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Student services availability in community colleges: Agreement or disagreement with institutional priorities as perceived by student services mid-management personnel
Abstract
This research provides a focused study on eighty-five comprehensive community colleges located within the states of Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri. Specifically, the study is focused upon twenty-five basic student service functions and 250 mid-level managers within four distinct student service areas. First, the focus on basic student service functions centers upon their absence or presence at the institutions. This situation is analyzed with regard to the effect of institutional headcount enrollment and reporting lines for the mid-level managers. Second, the focus on mid-level managers revolves around their perceptual differences in regard to institutional priority and their individual priority for the basic student service functions. Findings of the study are presented in tables of descriptive and inferential data. The chi-square statistic was utilized to determine the statistical significance of headcount enrollment and reporting lines. The analysis of variance statistic was utilized to identify statistically significant interaction in regard to perceptual differences within the mid-level managers. Conclusions of this study support the premise that headcount enrollment does influence the presence of certain student service functions while reporting lines for mid-level managers have a limited influence on the presence of basic student service functions. In addition, mid-level managers were generally in agreement about perceived institutional priority for the basic student service functions but had some significant differences in regard to what they felt the priorities should be for selected student service functions. When viewed collectively, the mid-level managers felt that all of the basic student service functions were assigned a lower priority by the institution than they thought appropriate. This was verified by utilizing the t-test statistic which yielded statistically significant differences for all of the student service functions. Future research possibilities are unlimited and necessary to further understand the complexities of the management relationship and its consequences for departmental productivity and efficiency. This is particularly true when institutional and departmental priorities are potentially in conflict.
Subject Area
School administration|Community colleges
Recommended Citation
Waisanen, Melvin Lee, "Student services availability in community colleges: Agreement or disagreement with institutional priorities as perceived by student services mid-management personnel" (1987). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8810335.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8810335