working students research paper

Sustained Strain: Faculty Work Strain Under COVID-19

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• Published: 04 July 2024

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• David A. Cotter   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9234-3809 1 ,
• Catherine White Berheide   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1719-529X 2 &
• Megan A. Carpenter   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5824-0267 3  

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The COVID-19 pandemic initially placed college and university instruction into an emergency remote mode. The subsequent periods of the pandemic presented new challenges. This paper examines changes in faculty work lives in the immediate aftermath of the onset of the pandemic and reports on results from surveys of faculty at three selective liberal arts colleges in 2020 and again in 2021. Specifically, we investigate faculty experiences with work strain. Drawing on job demands-resources theory, we develop an analytic framework that examines the effects of status resources (gender, race, and tenure), work domain demands and resources (teaching and research resources, student demands, emotional labor demands, and scholarship demands), and home and family demands (caregiving). Our findings suggest that work strain was elevated in both periods and that only tenure among the status resources predicted less strain. We show that the sources of elevated strain shifted from teaching and research demands in the initial phase of the pandemic to emotional labor demands during the first full academic year of it.

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The COVID-19 pandemic created a high degree of disruption for college staff, administrators, students, and faculty alike. In the spring of 2020, faculty, staff, administrators, and students were evacuated as campuses were closed to all but essential personnel. For many faculty, this shutdown entailed quickly developing facility with unfamiliar instructional technologies and pedagogies, managing students’ technical and emotional needs in addition to their educational ones, and suspension and/or redirection of research (Berheide et al., 2022a ; Carpenter et al., 2021 ). Many faculty were simultaneously facing disruptions at home with children requiring supervision and instruction or family and friends needing help with shopping and other forms of caregiving. All were operating in a condition of uncertainty about the course of the pandemic, which included anxiety about their own health and that of their loved ones, as well as uncertainty about institutional futures (Jefferson et al., 2021 ; Kirk-Jenkins & Hughley, 2021 ).

By the summer of 2021, the COVID crisis had affected faculty work conditions in new ways. Offices, studios, libraries and laboratories were no longer closed, but classes remained disrupted – whether held entirely online, in hybrid fashion, or in person but with masking and social distancing to prevent contagion and seating charts to facilitate contact tracing. These returns to campus and a semblance of normalcy may have reduced faculty experience of stress, or these newly disrupted work conditions may have contributed to an accumulation of that stress. With enough such strain, some faculty may have begun to experience burnout and even to consider exiting the profession (McMurtrie, 2020 ; Pope-Ruark, 2022 ; Tugend, 2020 ).

Drawing on job demands-resources theory, we use two waves of survey data, one from the immediate aftermath of the transition to remote instruction and the second a year later, to examine faculty experiences with work strain at three small liberal arts colleges (SLACs). Specifically, we ask whether status resources (gender, race, and tenure), disruptions to job demands and resources (teaching and research resources, student demands, emotional labor demands, and scholarship demands), and home and family demands (caregiving) affected faculty stress.

Job Demands-Resources Theory

The job demands-resources model has become common in research on workplace well-being as well as work-life balance and strain scholarship (Baker & Demerouti, 2007; Watanabe & Falci, 2016 ). The model posits that all aspects of a job can be classified as either demands or resources. Job demands represent sustained cognitive, psychological and/or physical efforts undertaken as part of the job. Job resources can include physical, psychological, social or organizational elements of a job or workplace which are used in accomplishing the tasks of the organization or occupation (Bakker & Demerouti, 2017 ). Such models have attempted to account for both positive (motivation, commitment, engagement) and negative (strain, burnout) outcomes by examining the demands placed upon workers and the resources that those workers had to bring to bear on the problems they faced. When resources and demands were balanced, or when resources outstripped demands, workers experienced positive outcomes such as motivation and commitment.

Negative work life outcomes, including stress and burnout, emerged when the demands placed on workers exceeded the resources available to them to meet those demands. The particular forms of both demands and resources were occupation specific, as was the connection between well-being and those demands and resources (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007 ). When such models have been applied to academic workplaces both for faculty alone and for faculty, staff, and administrators, they have predicted the positive and negative aspects of work life including satisfaction and commitment as well as stress, burnout, and turnover (Mudrak et al., 2018 ; Naidoo-Chetty & du Plessis, 2021 ; Watanabe & Falci, 2016 ; Zaynab et al., 2018 ; Zaynab et al., 2022 ). Typically, faculty positions, like other professional occupations, have been characterized by both high demands and high resources (Bakker and Demerouti, 2023 ). Some of the literature noted shifts in the resources available to, and demands placed upon academic faculty in the context of the emergent neoliberal university which has applied an increasingly corporatized model to higher education (Berheide et al., 2022b ; Gardner, 2022 ; McClure, 2016 ; Mudrak et al., 2018 ; Vican et al., 2020 ; Zhao et al., 2024 ) raising demands on faculty (and staff) while reducing the resources available. This corporatization of higher education formed the context within which the disruptions to academic work precipitated by COVID-19 took place (Amsler & Motta, 2017 ; Angervall & Beach, 2020 ; Finkelstein et al., 2016 ; Gardner, 2022 , O’Meara et al., 2008 ; Rafnsdóttir & Heijstra, 2013 ).

The Effects of Domain Disruptions on Academic Job Demands and Resources

The COVID-19 crisis shifted the balance between the demands upon college faculty and staff and the resources available to them. One of the ways that the initial transition to remote learning may have affected faculty involved the need to quickly learn unfamiliar ways of conveying content and managing a now virtual classroom, particularly at the three institutions studied which, as residential colleges, had little experience with or infrastructure for distance learning. At the same time, faculty may have experienced greater demands from students unfamiliar with remote learning and uncertain about the shifting policies adopted by colleges and instructors. These disruptions to students’ lives and learning have increased levels of emotional labor performed by faculty (Berheide et al., 2022a ; Lopes & de Camargo Santos, 2023 ).

The proximate consequence of the disruptions for faculty may have been an increase in time spent working. The increase in work time would be expected to have a substantial impact on strain, work-life balance satisfaction, and other indicators of well-being among college faculty as it has had for other workers (Fan & Moen, 2022 ).

Unlike many other personal and organizational disruptions, the COVID-19 crisis simultaneously disrupted both work and family life. But, depending on the context, some individuals’ lives may have been more disrupted than others in one or both of these domains. For instance, while schools and childcare centers were closed and vulnerable family members were isolated, a faculty member in a life course stage where they had fewer caregiving responsibilities may have experienced less disruption at home than one who was a caregiver (Carpenter et al., 2021 ; Pettigrew, 2021 ). Similarly, faculty members who had scholarship or creative work that could not be conducted during the early period of the pandemic because of lack of access to laboratories, archives, field sites, studios, or human subjects may have experienced a greater degree of stress than their colleagues who could continue their scholarly activities equally well from home (Carpenter et al., 2021 ).

Status Shields as Resources and Identity Taxation as Demands

While Lease ( 1999 ) found no effects of either seniority or gender on multiple dimensions of work strain among academic faculty, we posit that the pandemic-induced strain will be more intense for some faculty based on their status characteristics. In the academic workplace, several status distinctions provide protection for some faculty and leave others more vulnerable to increased work demands. That is, they represent a resource for “crafting” the demands placed on an incumbent by their job (Demerouti & Bakker, 2023 ). The most obvious of these is tenure, and the implications for the COVID crisis are fairly apparent. Tenured faculty have less structural need to be concerned about short-term disruptions to their teaching and research than their untenured colleagues. They have a status shield.

Hochschild ( 1983 ) coined the term status shield to refer to the protection from emotional demands that workers had when they belonged to a privileged group. She argued that women did not have the same shield as men did against the negative feelings of the people they served, which in the case of college professors would be students. Cottingham and colleagues ( 2015 ) found that male nurses’ status as men generally shielded them from performing as much emotional labor on the job as women nurses. Cottingham et al. ( 2015 ) argued that status shields were an interactional resource, the benefits of which were based on cultural beliefs that higher status people, such as men, were presumably more competent, were worthier of respect, and had greater authority.

Brooks ( 1982 ) found that men graduate students exhibited significantly higher levels of aggressiveness toward women faculty than men faculty. Similarly, white students have often challenged the authority of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) faculty (Harlow, 2003 ; Pittman, 2010 ). Status shields not only protected privileged actors from emotional demands, they also protected them from affronts to their authority (Bellas, 1999 ) and from other kinds of additional job demands (Berheide et al., 2022a ; Goodrum & Stafford, 2003 ). According to Hochschild ( 1983 ), the fact that women and others with lower status were treated differently on the job changed the nature of the job.

In fact, some faculty were subject to “identity taxation,” by having to perform additional work, including extra service expectations and more emotional labor, because they were a member of an underrepresented group (Eagan & Garvey, 2015 ; Hirshfield & Joseph, 2012 ). The pandemic may have exacerbated these extra demands in both visible ways from administrators and invisible ones from students (Berheide et al., 2022a ; Clark et al., 2022 ; Kasymova et al., 2021 ; Melaku & Beeman, 2022 ; Mickey et al., 2022 ; Pettigrew, 2021 ; Porter et al., 2022 ; Yildirim & Eslen-Ziya, 2021 ).

COVID-Induced Strain and Related Outcomes in U. S. Higher Education

To date, examination of COVID-induced work strain in higher education has been limited. The Chronicle of Higher Education ’s October 2020 survey of 1,122 faculty in the United States indicated that more than one third felt “extremely” and just over another third (36%) felt “very” stressed (Tugend, 2020 ). It suggested that many were “on the verge of burnout.” Winfield and Paris’ ( 2021 ) study applied a mixed method approach to the way that demand and resource changes induced by the pandemic affected burnout and turnover among 1080 higher education professionals (staff and administrators in admissions, registrars, and student affairs offices) at 782 institutions in the United States. They found that increases in demands were associated with higher levels of burnout and decreases in resources were associated with greater risk of turnover. Their analysis of qualitative responses revealed considerable concern among respondents about emotional and mental health.

To date, the other studies of faculty stress response to COVID in the United States are studies of single institutions. For example, Kotini-Shah et al.’s ( 2022 ) studied health sciences faculty at a public university with a medical school, finding high levels of work stress among 73% of respondents and high levels of home stress among 60%. Their latent class analysis identified two clusters of faculty with high stress both at work and at home: a group most likely to be pre-tenure women faculty with young children at home and the second a group characterized by women who were tenured associate professors with children at home. A third cluster, which was more likely to be men, tenured full professors without young children, exhibited moderate work stress and lower home stress. The final cluster of faculty who exhibited low work- and home-related stress was mostly made up of men without children in visiting and lecturer positions.

