus and introduce themselves.
“Sometimes we get put in a box and people assume certain things about us just because of our role,” he says. “What I find when I have lunch with students, one of the things that they really appreciate is that in many ways, I have struggles and I have challenges in my life just the way they do. We have a lot more in common than they really think.”
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What Does a College President Do? originally appeared on usnews.com
