Greg Toppo

USATODAY

That gleaming new athletic center at your kid’s college — or the hot new major in app development — could be the product of a curious phenomenon in American higher education: college and university presidents rushing to make their mark before they move on to the next gig.

A new survey of college presidents finds that these once-steadfast, once-starchy leaders now spend less time at a given institution and are under growing pressure to look for “quick wins” while they have the chance. As a result, many presidents are looking for “the proverbial low-hanging fruit” on their campuses when they should be thinking about more fraught, complex issues that their schools will face in the future.

“They’re not thinking about the long term,” said Jeff Selingo, a visiting scholar at Georgia Tech's Center for 21st Century Universities and one of the authors of the report. A professor of practice at Arizona State University, he added, “In many ways, I think, they’re developing thinking from the corporate side.” They’re thinking, he said, about the “thing-du-jour” and the next quarter, not the next decade.

One unnamed private university president told Selingo and his co-authors, “Presidents approach their job with the expectation that they’ll be judged on what they can finish. They think, ‘I’ll only be here five years, so I should only focus on what I can do in that time before I move on.’ They run their schools like pseudo-corporations. It’s short-term thinking. You might satisfy the immediate issue of the day, but this is unsustainable as a model.”

And like modern politicians, college presidents are also spending a lot of time raising money: 65% said fund raising, alumni relations and donor relations are their top three responsibilities. Half say fund-raising has increased in importance since they took their current job. But few spend time cultivating young alumni who could become big donors in a decade or two.

Meanwhile, just 2% said student life and student engagement are their most important job responsibility, which puts them at a disadvantage as growing student activism takes hold on campuses, Selingo said.

——“They’re basically not prepared for it, but at the same time they also rank it pretty low in terms of importance,” he said. He suggested that’s because few college presidents have much experience in student affairs before they take the top campus job.

One private-college president told researchers, “Presidents sometimes are tone deaf to the needs of students. Some don’t like spending time with them and they rely on their senior team to tell them what’s going on. That’s not sustainable.”

The survey of 165 presidents — about two-thirds of them from private institutions — comes from the Georgia Tech center and Deloitte’s Center for Higher Education Excellence.

Selingo and his co-authors worry about the administrative pipeline running dry in the decade ahead as demographic and financial challenges intensify. Many colleges have traditionally turned to provosts to fill vacant presidents’ slots, but surveys of sitting provosts suggest that many no longer want the job or, in a few cases, have the skills necessary.

Previous research from the American Council on Education (ACE) has found that college presidents are mostly white males in their sixties — and that their average tenure in the job is seven years, down from eight-and-a-half a decade ago. The new survey also notes several “public flameouts” and “high-profile ousters” in recent years that have ended presidents' tenures early.

Lynn Gangone, who trains new college presidents through the ACE’s Leadership Division, said that while some careers end badly after just a few years, “that’s not the norm.”

She also took exception to the idea that the presidents’ pipeline is running dry.

“I just think, candidly, we need to mine the pipeline better,” she said. Colleges should focus more on women and candidates of color, and look beyond the provost’s office to student affairs, development and the business office. “We have to look at leaders differently, but I don’t think the pipeline is running out at all,” she said.

All the same, Gangone agreed that presidents these days are pushed to raise money.

“There’s a lot of pressure on presidents today,” she said. “I think the pressure to get the ‘big win early’ is exactly that. I think presidents have to be pretty nimble at this point to thrive.”

Follow Greg Toppo on Twitter: @gtoppo