In their study of 58 faculty at a regional university, Chin and Clubbs ( 2022 ) found that pandemic-induced stressors moderated the relationship between values alignment and burnout such that they observed higher levels of burnout among faculty who more closely identified with the values of the institution and who had high levels of pandemic-induced stress. They posited the possibility of “moral injury” among these faculty due to a lack of workplace resources and supports. Moral injuries are a form of harm that occur when individuals are placed in situations where they are unable to act in ways congruent with their deeply held beliefs and values. Chin and Clubbs differentiated moral injury from burnout saying “[W]hile burnout can feel like a personal failing, moral injury is different because someone can acknowledge that they are trying to do the right thing but are faced with other things, such as policies and lack of workplace resources, that they believe they can do little about” (Chin & Clubbs, 2022 , p. 58). While it was clear at the outset of the pandemic that faculty work lives were disrupted, it largely remains to be seen whether faculty maintained elevated efforts to adapt to COVID-induced disruptions of teaching, scholarship, and homelife over the course of the 2020–2021 academic year and what effects those elevated efforts have had on faculty well-being.

One study that, like this one, used repeated cross-sectional data revealed an increase in perceived stress among faculty. Eubank, Burke, and Orazem ( 2023 ) surveyed faculty at City University of New York in three waves in the spring and fall of 2020 and again in the spring of 2021. Their descriptive analysis showed that faculty’s levels of stress rose during the first year of the pandemic (April 2020 to April 2021) for both full time and part-time faculty. While this result is important, they did not analyze factors other than full time/part time status that might have predicted strain.

Our understanding of the effects of institution type on faculty stress during the COVID-19 pandemic are hampered by the fact that most published studies in the US examine it only at research-intensive universities (e.g., Eubank, Burke, and Orazem 2023 ). Studies on the pandemic’s effects typically sample faculty at a single university (e.g., Chin & Clubbs, 2022 ) or even a single school within one (e.g. Kotini-Shah et al., 2022 ). Analysis of faculty data by institution type tends to focus on other topics such as marriage and fertility (Perna, 2005a ), hours (Winslow 2010 ), salary (Kelly and Grant 2012 ), and tenure and promotion (Perna, 2005b ). Unfortunately, there is limited systematic empirical basis from which to develop a theory of how institution type affects faculty stress. Our research begins to fill this gap by analyzing data from three small liberal arts colleges.

In the United States, colleges outnumber research universities. The Carnegie Foundation (2024) classified just 279 institutions of higher education as very high or high research activity universities compared to 499 as public and private not-for-profit four-year baccalaureate colleges. Baccalaureate colleges provide a valuable context within which to study faculty stress during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lower research expectations may account for the widespread belief that faculty jobs at teaching-intensive colleges are less stressful than those at research-intensive universities. Yet those lower research expectations come with higher teaching and service demands (Wolf-Wendel & Ward, 2006 ). As Birnbaum ( 1988 ) observed, the carework faculty engaged in while nurturing students at these teaching-intensive institutions was time-consuming. Therefore, faculty at SLACs may have experienced high levels of student and emotional labor demands during the pandemic. To assess whether these demands predicted faculty stress, we surveyed tenure-stream faculty at three SLACs. In this paper, we address the following research questions:

Research Questions

Did overall levels of faculty members’ perceived strain increase, decrease, or remain constant during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic?

Is work strain less prevalent among faculty who possess status shield resources and more prevalent among faculty subject to identity taxation demands?

Are faculty temporal/spatial/cognitive resources associated with less work strain?

Do faculty who report increased work demands experience greater work strain?

Do faculty with caregiving demands experience greater work strain?

Do the correlates of work strain shift during the first year of the pandemic?

Potential Contributions

This study will contribute to the literature on faculty work lives during COVID in several ways. First, we address a gap in the extant literature by analyzing data about smaller, typically residential, teaching-intensive institutions. Second, we examine shifts in faculty work strain at multiple points in time – early and later in the pandemic. Third, by applying the job demands-resources model to the issue of work strain, we seek to move beyond description of who experienced how much strain to attempting to understand covariates and potential predictors of that strain. Finally, we attempt to suggest remediation and mitigation strategies to ameliorate the lingering harms of the disruptions and prepare for potential disruptions in the future.

Methods and Materials

Research context.

The three small liberal arts colleges (SLACs) from which the present study’s samples were drawn are each selective, residential, and predominately white private institutions in upstate New York. These sites were selected because of the authors’ access to faculty at those institutions. The three have similar sized student bodies (2100–2700) and faculties (165 to 217).

All three were fully remote from mid-March to the end of the academic year in 2020. The campuses were closed to nearly all students, faculty, and staff until later in the summer. During the 2020–2021 academic year, each allowed faculty to choose whether to teach and students whether to attend online, in-person, or hybrid classes, maintained masking and distancing in classrooms, and provided regular testing for students and employees on campus.

While the similarities among the colleges were substantial, there were several important differences. First, one of the colleges used a trimester schedule, which was notable because while two were in mid-semester when the transition to remote learning occurred in March 2020, this shift occurred at the end of winter term for this college. Those faculty conducted the entire spring term online. Second, during the 2020–2021 academic year, two of the three colleges largely retained their original calendar while the third adopted a shifted semester model with an expanded 2021 summer semester to reduce the number of students and faculty on campus during any given semester. Because there were no significant differences in our primary dependent variable, work strain, between the colleges for either year, we were able to pool data from all three colleges in our analyses. Footnote 1

Participants and Procedure

We collected the data in two waves using a repeated cross-section of the faculty at these three institutions. Footnote 2 The first wave (Wave 1) data came from a survey of 204 tenure-stream faculty at these three SLACs in the spring and summer of 2020. We collected the second wave (Wave 2) in the spring and summer of 2021, after a full year of pandemic-disrupted academic life. Although we expanded the second-wave sampling frame to include full-time non-tenure stream faculty as well, in this paper, to ensure comparability with the first wave, we restricted our analysis of second wave data to tenure stream faculty who make up a large majority of instructional staff at each of the three institutions. Footnote 3 In the second wave, 157 faculty completed the survey, 126 of whom were tenure stream faculty and were included in this analysis. Footnote 4

Participants were recruited via an email from the college’s Provost or their designate inviting faculty to complete the survey. Follow up emails were distributed at several week intervals. A chance to win a tablet computer was offered as an incentive. Response rates among tenure track faculty for the first wave were 37% and 23% in the second.

While this repeated cross section design allows us to examine changes in levels of strain and the patterns of correlates, it is not as well suited to assessing causal relationships.

Work Strain

To measure perceived work strain, we adapted an item from Hämmig ( 2017 ) in which participants indicated how often, in comparison to the Fall 2019 term, they felt overwhelmed by work. We added two parallel questions about how often they felt stressed and exhausted. Participants responded on a Likert scale of 1 (much less often) to 5 (much more often). Items were centered at 0 and averaged to create a single composite score (alpha = 0.992). Higher scores indicated greater work-related emotional strain. These measures were replicated in the 2021 wave. The reliability of this index was similarly high in Wave 2 (alpha = 0.938).

Status Shield Resources/Identity Taxation Demands

We examined a set of status characteristics that may have entailed greater or lesser degrees of power and autonomy in the workplace, that is, that provided some faculty a status shield, which served as a resource protecting them from student demands or alternatively created an identity tax that subjected other faculty to higher work demands. These included measures of gender and race/ethnicity as well as tenure. We coded each of these as binary variables. For gender, we distinguished cisgender men from other faculty as an indication of their privileged status in the academy. To reflect the status privilege of white faculty, we coded race as white/BIPOC status. Finally, we used a binary indicator of tenure status (tenured = 1).

Work Domain Resources, Demands, and Disruptions

We assessed the effects of work-domain resources with questions about respondents’ temporal, spatial, and psychological ability to perform teaching and research. To operationalize faculty resources, we used six questions about whether faculty were able to dedicate “enough time” and “appropriate space,” as well as whether they had “trouble concentrating” on teaching and research in each of the two waves (e.g., “I have been able to dedicate enough time to my teaching”). The responses were a five-point Likert scale from “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree.” After reverse-coding responses for the question about concentration, these reflect material, temporal, and cognitive resources faculty felt they could deploy. We averaged the responses across the six questions, with a high level of reliability in both waves (Wave 1 α = 0.77, Wave 2 α = 0.79).

We operationalized demands by measuring the degree to which faculty perceived increased demands for or barriers to teaching and scholarship because of the pandemic. To measure the possibility of disruption of scholarship , we asked respondents in both waves, “To what extent have you been able to accomplish your scholarship and/or creative work during the COVID-19 pandemic?” The response options were 2 (I have been a lot more productive than before COVID-19), 1 (I have been a little more productive than before COVID-19), 0 (I have been about as productive as before COVID-19), -1 (I have been a little less productive than before COVID-19), and − 2 (I have been a lot less productive than before COVID-19).

We assessed levels of teaching-related demands with a series of eight questions, five of which we adapted from El-Alayli et al. ( 2018 ). We could only use one of El-Alayli et al.’s ( 2018 ) standard work demand items (i.e., “students would send emails with questions about course materials and assignments”) and one friendship behavior item (i.e., “students would discuss personal issues such as mental health with you”) because the others all involved in-person contact that was no longer possible in spring 2020. We adapted three of El-Alayli et al.’s ( 2018 ) measures of the solicitation of special favors: “students would ask for adjustments or exceptions on grading (higher grades, extra credit, resubmissions),” “students would ask to meet (either in-person or via phone/Internet) and expect to be able to meet right away without scheduling an appointment,” and “students would ask for adjustments or exceptions on assignments (extensions, exemptions, reductions).”

The three items we added addressed experiences that might have increased due to the pandemic, specifically the increase in the types of behaviors that El-Alayli et al. ( 2018 ) labeled special favors (i.e., “students discussed with you whether they should take your course Pass/Fail;” “students discussed issues with Wi-Fi, computer access, or phone access that kept them from completing work for your course;” and “you needed to go to extra lengths to get in touch with students who dropped out of contact [i.e., sending extra emails, contacting student advising office, etc.]”).

