It may sound cliché, but achieving diversity is everyone’s job. No single person or unit can do it all, nor should they. It takes a village — well, a team — to promote diversity, achieve equity, foster inclusion, pursue justice, and boost belonging in higher education workplaces, including student affairs. These terms must be more than buzzwords and deeply infuse day-to-day operations, campus policies, HR practices, and business intelligence. Winning institutions know the difference between them and use that understanding to bring talented people in as staff and leaders, to remove systemic barriers that shut some people out, and to ensure that all staff members feel heard, seen, and visible as reflected in the institution’s staff profile, equitable pay structure, core values, and DEI practices, to give a few examples.
There are many versions of this in the public domain, but we present this as a basic guide for readers. Diversity asks: Who’s present? Equity asks: Who’s (still) attempting to enter the room but can’t? What obstacles exist, seen and unseen? Inclusion asks: Are all people’s opinions heard, valued, and understood? Belonging asks: Does everyone in the room feel respected and free to be themselves, just as they are? Justice asks: How, or why, are our systems harming or limiting people? How do we fix them? And, all of these come together in a way that leads to action to achieve positive results, while paying attention to people’s experiences along the way.
Promising Places create a culture of evidence-based decisionmaking that leads to implementation, experimentation, and even revision of promising practices, policies, and programs like those mentioned in this year’s report. It’s not that they do one thing well, but they have developed a constellation of supportive policies, equity-minded practices, and cutting-edge DEI practices that provide employees, particularly those in student affairs, with a positive work environment, equitable pay, opportunities for advancement, and meaningful work that contributes to the institution’s bottom line and their personal/professional goals.
On many campuses, promising practices, programs, and services are "housed" across divisions. They’re in human resources and talent management. Diversity and inclusion. Academic and student affairs. Athletics and intramural sports, to name a few. So, the answer to the question "who’s responsible" is simple: everyone! When the institution wins, everyone wins.
Again, congratulations to this year’s highly selective set of Most Promising Places to Work in Student Affairs!
', study: - 'This study was first proposed by Ralph Newell at Diverse: Issues in Higher Education as a possible partnership with the American College Personnel Association (ACPA) in 2011. The ACPA Governing Board motioned for the then director of research and scholarship, Dr. Terrell Strayhorn, to explore the merit and extent of this project. With input from a volunteer advisory board, the project was recommended to the governing board and approved.
Strayhorn was commissioned by ACPA and Diverse: Issues in Higher Education to serve as the project’s principal investigator. In this role, Strayhorn developed the Promising Places to Work in Student Affairs (PPWSA) Survey in consultation with experts on the project’s advisory board. The original survey was pilot-tested with a small sample of non-ACPA member institutions; feedback from the pilot-test helped to clarify survey items, correct logic sequencing, and determine the utility of our scoring algorithm.
The purpose of this commissioned study was to examine the extent to which diversity and inclusion permeates aspects of various divisions of student affairs (or equivalent) at participating ACPA-member institutions across the globe including administrative structures, core values, short- and long-term commitments, work environments, and staffing practices.
', + 'This study was first proposed by Ralph Newell at Diverse: Issues in Higher Education as a possible partnership with the American College Personnel Association (ACPA) in 2011. The ACPA Governing Board motioned for the then director of research and scholarship, Dr. Terrell Strayhorn, to explore the merit and extent of this project. With input from a volunteer advisory board, the project was recommended to the governing board and approved.
Strayhorn was commissioned by ACPA and Diverse: Issues in Higher Education to serve as the project’s principal investigator. In this role, Strayhorn developed the Promising Places to Work in Student Affairs (PPWSA) Survey in consultation with experts on the project’s advisory board. The original survey was pilot-tested with a small sample of non-ACPA member institutions; feedback from the pilot-test helped to clarify survey items, correct logic sequencing, and determine the utility of our scoring algorithm.
The purpose of this commissioned study was to examine the extent to which diversity and inclusion permeates aspects of various divisions of student affairs (or equivalent) at participating ACPA-member institutions across the globe including administrative structures, core values, short- and long-term commitments, work environments, and staffing practices.
', survey: 'The PPWSA survey consists of approximately 60 items, organized into 10 major sections. For example, one section elicits contact information for the survey respondent and identifying information about their respective institution (e.g., control, minority-serving institution [MSI] status). Another section includes several items to assess the structural diversity of the institution and student affairs department in terms of gender, race, sexual orientation, and disability status. There are several sections that measure the availability and extent of best-in-class support services provided to student affairs staff on campus, such as stress reduction programs, educational leave, flexible work arrangements, and professional development.
The survey was authored by Dr. Terrell Strayhorn, with input from experts on the project advisory board, and is not available in the public domain. Now part of the larger ’Promising Places to Work’ project, the survey has been administered by Strayhorn and his teams at various centers and Do Good Work Professional Consulting Group. All survey rights belong to the author. All analyses presented in this edition were conducted by Strayhorn and Dr. Royel Johnson.
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