Rather than ask participants to estimate how often students engaged in these behaviors in the typical term as El-Alayli et al. ( 2018 ) did, we asked them to rate how frequently these experiences occurred during the spring 2020 term or 2020–2021 academic year compared to fall 2019 on a 5-point scale consisting of -2 (much less often), -1 (slightly less often), 0 (about the same), 1 (slightly more often), and 2 (much more often). The eight items (one standard work demand, one friendship behavior, and six special favors) formed a single student demands index with high reliability (Wave 1 α = 0.77, Wave 2 α = 0.73) that was equivalent to what El- Alayli et al. (2018) found for special favor behaviors. Higher scores indicated that faculty experienced a higher number of these student demands more often during spring 2020 or academic year 2020–2021 than fall 2019.

We also assessed emotional labor demands with a series of six questions about emotional labor adapted from El-Alayli et al. ( 2018 ). These six items measured two forms of emotional labor: student-directed and self-directed. Self-directed emotional labor focused on the degree to which faculty felt that they had to adjust their behaviors and feelings when interacting with students (four items: e.g., “I was unable to express my true feelings to my students,” and “I was required to be ‘artificially enthusiastic’ to students”). Conversely, student-directed emotional labor centered around the degree to which faculty felt they had to help students deal with their emotions (two items: “I spent a lot of time helping students feel better about themselves” and “I spent a lot of time helping students deal with stresses and difficulties”). Participants responded on a Likert-scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Higher scores indicated greater emotional labor. We combined these two dimensions into a single scale of emotional labor demands with high reliability (Wave 1 α = 0.72, Wave 2 α = 0.80).

Home Life Demands

We operationalized demands at home as whether faculty had any caregiving responsibilities, which we calculated as a dichotomous variable by combining the presence of children under 18 in the household with the provision of care to others either inside or outside the home. We coded those with any caregiving responsibilities as 1 and those with no caregiving responsibilities as 0.

Working Time and Work-Life Balance

Finally, we introduced two variables examining how increased demands and decreased resources at work may have resulted in faculty allocating more time to work than typical, thereby changing their satisfaction with work-life balance. Faculty were asked to assess “Which of the following is true for the changes you made to your work schedule following the switch to remote learning during the Spring 2020 term/during the 2020–2021 academic year?” They could respond on a five-point scale from significantly more to significantly less each week (2, I worked significantly more each week; 1, I worked slightly more each week; 0, I worked about the same number of hours; -1, I worked slightly less each week; and − 2, I worked significantly less each week).

To assess changes in work-life balance, respondents were asked two questions: “Prior to/Since the COVID-19 pandemic, how satisfied were/are you with the balance between your professional and personal life?” each ranked on a six-point scale from very dissatisfied (1) to very satisfied (6). We took the difference between the two measures as an indicator of the change in work-life satisfaction, with negative values indicating a decrease in work-life satisfaction during the pandemic.

Analytic Strategy

Mean substitution was used to replace missing values. Footnote 5 Our analytic strategy began with a descriptive analysis and proceeded to an examination of correlations between each of the predictors and work strain. We then used a series of hierarchical OLS regression models (Ross & Willson 2017 ) to identify the sources of strain among faculty. Our models are constructed in blocks beginning with the status resources (Research Question 2), then adding the job resources (time, space, attention, for teaching and scholarship, and ability to sustain scholarship (Research Question 3), and student demands and emotional labor demands (Research Question 4). Caregiving demands are added to assess Research Question 5. Finally, Research Question 6 is assessed by comparing effects of job demands and resources between the two waves. Regression diagnostics including inspection of residuals plots to ensure normality and examination of collinearity diagnostics (VIF < 5) to ensure independence among the predictor variables indicated that the data met the assumptions of OLS regression.

Addressing Research Question 1, our first analysis examined the overall levels of work strain in the two waves asking whether the amount of work strain fell between 2020 and 2021. As Fig.  1 shows, perceived levels of work strain were elevated during both the summer of 2020 and the summer of 2021 compared to Fall 2019. At both points, nearly half of the faculty answered that they felt overwhelmed, stressed, and exhausted by work “much more often” than before the pandemic. For each individual item, between nearly three quarters and four fifths of faculty reported higher levels of work strain. Only a small number of faculty (between 4 and 8%) reported feeling overwhelmed, stressed and exhausted less often.

Measures of work strain among tenure-stream faculty 2020 and 2021

The second part of our descriptive question was whether the level of work strain increased or decreased between the end of academic year 2019–2020 and the end of academic year 2020–2021. When we combined the three indicators into a single strain scale, we found no significant change in levels of work strain from the early phase of the pandemic in 2020 to the summer and fall of 2021. The average level of reported work strain for faculty was 1.11 in 2020 and 1.20 in 2021, a difference that was not statistically significant (t = -0.796).

Sources of Strain: Bivariate Correlations and Multivariate Models

We began analyzing the sources of strain by examining the bivariate correlations between work strain and each of the predictors as presented in Table  1 and 2 . The bivariate correlations for both waves suggested that tenured faculty reported lower levels of work strain than their tenure-track colleagues. More work resources in the form of time, space, and concentration for teaching and research were negatively correlated with strain in both waves, though the association was stronger in the first wave. The ability to accomplish scholarship was associated with less strain in both waves. Increased student demands and emotional labor demands were correlated with higher levels of strain in both the first and second wave. Our measure of home life demands, whether the faculty member had children under 18 or provided care to another individual inside or outside the home, was associated with higher levels of strain in the first wave but not the second. Increased work hours were associated with more strain while increased satisfaction with personal-professional balance was associated with less strain.

The multivariate analysis started with the status resources/demands that we used to reflect power and the potential for invisible labor in the academic workplace addressing Research Question 2. In both the first and second wave, neither gender nor race/ethnicity had observed effects on perceived work strain. Tenure status significantly predicted work strain in model 1 for both Wave 1 and Wave 2 with tenured faculty reporting less strain than their tenure-track colleagues, but this model only explained 1.3% of the variance in work strain in the first wave and 1.7% in the second.

Adding the indicators of work resources/demands reduced the effect of tenure status and increased the explained variance to 15.2% in the first wave and 10.7% in the second. In the first wave, faculty who said they were able to meet the demands of scholarly productivity reported less strain (Research Question 3). In addition, faculty who experienced elevated student demands reported increased levels of work strain (Research Question 4). Notable here was that our measure of emotional labor, which has a significant correlation with work strain in both waves, retained a statistically significant effect after controlling for the other variables only in the second wave (see model 2) (Research Question 6). In contrast, faculty caregiving was not a significant predictor of work strain in either model 3 or 4 in either wave (Research Question 5).

As model 4 indicates, those faculty who said they worked more during the two pandemic periods reported higher levels of work strain in both the first and second wave, though the effect was larger in the first wave. Conversely, those faculty who reported a positive change in personal-professional balance experienced less work strain. In this final model for the second wave, the ability to accomplish scholarship, which was correlated with lower levels of strain and a significant predictor in the first wave, did not have a significant effect after controlling for other variables. Instead, it was emotional labor demands that retained its significant relationship with strain in wave 2. Overall, the final models accounted for nearly one third of the variance in work strain in the first wave and almost one quarter in the second.

The degree to which faculty reported being overwhelmed, stressed, and exhausted by work suggested a high level of strain during the COVID-19 pandemic. Importantly, the level of strain was equally high more than one year into the pandemic. Such an elevated and sustained level of work strain was likely to have deleterious effects on individual faculty members as chronic work-related stress has been associated with poor mental and physical health outcomes (Dewa et al., 2007 ). Prolonged work-strain may have also negatively affected the institutions at which these faculty work, as impaired psychological and physical well-being may have increased absenteeism, mental health- and disability-related leaves of absence, and intention to leave the professoriate (Barnes et al., 1998 ; Dewa et al., 2007 ; Reddy, 2010 ). Our attempt to illuminate the etiology of that strain suggested several correlates of the strain as well as some potential consequences.

Surprisingly, most of the status resources/demands we examined were not strongly related to work strain, at least directly. Neither gender nor race/ethnicity appeared to have significant effects on this outcome. Tenure status had an effect in the initial analyses, but it faded once controls for work resources and demands were added, echoing earlier findings on the lack of effects of gender and seniority on work strain (Lease, 1999 ). Perhaps less surprisingly, having caregiving responsibilities was not directly related to work strain. As noted earlier, other dimensions of spillover (when concerns from home interfere with work life and vice versa) and burnout may be more affected by both status resources/demands and caregiving demands. Similarly, more measures of disruptions in the respondents’ lives outside the workplace may help further illuminate work strain as well as spillover and burnout.

As these analyses have shown, work resources were a significant predictor of strain in the first wave, but that effect disappeared once we controlled for caregiving demands, implying a link between parenthood as well as other caregiving responsibilities and being able to muster the time, space, and concentration for teaching and research especially in the initial phases of the pandemic. This result was consistent with other pandemic-era research illustrating the impact of parenthood on faculty scholarly productivity (Carpenter et al., 2021 ; Kotini-Shah et al., 2022 ). Two work demands, both scholarship and teaching, were associated with work strain in the first wave. In the second wave, it was emotional labor demands that were associated with strain, suggesting that in the early phase of the pandemic, the disruption to scholarship had produced a disequilibrium in faculty’s work lives that led them to feel overwhelmed, stressed, and exhausted. After the first full academic year of the pandemic, it was the necessity to manage the feelings of both their students and themselves that was wearing on them. That the disruptions to teaching and scholarship in the spring of 2020 were associated with elevated strain among faculty was unsurprising. A year later, many of the initial disruptions had either been substantially lessened or faculty could have become accustomed to them. Notably, research resources improved from the first to the second wave, but student demands increased even though its effect on strain decreased. The increase in emotional labor demands coincided with a period in which faculty may have been depleted from the efforts of the earlier disruptions and thus had lower emotional reserves to manage these continued demands. It was also notable that increased time spent working and dissatisfaction with personal-professional balance were strongly associated with work strain in both waves, the latter of which is consistent with pre-pandemic findings (Mudrak et al., 2018 ).

That emotional labor demands had strong effects on faculty feeling overwhelmed, stressed, and exhausted especially in the second year of the pandemic may have reflected the degree to which institutions extended the trend toward intrusive teaching (Goode et al., 2020 ). Intrusive teaching asks faculty to monitor and even intervene in the social and emotional well-being of their students, often in an effort to increase retention. The possible consequence of this trend on increased faculty strain and burnout deserves further attention both from scholars and from administrators.

The two waves of this study took place between what may be considered the immediate and intermediate periods of the COVID-19 pandemic (Christakis, 2020 ). While in the summer of 2020 the prospect of vaccinations appeared a distant hope, by the summer of 2021 vaccines were widely available and required for enrollment and employment at each of the institutions. It would appear that we were then in the intermediate pandemic period in which “…people will still be recovering from the overall clinical, psychological, social, and economic shock of the pandemic and the adjustments it required” (Christakis, 2020 , p. 250). Insights from the study of pandemics, in particular, and disasters, more generally, suggested that this long tail toward recovery during the period in which the immediate threat has receded but lasting aftershocks or additional waves may arrive can be a period of particular psychological disruption (Van Hoof et al., 2021 ). DeWolfe’s ( 2000 ) widely applied model of disasters’ psychological effects posited seven phases running from warning/threat , impact, rescue/heroic, remedy/honeymoon, inventory, disillusionment , and recovery/reconstruction . In relation to the lingering, episodic, and cyclical patterns of COVID-19 for college students – and colleges – Stowe et al. ( 2021 ) added a “sandbar phase” which sits between cyclical phases of impact, heroic, honeymoon, and disillusionment. The sandbar metaphor may be particularly apt given that the safety of a sandbar is nearly always only partial and temporary, and may be swamped or eroded with each new wave.

Limitations

This study is not without limitations, but these offer several opportunities for future research. First, these data are not drawn from a nationally representative sample of institutions or the population of US faculty. Overall, the student and emotional labor demands on the faculty in this sample may have been substantially higher than those for faculty at larger institutions, especially research-intensive institutions and those which are not typically primarily residential. The results may not be generalizable beyond similar small liberal arts colleges. Future research can test these models using a national or international sample—data that do not currently exist.

Second, our measure of faculty work strain is a subjective and self-reported one. Greater validity and reliability may be gained in future research by collecting objective (i.e. biometric and/or behavioral) measures.

Third, although the data are longitudinal, they are a repeated cross-section only allowing an aggregate comparison rather than the individual-level modeling that would be possible with panel data. This research design limits the degree to which we can attribute causality to the associations observed here. In addition, because both predictors and outcomes are measured simultaneously, we cannot disentangle reciprocal relationships between the variables.

Finally, we lacked baseline data from before the pandemic. Even with those limitations in mind, however, these findings nonetheless reflect important experiences of faculty during the pandemic period.

Our results are consistent with those of a national study that reported, many faculty were “on the verge of burnout” (Tugend, 2020 ). Thus, it is in the interest of both individual faculty and the institutions that employ them to find ways to ameliorate the elevated work strain caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. To draw again from literature about disasters, one of the common distinctions is between remediation and mitigation where remediation is work to repair damage caused by the disaster and mitigation is work undertaken to prevent damage in future disasters. It is unknown whether another global pandemic might emerge in the near future, but the period of near-constant crisis in higher education – whether from local campus events; demographic and/or fiscal crises; local, national, and global political developments; or natural disaster – is likely to persist. In many of these cases, spatial and temporal disruptions to “normal” campus operations may be deemed necessary. And, while the campus disruptions of COVID-19 were unique in their ubiquity, they were not the first time campuses closed and adopted emergency remote instruction for protracted periods (Murphy, 2020 ). Colleges and universities should then find ways to alter both the demands placed on faculty and the resources available to them in the event of disaster. Having faculty and staff trained and attuned to the possibility of disruption is imperative. Further, some of the “crises” noted above are relatively “acute” short, sharp shocks, others are more “chronic” slowly building and lingering maladies (Erikson, 1995 ). Methods to address both chronic and acute disruptions can focus on both job demands and resources at the level of individual faculty member and the organization (Demerouti & Bakker, 2023 ).

Decreasing or Defining Student Demands. The organizational ability to develop and delineate clear policies and parameters within which faculty are expected to operate can limit the degree to which students make demands on faculty. At many institutions, including the three studied here, faculty flexibility was encouraged, which likely was an appropriate response. However, more clarity about the ways in which that flexibility should be exercised may have reduced both the level of student demands and the strain experienced by faculty in responding to it.

Managing Emotional Labor Demands . As our findings suggest, in the intermediate stages of the pandemic that were represented in the second wave of our data, the lingering effects of emotional labor demands had heavy consequences for faculty work strain. In fact, the level of emotional labor performed by faculty in the second wave was higher than in the first. It may be possible for institutions to augment resources allocated to the management of students’ emotional needs to lift some of that burden from faculty. However, because many faculty have come to see such emotional labor as an essential part of their work and because institutions have increasingly expected “intrusive teaching,” asking those faculty to limit or eliminate it may not be a practicable solution. An alternative may be to increase the resources that faculty have to manage that emotional labor, which may mitigate its effects, including faculty development programing concerning student mental and emotional wellbeing as well as expanding support systems for faculty. The danger with this approach, however, is that it will increase demands upon faculty to “do more,” which would both increase their workload and might interfere with personal-professional balance – each of which we have shown to have increased work strain.

Reducing Workload. One of the strongest correlates of faculty strain in this study was increased work time. Much of this time scarcity was driven by the transition to remote and then hybrid instruction, but also time spent on addressing student demands and engaging in emotional labor. In addition, some of the regular responsibilities of department and committee were service were increased. At the level of the individual faculty member, a strategy of job crafting (Demerouti & Bakker, 2023 ) could be pursued in which faculty, perhaps temporarily, redefine and reprioritize what they must do, and how they cognitively frame it. It is important to note, though, that this must be equally available to faculty regardless of their status at the institution. At the organizational level, considerations of what committee and department tasks are essential during a crisis should be proactively considered. Some may be suspended during a crisis, particularly given that others will be increased. Planning regarding the reasonable redistribution of those tasks should be considered as well (Demerouti & Bakker, 2023 ).

We also conducted sensitivity analyses by running each regression separately by school. The results remained consistent, though many effects were no longer statistically significant due to the reduced sample sizes.

University A IRB approval numbers (2020-31 and 2021-19), and College B Human Subjects Review Board 20,014 and 21,016). College C’s Institutional Review Board did not require application because of prior review by University A’s IRB.

Tenure stream faculty represent a large majority of instructional staff at each of the three institutions representing 86%, 80%, and 62%. Moreover, the heterogeneity of non-tenure stream faculty positions within each institution, and the dissimilar definition of the positions between institutions made creating coherent categories of non-tenure stream faculty problematic for this analysis.

Sensitivity analyses performed with the full sample for the second wave indicate substantively similar results when non-tenure track faculty are included and grouped in a single category.

We evaluated three strategies for missing values: casewise deletion, mean substitution, and multiple imputation. The results were substantively similar for each method. We ultimately used mean substitution because it preserved the maximum number of cases and provided fit statistics for the regressions (R 2 ).

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Cotter, D.A., Berheide, C.W. & Carpenter, M.A. Sustained Strain: Faculty Work Strain Under COVID-19. Res High Educ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-024-09809-3

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College Students and Career Aspirations: Nudging Student Interest in Teaching

We survey undergraduate students at a large public university to understand the pecuniary and non-pecuniary factors driving their college major and career decisions with a focus on K-12 teaching. While the average student reports there is a 6% chance they will pursue teaching, almost 27% report a nonzero chance of working as a teacher in the future. Students, relative to existing statistics, generally believe they would earn substantially more in a non-teaching job (relative to a teaching job). We run a randomized information experiment where we provide students with information on the pecuniary and non-pecuniary job characteristics of teachers and non-teachers. This low-cost informational intervention impacts students' beliefs about their job characteristics if they were to work as a teacher or non-teacher, and increases the reported likelihood they will major or minor in education by 35% and pursue a job as a teacher or in education by 14%. Linking the survey data with administrative transcript records, we find that the intervention had small (and weak) impacts on the decision to minor in education in the subsequent year. Overall, our results indicate that students hold biased beliefs about their career prospects, they update these beliefs when provided with information, and that this information has limited impacts on their choices regarding studying and having a career in teaching.

We thank the University of Michigan's School of Education for their generous support. We thank Alexander Bolves, Zach Weingarten, Marcus Winters, seminar participants at the University of Michigan, and conference participants at AEFP for helpful comments. We are also thankful to Emanuele Bardelli, Matthew Truwit, and Quentin Francis for aiding in survey development and implementation and Xiaomeng Li for data support. This material is based upon work supported by the Institute for Educational Sciences (R305B150012). This study is registered with the American Economic Association's registry for randomized controlled trials (AEARCTR-0013764). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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Alternative Assessments

What and why of alternative assessment.

Are the dozens of research papers all starting to blur together? Are the scantron bubbles beginning to haunt your dreams? More than likely, they are for students too. In moving away from traditional forms of assessment it is becoming more common practice, and highly desired, by students, teachers, and the professional world to extend the life of assessments past a single moment. Alternative Assessment may offer new ways for you and your students to explore subject matter in unique, and holistically beneficial ways.

Although carrying its own importance and necessity in achieving specific outcomes,  summative assessments  do have distinct drawbacks (Williams, 2014). These typically include:

• Tedious completion and grading for professors and students
• Narrow learning outcomes
• A focus on the grade, rather than the process (for more on this see  Ungrading )
• Disposable products that are never seen by student or teacher again
• Instances of concern for academic integrity

Alternative assessment offers solutions to these drawbacks and speak to emerging needs of college graduates. The professional world seeks college graduates who possess not only discipline-specific factual knowledge but also the problem solving, collaborative, and interdisciplinary skills that cannot be achieved by artificial intelligence advances (Binkley et al., 2012). Considering this, mixed method approaches to assessment are becoming necessary in the college environment (Hains-Wesson et al., 2020). Incorporating aspects of summative ,  formative , and alternative assessment can help to expand and enhance learning outcomes for the students as well as provide new experiences for the professor.

Types of Alternative Assessment

Peer/self-assessment.

In this form, often written products are exchanged among peers for assessment. While the professor may provide the rubric, training, and criteria for the consistency of peer assessment, the “assessment” of the assignment is conducted by fellow students. This offers opportunity for the product to be reviewed by multiple people before any final submission to the professor and allows students to view their peers work. This exposure among peers can help to facilitate new connections and perspectives that students may be able to communicate among themselves in a way that had been missed in the course prior. Self-assessment can be constructed in the same way (with a rubric, criteria, and revisions) but offers students an opportunity to reflect on their own thought process and externally process. Additionally, pairing peer/self-assessment may allow students to review their peer’s work and then reflect upon their own in a new light (Wen & Tsai, 2006). These activities can also facilitate  community within the classroom .

Authentic Assessment

This form of assessment aims to create “authentic” experiences that require practical, context-driven approaches with assessment as learning opportunities (Gulikers et al., 2004). When moving away from quantitative means of assessment, it can be difficult to concretely define authentic assessment in practice. Guliker et al. provides a five-dimensional theoretical framework:

• “An authentic task is a problem task that confronts students with activities that are also carried out in professional practice.”
• Physical Context: “ Where we are, often if not always, determines how we do something, and often the real place is dirtier (literally and figuratively) than safe learning environments… Authentic assessment often deals with high fidelity contexts.”
• Social Context:  “In real life, working together is often the rule rather than the exception… learning and performing out of school mostly takes place in a social system.”
• Quality product students would be asked to produce in real life
• Demonstration that permits making valid inferences about the underlying competencies
• Full array of tasks and multiple indicators of learning
• Presentation of work either written or orally to other people”
• Criteria and standards: “ Setting criteria and making them explicit and transparent to learners beforehand is important in authentic assessment, because this guides learning… and employees usually know on what criteria their performances will be judged.”

Work Integrated Learning (WIL)

This form of assessment aims to not only  imitate  authentic field experiences, but actually participates in these experiences outside of the classroom. As such, WIL is technically a form of authentic assessment – but takes it even further than in class experiences. Although common place in many vocationally oriented programs (such as social work internships or education student teaching), WIL is not limited to these types of curricula. Implementing WIL experiences into a course (or program) entails distinct challenges—specifically ensuring rigor and a means of using effective assessment practices (Ajjawi et al., 2020). As institutions are ultimately responsible for the WIL assessments reflecting intentional learning outcomes, it is important to put great care into ensuring the alignment of WIL assessments.

Multi-media

Technology has become a larger part of the college experience, not only in the classroom, but in the way that course assignments are completed. These various forms of media provide additional resources and creativity for alternative assessment. Developing electronic portfolios, creating video essays/reflections, music videos, or other digital products that require student creativity and engaging with course material is an effective means of using technology to aid in learning outcomes. The language of the learning outcomes do not necessarily have to change, but the criteria can. If large multimedia projects seem overwhelming or unachievable at a scale for your course, offering these as options for extra credit or alternatives to existing assignments is a good trial run for their implementation.

Crafting your own Alternative Assessment

Some of these suggestions may already be in practice or more inherent to your discipline. For others, jumping into these may seem daunting. It is not necessary to attempt to overhaul a course overnight. From these categories, there are endless possibilities for how to incorporate aspects into a single class session, or into a semester long capstone project. To hear from your fellow faculty more in depth on ways they are incorporating Alternative Assessment into their classrooms, view this  Seminar for Excellence in Teaching .

• What can I do next class?  Have students write a self-reflection on that day’s topic on how it relates to their career path, what aspects of the topic they feel they have grasped well, or what areas they feel like they still do not understand well.
• What can I do next unit?  Craft the end of unit assessment to be something other than an exam or essay. Try to holistically assess student learning as they are experiencing it (e.g., have students put together a portfolio—in a journal or online—that has them describe/narrate as they view their complete understanding of that unit.)
• What can I do next semester?  Design each end of unit assessment as a segment that culminates into an end of course capstone project. The final product could combine audio, visual, and/or physical components that reflects products created within this discipline.
• What can I do across semesters?  Create a project or experience that builds on itself as more semesters participate in the activity—such that data collected, products created, or ideas generated create a continuous “living” assessment (e.g., literature reviews/meta-analyses that continually build based on new publications and expanding datasets to monitor trends through time).

Below are key characteristics and examples of alternative assessments compared with traditional approaches. While this is not exhaustive, it provides an insight to the ways in which you can begin to transform your own course assignments and assessments.

Figure 1: Traditional and Alternative Assessment Characteristics (Rojas Serrano, 2017)

Challenges and Champions of Alternative Assessment

In a similar frame of mind as formative assessment ,  alternative assessment seeks to provide a means of assessing student learning in real time, rather than as a snapshot such as in summative assessment. Alternative assessment is less focused on grades and more focused on student process and thinking, allowing instructors to more clearly into the minds of their students and their learning. Other objectives you may be aiming for (including  Universal Design for Learning  and  compassionate teaching ) can be incorporated, if not enhanced, by employing alternative assessment. This has distinct advantages and challenges in the way it is realized in the classroom (Stasio et al., 2019). While these are important considerations, they are meant to provide context and mindful considerations as you explore these alternatives.

Challenges:

• Ensuring academic rigor
• Restructuring understanding of student’s role in learning
• Requires time for development
• Trial and error may be necessary
• Aligning course outcomes with assessment tasks
• Source of motivation for students connecting with their areas of study
• Holistic approaches to subject matter
• Applied skills and products for student portfolios
• Build collaboration and opportunities for living course work
• Places learning outcomes in the foreground

Ajjawi, R., Tai, J., Huu Nghia, T. le, Boud, D., Johnson, L., & Patrick, C. J. (2020). Aligning assessment with the needs of work-integrated learning: the challenges of authentic assessment in a complex context.  Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education ,  45 (2), 304–316. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2019.1639613

Binkley, M., Erstad, O., Herman, J., Raizen, S., Ripley, M., Miller-Ricci, M., & Rumble, M. (2012). Defining Twenty-First Century Skills. In  Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills  (pp. 17–66). Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2324-5_2

Gulikers, J. T. M., Bastiaens, T. J., & Kirschner, P. A. (2004). A Five-Dimensional Framework for Authentic Assessment.  ETR&D ,  52 (3), 67–86.

Hains-Wesson, R., Pollard, V., Kaider, F., & Young, K. (2020). STEM academic teachers’ experiences of undertaking authentic assessment-led reform: a mixed method approach.  Studies in Higher Education ,  45 (9), 1797–1808. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2019.1593350

Rojas Serrano, J. (2017). Making sense of alternative assessment in a qualitative evaluation system.  Profile Issues in Teachers’ Professional Development ,  19 (2), 73–85. https://doi.org/10.15446/profile.v19n2.57178

Stasio, M. di, Ranieri, M., & Bruni, I. (2019). Assessing is not a joke. Alternative assessment practices in higher education.  Form@re - Open Journal per La Formazione in Rete ,  19 (3), 106–118. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/form-7488

Wen, M. L., & Tsai, C.-C. (2006). University students’ perceptions of and attitudes toward (online) peer assessment.  Higher Education ,  51 , 27–44. https://doi.org/DOI 10.1007/s10734-004-6375-8

Williams, P. (2014). Teaching in Higher Education Squaring the circle: a new alternative to alternative-assessment.  Teaching in Higher Education , 565–577. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2014.882894

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Student Voice Survey: The Academic Experience   

Students rate their educational quality highly while signaling ways to improve their academic experience in newly released data and analysis from our annual survey of college undergraduates.

By  Colleen Flaherty

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New Student Voice findings and analysis shed light on 5,025 two- and four-year students’ academic experiences, including what they say would boost their academic success. Encouraging faculty members to limit high-stakes exams, or those counting for 40 percent or more of a course grade, is a top response.

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Mohamed Diallo, a rising junior at Yale University, is pursuing a double major in global affairs and history as well as a certificate—something like a minor—in computer science. How does he rate the quality of his education so far? A solid four on a scale of one to five, or “really good.”

The pros: Diallo, a first-generation student who’s not yet set on a specific career path, says his education so far has made him more “intellectually curious” and has “laid a really good foundation for me to succeed.”

“It’s the liberal arts education that I can really learn to appreciate,” he adds. “For the past few semesters, I was able to take a wide range of classes. And that’s valuable to me in the long run.”

As for cons, Diallo touches on them in the second half of that last sentence: “… even though a lot of these classes are not things that are anything applying towards my career right now.” Translation: He’d appreciate more of an emphasis across disciplines and instructors on connecting course content to real-world issues and applications.

“That’s something that I highly value when looking for my courses,” Diallo explains, endorsing a global development course in which he learned not only econometrics but the practical skill of writing policy reports, for example.

Diallo is just one of the 5,025 two- and four-year students who completed Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab’s annual Student Voice survey. Some of his thoughts, which he shared in a recent interview, align with his peers’ responses to parallel survey questions; others diverge from popular responses. Read on for additional findings from and analysis of the survey’s academic life portion.

Methodology

Nearly three in 10 respondents (28 percent) to Inside Higher Ed ’s new annual Student Voice survey, fielded in May in partnership with Generation Lab, attend two-year institutions, and closer to four in 10 (37 percent) are post-traditional students, meaning they attend two-year institutions and/or are 25 or older. The 5,025-student sample is nationally representative. The survey’s margin of error is 1.4 percent.

Initial highlights from the full survey are here , and the full data set, with interactive visualizations, is available here . In addition to questions about academic life, the main annual survey asked questions on health and wellness, the college experience, and preparation for life after college. Look for additional findings and analysis in the coming weeks and months.

More on Education Quality

About three in four Student Voice respondents rate the quality of education they’re receiving in college as good (46 percent) or excellent (27 percent), with only 2 percent rating it as poor. Students at private nonprofit institutions are especially likely to say that their education quality is excellent, compared to those at publics. This difference can’t be attributed to institution size or even two-year or four-year classification, as community college students are somewhat more likely than four-year students over all to rate their education quality as excellent (30 percent versus 25 percent, respectively).

By region, students in New England are most likely to rate their education quality as excellent (43 percent) and students in the far West are least likely (15 percent).

Looking at student characteristics, family income appears to factor in here, with the wealthiest students in the survey (a family income exceeding $200,000) most likely to rate their education quality as excellent (37 percent). Gender, race and political orientation don’t appear to drive perceptions of educational quality, though students 25 and older are more likely than their younger counterparts to rate their educational quality as excellent (32 percent versus 25 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds).

Continuing-generation students are slightly more likely (75 percent) to rate their educational quality as good or excellent than are first-generation students (70 percent). Same for students taking a typical course load (75 percent rate their educational quality as good or excellent) relative to those taking more or less than the typical load for their institution (69 percent in each case).

Bigger gaps emerge when looking at course modality: Three in four (76 percent) students taking all their classes in person say their educational quality is good or excellent, compared to two in three (67 percent) students taking all their classes online. Students taking a mix of both in-person and online classes split that difference (72 percent).

That students at private nonprofit institutions are so likely to say their educational quality is excellent surprises Flower Darby, for whom educational quality boils down to instructional effectiveness. Darby, associate director of the Teaching for Learning Center at the University of Missouri at Columbia, has nothing against private nonprofit institutions, in particular, but she explains that higher education historically underemphasizes the practice of teaching—four-year institutions (public or private) most of all.

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“I understand the value of research and scholarship, and I know that it can enhance and feed into better teaching,” she says of faculty duties beyond teaching at four-year colleges and universities (versus community colleges, where teaching is a primary focus). “But what the students are experiencing on a day-to-day basis, whether they’re in person or online, is the teaching.”

Darby explains that students’ residential experiences, where applicable, and other supports and services matter—just not as much as instructional effectiveness. Not all her peers across higher ed may think of educational quality in this way, she says, but there is a growing emphasis on how instructors impact the student experience of quality. In any case, she notes, “Students are definitely thinking about quality in this way.”

Jonathan GS Koppell, president of Montclair State University, says that in addition to seeing quality through the lens of instructional effectiveness, survey respondents’ overall high marks on educational quality—public or private, two-year or four-year institution—have implications for the tenor of current national conversations about college value. A related recent flash survey from Student Voice detailed current students’ thoughts on college value, affordability and the botched rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

The vast majority of students feel they are benefiting from the skills and knowledge they are acquiring, and that is before you factor in the clear return on investment a degree provides in one’s personal and professional life after college. Instead of allowing those on the outside to devalue what higher education provides based on their own assumptions about what students want and what they are getting, we should listen to students.” —Jonathan GS Koppell, Montclair State University

Boosting Academic Success From Within the Classroom

As for what institutional academic-focused actions would most boost their academic success, students’ No. 1 choice from a long list of options is encouraging faculty members to limit high-stakes exams, or those counting for 40 percent or more of a course grade. By institution type, this appears to be more of a priority for students at large institutions (48 percent of that subgroup) than small institutions (39 percent), and for four-year students (49 percent) relative to two-year students (37 percent).

Limiting high-stakes exams also seems to be more popular among Democrats (49 percent) than among Republicans (39 percent), by student political leaning. By major racial group, white (48 percent), Asian American and Pacific Islander (47 percent), and Hispanic (44 percent) students are more likely to choose this than Black students (39 percent). Students 25 and older are less likely than their younger peers to want this, meanwhile, by age (36 percent versus 48 percent, respectively).

Beyond limiting high-stakes exams, many students—like Diallo—say they think it would make an academic impact if professors could help them better connect what they’re learning in class to issues outside the classroom and/or to their career plans (40 percent of the sample over all). This, too, is more of an apparent priority for students at large institutions (42 percent) than small ones (32 percent), students at four-year institutions (43 percent) relative to those at two-year institutions (33 percent), and students 18 to 24 (42 percent) relative to those 25 or older (31 percent).

Another popular choice: encouraging professors to get to know students better . About a third of the sample over all (35 percent) believes this would help their success, but closer to half of students at private nonprofits do (45 percent). Relatively more four-year students (38 percent) than two-year students (28 percent) choose this, as well.

By individual student characteristics, AAPI students are especially likely (40 percent) to say they want professors to get to know students better, as are younger students relative to older students (38 percent versus 24 percent, respectively).

Other wants include deadline flexibility, changes to exam schedules and encouragement of study groups.

Despite its relative popularity among his fellow survey respondents, Diallo says he’s not keen on limiting high-stakes exams, as he prefers to confine exam stress to the end of a term, when there’s time built into the academic calendar to study. He does support the promotion of study groups and recalls how much he appreciated when an economics professor helped students form study groups in a class in which he knew few others.

Diallo also likes the idea of encouraging professors to get to know their students better, beyond office hours and in ways that could help students build their networks within a given field. Students might even help professors better understand what they’re interested in learning, and why: “We could provide a lot of support to them as well.”

Karen Cangialosi, director of the Every Learner Everywhere Network, part of the Western Interstate Commission of Higher Education’s (WICHE) Cooperative for Educational Technologies, says the results are unsurprising in that “high-stakes exams and testing work counter to the project of learning, as many have been writing about for years”—Diallo’s comments notwithstanding.

Additionally, Cangialosi says, “students want to see more relevance in what they are studying. They want to change the world. My students used to tell me that in almost every class.”

Darby’s of the same mind. Half of students asking for fewer high-stakes exams is compelling evidence against their widespread use in assessing student learning, she says. And jumping ahead to the survey’s findings on health and wellness (the topic of future Student Voice reporting), many students link high-stakes exams to mental health concerns, she notes. Replacing exams with more unit tests does not sacrifice rigor but can reduce student anxiety (although high-pressure exam experiences could benefit students preparing for consequential certificate or entrance exams in their fields).

That’s a teaching issue. There is no reason to continue with high-stakes exams in most classes. Now there’s eight or 12 [assessments] instead of two or three that are make-or-break.” —Flower Darby, University of Missouri at Columbia

Ultimately, Darby says, curbing high-stakes exams is a “very low-hanging fruit” when it comes to student success, in that it’s not complex or costly to implement. “I don’t want to assume that every faculty [member] can devote tons of time into improving their teaching or making changes in their classes. But this one is doable and would have a significant impact on student well-being.”

Darby adds that pedagogical research supports much of the other student wants, as applicability or relevance of course content boosts intrinsic motivation to learn, structure coupled with some flexibility around deadlines helps students feel supported and empathized with, fostering a sense of belonging among students via study groups promotes student success , and so on.

On study groups, for instance, Darby says, “The fact that students are asking for that is, again, to me, a relatively low-hanging fruit. Even learning management systems like Canvas can literally create groups with the click of a button. And what it does is enhance community among students, which is critically important to their learning and success.”

Additional Ways to Boost Student Success

Asked which additional student experience–focused institutional actions would best help promote their academic success, more than half of students (55 percent) say making tuition more affordable so they can better balance academics, finances and work. This is relatively consistent across family income levels, suggesting that students from a range of backgrounds may struggle to afford college in ways that impact their academics. Students at public and private nonprofit institutions are about as likely to say this, but relatively more four-year (59 percent) than two-year (44 percent) students do. By region, students in the far West (65 percent) and Rocky Mountains (71 percent) are most likely want to make tuition more affordable in the interest of their academic success.

Another popular option, also with financial implications, is creating more opportunities for paid on-campus work , including internships or leadership opportunities in the student’s field of interest (49 percent). Fewer students 25 and older (35 percent) want this than do those 18 to 24 (52 percent), however. But by institution type, boosting opportunities for paid campus is work is more popular among students at four-year institutions than among students at two-year institutions (52 percent versus 41 percent, respectively).

Other popular options for college experiences that students say could impact academic success are promoting opportunities for social connection and building a sense of belonging (32 percent) and introducing more mental health initiatives (30 percent). Rates for both are relatively consistent across institution types and student demographics, but boosting mental health offerings is especially popular among nonbinary students in the survey (53 percent).

Creating more research opportunities for undergraduates is more popular among students at private nonprofits (42 percent) than publics (29 percent) and four-year students (34 percent) than two-year students (22 percent).

Doing more to promote diversity, equity and inclusion and making the campus more welcoming for all was selected by about two in 10 (21 percent) students over all but 50 percent of nonbinary students, 32 percent of Black students and 29 percent of AAPI students, in particular, meaning that students’ experiences with campus climate and that climate’s bearing on their academic success vary by background. By political leaning, 30 percent of Democrats and 8 percent of Republicans say more DEI efforts would promote their academic success.

Lastly, despite chat bots being a main use of AI on many campuses, according to Inside Higher Ed /Hanover Research’s 2024 surveys of presidents and provosts , few students prioritize their expansion as a way to boost academic success, with just about one in 10 (12 percent) of students choosing this.

Diallo, at Yale, puts a high value on inviting more guest speakers and lecturers and on expanding mental health initiatives, with the former linking back to his preference for real-world applications of what he’s learning: “You’re learning about potential career opportunities or new insights that they might have that the professor might not.” On mental health initiatives, Diallo says he’s not fully aware of the mental health initiatives that currently exist on campus and he’s interested in hearing more about how things like stress reduction could promote his academic success and overall growth.

“The past two semesters have been really stressful for me since I’m pursuing a double major,” he adds.

Darby, meanwhile, tends to get “super philosophical” regarding students’ affordability concerns, which speaks to “the defunding of education at the state level. And that goes directly against the vision for this democracy laid out by the founding fathers. Thomas Jefferson is credited with saying that a functioning democracy requires an educated citizenry and free access to education was a foundational pillar of this country. So when I look at what’s happening with our political situation, and I think about the expense of higher education because of defunding, I see some connections there.”

The high cost of education is such a huge barrier to so many students and would-be students. It gets worse all of the time. Our continual defunding of public education has exacted huge costs on our students and on our society as a whole.” —Karen Cangialosi, Every Learner Everywhere

Like Darby, Cangialosi links the student mental health crisis to stress associated with grades—as well as high costs associated with tuition and fees. And so, like Koppell, the Montclair State president, she says these findings have implications for national conversations about college value, namely that “we need to continue to communicate the public value of education over just viewing it as personal gain for students.”

Students on Teaching Formats and Practices

As for which class formats and teaching practices students say most help them learn and retain information (they could pick two), the top choices are interactive lecture, meaning a class that’s still professor-led but punctuated with active learning strategies (44 percent). That’s above both traditional, sage-on-the-stage–type lectures (25 percent) and active learning–intensive courses in which the professor is mostly a facilitator to learning instead of a lecturer (20 percent). This corresponds with previous Student Voice survey findings from Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse on this topic, which indicated that students preferred interactive lectures over other options.

In the new survey, relatively more men (29 percent) express a preference for traditional lecture than women (22 percent) or nonbinary students (24 percent).

About a quarter of students each also prioritize case studies that connect course concepts to real-world problems (23 percent). Students are less enthusiastic about other active-learning strategies, like minute papers or exit tickets and quick polls and surveys (8 percent each), so they may be somewhat agnostic about specific interactive strategies or looking for more innovative strategies than these commonly used ones.

All these results are relatively consistent across institution types and student demographics in terms of what students prioritize. However, students taking all their classes online are less likely than the sample over all to select interactive lectures (35 percent), as are students with a learning disability (33 percent) and those with a physical disability (27 percent).

The findings make sense to Diallo, who enjoys case studies because they help make course content relevant; as one example, he says he and peers in a global development course retraced the steps of researchers who completed a global development study. As for class format, he recalls a popular education studies professor who caught him off guard and eventually won him over with “innovative” practices that kept students engaged, like asking them to knit in the middle of one meeting (yes, knit , with yarn, etc.).

Even though [the] lectures were recorded and not mandatory, a lot of us still attended due to the interactive nature of [the class] and really loved what [the professor] was doing. She also encouraged us to write and share, amongst the 100-person lecture room, our experiences with education. I found the interactive nature of it to be really helpful … It really helps to have little five- to ten-minute breaks in the lecture.” —Mohamed Diallo, Yale University

Darby finds the plurality’s preference for interactive lectures “really encouraging,” in that it signals students (like educational researchers) understand that active learning boosts their engagement and performance. Plus, she says, from a faculty standpoint, “classes that are entirely active learning can also be very, very effective but are a huge lift.” Translation: interactive lecture is another “very low-hanging fruit.”

One note: “If it’s an in-person class, you do have to cut a little bit of content, reduce slides,” she says. “But there is abundant evidence to show that that helps students learn more effectively … A little goes a long way.”

Students on Course Modality

The majority (58 percent) of student respondents say in-person/face-to-face is preferred, with relatively more four-year (62 percent) than two-year (49 percent) students saying so. By institution type, nearly eight in 10 (79 percent) of students at private nonprofits say they prefer face-to-face, compared to closer to five in 10 (54 percent) at public nonprofits. By region, students in New England (70 percent) are especially likely to prefer face-to-face and students in the Southwest (46 percent) are least likely.

How does this compare to administrators’ views of what students want? In Inside Higher Ed and Hanover Research’s survey of provosts this year, nearly six in 10 (56 percent) provosts said that based on enrollment data, students tend to prefer in-person courses over online or hybrid courses when both are offered, with chief academic officers at private institutions being especially likely to say this. The strong preference for face-to-face conflicts with some other data, however, including a recent report by Tyton Partners finding that just 29 percent of students prefer face-to-face instruction. (Student Voice survey respondents were able to pick up to two choices.)

By course format, nearly three in four Student Voice respondents (74 percent) taking all their courses in person prefer face-to-face instruction, followed by blended courses (23 percent). Among students taking all their courses online, more than half (54 percent) prefer online, asynchronous instruction, followed by in-person (23 percent). Among respondents taking a mix of online and in-person courses, just over half (52 percent) prefer in-person, followed by hybrid (29 percent).

Older students express much less of a preference for face-to-face instruction than do those age 24 or younger, with a plurality of older students preferring online, asynchronous classes.

Diallo says he mostly prefers in-person courses, as he believes he learns best this way. He’s also interested in HyFlex, though, so that he has options as to how to participate when and if other obligations arise.

Darby, meanwhile, says she didn’t anticipate just how many students would prefer in-person instruction and finds it somewhat “affirming” that traditional-age students are particularly interested. She wonders whether that’s “influenced or reinforced by their pandemic education experience. Maybe some realized that ‘in-person is good and might support me better.’”

As for asynchronous, online courses being the second-most-preferred format over all, Darby says many institutions are expanding these course offerings, “and I would argue that it increases access and is a more equity-focused approach, because it does make it possible for students who would not otherwise be able to earn that degree due to other obligations to earn that credential.” Still, Darby emphasizes quality—including instructional effectiveness—as these courses proliferate. This also points back to the findings on educational quality by course modality, in which students taking all their courses in person are significantly more likely than those taking all their courses online to rate their educational quality as good or excellent.

“Increasing access to college is one thing, but we need to be doing whatever we can to increase completion of online classes. And again, for me, that’s a teaching and learning challenge that we can address. We know what works.”

Cangialosi says the response pattern “screams out about how much students want direct engagement with faculty and peers. People learn in social environments. Students, like other people, crave social connections in real life, and learning is enhanced just by the presence of others learning with you.”

Interaction can be online in synchronous formats when face-to-face isn’t possible or when it’s too expensive, she adds, “but it isn’t usually preferable. The biggest benefits of online education are access, affordability for some programs, and flexibility, which students need.”

Navigating AI

As for whether students have a clear sense of when, how and whether to use generative artificial intelligence to help with their coursework, relatively few students (19 percent) say no. The largest shares of students attribute their savvy to individual faculty members, with about a third each saying some or all of their professors had addressed the issue in class (31 percent) and some or all of their professors had included a policy on this in their syllabi (29 percent). About a quarter of students say they’ve researched the issue themselves. They are less likely (16 percent) to attribute their knowledge to their institution publishing a policy—a finding that’s consistent with Inside Higher Ed and Hanover Research’s annual surveys of presidents and provosts , in which about the same share of each group said their institutions had published an AI policy involving teaching and research.

Less than one in 10 students in this Student Voice survey say their institution offered information sessions or related trainings on this. That’s even as prior Student Voice survey data suggest students are eager for AI training, particularly as it relates to their future careers.

By age, in this most recent survey, students over 25 are less likely than younger peers to attribute their knowledge on using generative AI for academic work to professors and more likely to say that they researched it themselves. Students at public institutions are also more likely than those at private nonprofits to say they don’t know how, when or whether to use generative AI for coursework (21 percent versus 11 percent, respectively, a significant gap). Community college students are also more likely to say they lack this knowledge than four-year students (24 percent versus 17 percent, respectively).

Diallo says he does have a “good grasp” of when, how or whether to use generative AI for academic work, much of it intuitive, he says, comparing writing a paper with generative AI to any other kind of plagiarism. Beyond this, he says Yale has posted guidelines for this around campus and individual professors have addressed it in their course syllabi. Still, Diallo says, he’s aware how important prompt engineering is in using generative AI effectively and he’s never explicitly been taught best practices to that end.

Darby’s not surprised by how many students say they’re not getting key guidance on generative AI at the institutional level, but she ventures that many colleges and universities are working on this issue this summer, to provide students more clarity come fall. More encouraging, however, is the share of students who say their professors are effectively addressing this issue, through syllabi or direct instruction: “That’s different than what I would have predicted, quite frankly, and I think that’s different than it would have been a year ago. So that’s great.”

She adds that there’s a delicate balance to be struck between institutional stances on one hand and pedagogy and academic freedom on the other, even as many “professors are looking for more of that institutional guidance.”

Final Thoughts

Looking at the data as whole, Cangialosi says, “I firmly believe that the burden is on those of us claiming to want reform in higher education to find ways to, No. 1, substantially lower the cost of education; No. 2, dramatically transform or get rid of grading as it is normally done; and No. 3, help guide students to direct their own path of learning towards issues that are relevant to them and their local, regional and global communities.”

Koppell adds, “The results show that high-quality academic experiences on campuses around the country are appreciated and, furthermore, that students have ideas about how we can further improve. We should pay attention to it all.”

Tell us about how a student experience–related effort at your institution has impacted students’ academic success.

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Lived Experiences of On-Campus Working Students

Using a mixed qualitative and quantitative method, this study explored the lived experiences and struggles of 22 on-campus working students of ISAT U-Miagao Campus. This study utilized a researcher-constructed questionnaire and interview in gathering information about their experiences and related variables. Frequency count, percentage, mean, and chi-square were used as statistical tools. Results revealed that financial problem was the main factor that motivated the students to work on-campus. They experienced varied feelings as happiness, sadness, annoyance, and worry. Despite work pressure, working students had good time management both for studies and work, with high self-esteem and good academic performance. The study concluded that participants' dual roles in the college as full time student and worker, do not seem to affect their self-esteem and academic performance, however, there is a need to consider helping these students, especially on their financial needs for them to finish their studies.

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Debbie Ermac

This study sought to know and understand the opportunities and challenges of working students. Likewise, the study looked into the factors that prompted students to work and how they were affected by the job. The study used qualitative research specifically phenomenological approach in gathering the data. Interviews were conducted to substantiate the study. The informants were thirteen students who worked in off-campus and on-campus. The results of the study revealed that a working student is a person who works so he can finish his studies and help his parents. Basically, students worked for their tuition. Being a working student was becoming the best version of themselves. It was about sacrifice and most importantly, it was about dedication and proving to the world that poverty will never be a hindrance to fulfilling one's dreams. The " poverty is not a hindrance to education " theme was the crucial element of the informants' overwhelming experience. To conclude, there were some advantages that working while studying had brought to the working students. Although they encountered some difficulties, they seemed to manage both studying and working simultaneously. Working at the same time studying had positive and negative effects on the personal needs, self-esteem, and time management of working students. Indeed, colleges and universities may recognize and respond to the prevalence, characteristics, and implications of working for today's undergraduates.

ijetrm journal

Ijetrm Journal

This research investigates the lived experiences of working students in Davao City, delving into the multifaceted challenges they encounter and the strategies they employ to navigate the intricate intersection of work and education. Through in-depth interviews and thematic analysis, the study uncovers key themes including time management, financial pressures, motivation, peer support networks, personal development, and spirituality. The findings highlight the transformative impact of being a working student on personal growth, mindset, and resilience, emphasizing the interconnectedness of work and education in their lives. Based on these findings, the study proposes a range of recommendations to enhance the support systems and well-being of working students, including tailored time management workshops, financial aid programs, motivational counseling services, peer support networks, selfconfidence building programs, spiritual support services, mentorship programs, flexible academic scheduling, advocacy for policy change, and comprehensive support systems. By addressing these recommendations, educational institutions and support organizations can create a more inclusive and supportive environment that empowers working students to excel in their academic and professional endeavors.

iJSRED Journal

This study focused on the investigation to know if the students' are experiencing the aspect of working while studying at Eastern Samar State University-Guiuan Campus. The study shows the perception of students on working while studying. Moreover, the study also indicates the reasons why they engage on working and the impacts of being employed to their academic performance. The study focused on the undergraduate students of Eastern Samar State University Guiuan Campus. The data obtained from the survey questionnaires were consolidated, organized and tabulated accordingly. They were analyzed, and interpreted utilizing suitable statistical tools. Based on the results of the study, the following recommendations were given: For the University, to improve provided services in order to help students (1) engage in working while studying, (2) help students to achieve the balance between working and academic performance. For the Faculty Members let the students encourage to participate and engage of different skills so that they may be able to have positive experiences on working for income. For the Future Researchers to conduct a similar study using other variables that are believed to have a similar topic, so that there will be comparison of the results.

Andrews Maquiling

This descriptive survey study finds out the challenges, benefits and coping mechanisms of working students in the different companies and colleges in the Kingdom of Bahrain during the Academic Year 2016 – 2017. Included in the study were 150 working students. Frequency, Rank, & Mean were used to determine the dominant challenges, benefits, and coping mechanisms of working students. T-test was used to determine the significant difference on the dominant challenges & coping mechanisms of the working students for their type of part-time job. The results revealed that out of the 150 respondents who are working mostly in the private sector, their main reason why they work part-time is because of additional money and not so much for experience. Many of them are into business and customer service. Their serious challenge is of their friends & family’s complain of spending less time with them. Although their highest benefit revealed is winning a lot of friends at work and financial security...

Dahryl Buraquit

This study explores how the student creates ways to maximize their time in working and in studying. The said study also aims to investigate and identify students&#39; experiences while working. They are starting at how difficult their situation. Next, the problems they encounter. Then, how they deal and cope with such difficulties. The purpose of this study is to investigate the experiences of working while studying. In this study, a qualitative study is used. It is a subjective report which made utilization of a phenomenological way to deal with accumulating important information. The method that is used in the process of making this part of the study is the Snowball technique. Based on the participants’ responses on their perceptions on working while studying, it is confirmed that financial support, self-development and internal motivation to integrate theory and practice are among the driving forces of working while studying at university. The findings also show that the particip...

David Cheng

Enrique B Picardal Jr

Abstract: This locates out about used to be intensively researched and studied through university college students working at Biliran Province State University a public university. Through a research-based strategy using questionnaires, non-public experiences of fifteen college students have been obtained. The findings of this examine an exhibit that these college students advantage from the accountability that comes with their twin roles as students and employees in many ways. However, they additionally did not go through emotional and bodily stress ensuing from fatigue, lack of sleep due to their work and locate out about experiences. Interestingly, these college students effectively labored through a range of coping mechanisms consisting of finding social aid and engaging in enjoyable and non-fiction entertainment things to do that negatively impact learning and work at the same time.

Jurnal Al-Hayat

Halim Purnomo

The current study explores the experiences of working students, especially in higher learning institutions in coping with the challenges of working while studying. It is expected that the suggestions and recommendations from the study can improve working students' experiences to be successful in both working and studying.This qualitative research which documentation and interview had been used in order to collect data on the experiences of working students at the International Islamic University Malaysia. Some working students were purposively chosen and interviewed to know the challenges they faced and how they overcome the problems.The findings of the current study show that the informants fully understood the concept of working while studying and considered it as a financial necessity and self-improvement. The informants exposed several challenges of working students such as time constraints and commitment to their studies. Despite the challenges, the informants considered working while studying as a motivation to further develop themselves and acquire necessary skills for better employment.This study is important as many college students are working while enrolled in higher education. They may experience time constraints managing the responsibilities of both student and worker. Thus, it is significant to understand their experiences that may affect the future of their academic studies.This study provides some implications and recommendations for working students to overcome the challenges. They include time management, commitment, discipline, and responsibility. Studi saat ini mengeksplorasi pengalaman mahasiswa yang bekerja, khususnya di perguruan tinggi dalam menghadapi tantangan bekerja sambil kuliah. Saran dan rekomendasi dari penelitian ini diharapkan dapat meningkatkan pengalaman kerja mahasiswa agar berhasil baik dalam bekerja maupun belajar. Penelitian kualitatif dengan dokumentasi dan wawancara ini digunakan untuk mengumpulkan data tentang pengalaman kerja mahasiswa di Internasional. Universitas Islam Malaysia. Beberapa mahasiswa yang bekerja sengaja dipilih dan diwawancara untuk mengetahui tantangan yang mereka hadapi dan bagaimana mereka mengatasi masalah tersebut. Temuan penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa informan memahami sepenuhnya konsep bekerja sambil belajar dan menganggapnya sebagai kebutuhan finansial dan peningkatan diri.. Para informan memaparkan beberapa tantangan mahasiswa yang bekerja seperti kendala waktu dan komitmen untuk belajar. Terlepas dari tantangan tersebut, para informan Working Students in Higher Education...-Tumin et al 80 menganggap bekerja sambil belajar sebagai motivasi untuk lebih mengembangkan diri dan memperoleh keterampilan yang diperlukan untuk pekerjaan yang lebih baik. Studi ini penting karena banyak mahasiswa yang bekerja selama mendaftar di pendidikan tinggi. Mereka mungkin mengalami kendala waktu dalam mengelola tanggung jawab siswa dan pekerja. Oleh karena itu, penting untuk memahami pengalaman mereka yang dapat mempengaruhi masa depan studi akademis mereka. Studi ini memberikan beberapa implikasi dan rekomendasi bagi mahasiswa yang bekerja untuk mengatasi tantangan tersebut. Itu termasuk manajemen waktu, komitmen, disiplin, dan tanggung jawab.

Ahmad Faizuddin , Tumin Tumin , Tumin Wagiman

This study explores the experiences of working while studying of postgraduate students at International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM). The main objective is to know what is the meaning of working while studying for postgraduate students at IIUM. Four research questions were formulated: (1) What are postgraduate students' perceptions of working while studying? (2) What are the positive and negative effects of working while studying? (3) What are the challenges faced by postgraduate students when working while studying and how do they overcome the problems? (4) What are suggestions and recommendations for students who are working while studying? Two informants were purposively selected and interviewed to collect the data. The result shows that postgraduate students understand the meaning of working while studying and how to deal with them in term of overcoming the challenges. The recommendations include postgraduate students who decide to work while studying should have good time management, be committed, disciplined and responsible for what they are doing.

Waheed Jang

This study focuses on the problems with many people working nowadays while they are studying and vice versa. Some of them are doing domain relevant jobs and some are doing unrelated jobs. In both cases, it is all amazing experience, but there are many problems that working students face. The purpose of this paper is to summarize some of these problems, and some solutions for these problems are suggested for these problems. The data for this research is collected by conducting surveys and interviews of working students of different ages and domain, analyzing their experiences regarding study and work. The way of approach is a deep analysis of their age, experience, the domain of work and study and their personal suggestions. This research can help all those students who are still studying and working and who will have to work and study together in future to tackle these problems to make their study life easy and more beneficial. This research is done on smaller scale, it can be done on a broader scale in future.

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Professor Emeritus Bruce Wollenberg receives 2025 IEEE Herman Halperin Award

Professor Emeritus Bruce Wollenberg is the recipient of the 2025 IEEE Herman Halperin Electric Transmission and Distribution Award. The award recognizes Wollenberg for his “contributions to operations, computing, and control of power systems.”

The IEEE Technical Field Awards are a recognition for contributions or leadership in specific fields of interest of IEEE. Recipients are selected by the Technical Field Awards Council of the organization’s Awards Board. Roughly 30 Technical Field Awards are awarded each year across the more than 400,000 strong membership of the IEEE. 

Wollenberg’s foundational contributions to the operation, analysis, monitoring, and control of power systems are characterized by how closely connected they are to engineering practice. His industry experience has influenced the types of problems he has addressed, and has informed the proposed solutions. The impact of his work is apparent in the number and nature of articles he has authored and co-authored in the Proceedings of the IEEE and the recognition they have received through citations and/or the establishment of new lines of inquiry. Some of the key highlights of his work include: a paper on managing transmission in a deregulated environment that includes an overview of methods from a technical point of view and specific instances of these methods as pursued around the world; another contribution focuses on on-line power system security analysis which tackles topics such as contingency analysis, optimization of preventive and corrective actions, and dynamic security analysis; a third key contribution to the Proceedings discusses at length alarm processing in the context of power system operators and includes several topics related to computing and human-computer interaction that are particularly relevant today.

As far back as 1987 Wollenberg authored an article on artificial intelligence in power-systems operations for the Proceedings in which he commented on the difference between so-called knowledge-based expert systems (a technology related to artificial intelligence) and conventional numerical algorithms within the context of practical considerations pertinent to human operators and control centers. He has made several other contributions to the general area of knowledge-based expert systems including tackling applications and algorithms such as unit commitment, the role of expert systems in contending with emergencies, the creation and evaluation of switching sequences, and fault diagnosis.

Wollenberg’s contributions address topics that are of particular interest and lasting relevance to power engineers and others in the community of practice. His work has been at the forefront of technical developments, and in many instances their relevance has persisted decades after he first addressed the topics. Some of these contributions include: mechanism design for power markets in the context of deregulation of power systems; a co-authored seminal publication on the concept of the smart grid in the early days of the idea; and his deliberations on the notion of reliability in the context of blackouts. The practical nature of Wollenberg’s contributions stem from his industry experience, but the fact that he has also successfully integrated them with the latest solutions in control theory, optimization, and computing indicate his effortless bridging of the gap between academia and industry. 

Wollenberg’s academic contributions are equally significant. He authored the book, “Power Generation, Operation and Control,” (published by John Wiley & Sons, New York 1984, initially co-authored with A. J. Wood, with later editions seeing the addition of G. B. Sheble as another co-author). It has remained the authoritative reference on power-systems operations and control used by those in academia and industry. Wollenberg has advised a long list of graduate students who have gone on to achieve remarkable professional success in the power engineering field. Two among them might be the most recognizable names: Mark Lauby and Noel Schulz. Lauby is senior vice president and chief engineer at the National Electric Reliability Corporation and a member of the NAE. Schulz is a professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Washington State University.

Wollenberg is the recipient of several awards and honors that recognize his research and teaching contributions. In 2008 he was made IEEE Life Fellow, in 2002 he received the IEEE Power and Energy Society Outstanding Power Engineering Educator Award, in 2000 he was recognized with the IEEE Third Millennium Award, and was elevated to IEEE Fellow in 1988. He was also the recipient of the University’s Outstanding Contributions to Postbaccalaureate, Graduate, and Professional Education Award in 2007. In 1987 he received the Control Data Corporation Technical Excellence Award (he was an employee of the company from 1984 to 1989). In 2005, Wollenberg was made a member of the National Academy of Engineering. 

Professor Emeritus Bruce Wollenberg earned his doctoral degree in systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974 and after spending time as an engineer in industry and faculty in academia, he joined the University of Minnesota Twin Cities in 1989 as a professor. 

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