Students as Emerging Adults

Over the past year Student Affairs staff has been thinking and talking about how age appropriate standards and expectations should influence our policies and our direct work with students. We have been thinking about questions such as: What should we expect of students? What personal gains does student affairs promote? What is the right balance between nurturing and challenge, rights and responsibilities, individualism and community?

During the college years students leave safe and familiar intellectual and social terrain for new challenges and opportunities.  While at Skidmore students confront a new and more complex set of ideas, perspectives, and peers. They think deeply about ideas, values, and goals. They experiment with different roles and relationships. Perhaps most significant, from a student affairs perspective, is the expectation that students take responsibility for their education, health, and daily living.

We consider students emerging adults. The term helps us use knowledge about personal development when we work with students and consider college policy. The phrase focuses the attention of a diverse group of student affairs professionals on the abilities we expect students to develop while in college. Promoting these abilities informs our work whether we perform that work in an academic, co-curricular, extracurricular, or social context.

Student Affairs is especially concerned with fostering the qualities that will contribute to students success both in and after college. We help students develop goals and make plans and we help students assess their academic and personal needs. We promote opportunities and facilitate student access to those opportunities. We work with students to foster a social environment conducive to learning. We help students participate fully in community promoting their contributions and facilitating their learning.

At the same time, we know their success depends most on their motivation, commitment, and willingness to invest in the intellectual and community life of the college. The college experience is theirs to create. We only help them make the most of the opportunities they earn while here. The intellectual, personal, and social benefits of these years depend on the effort they make to learn about and access the wealth of programs Skidmore provides.

Most student affairs work takes place in the context of a supportive and challenging professional relationship. We support the students inherent push toward autonomy and mastery while challenging students to take responsibility for their intellectual and personal lives. We work with students as mentors, coaches, advisers, tutors, guides, and confidants helping them master the challenges, stresses, and tensions inherent in the college experience.

We also work to shape the residential, co-curricular, and social environment so students can succeed as students and citizens. In this context, we do research, develop policy, set limits, teach, negotiate, facilitate, advocate, and discipline. Much of this work takes place in formal groups, committees, and other administrative contexts. 

Respect for our students emerging adulthood means that while we will on occasion intervene with other offices and programs on the student's behalf, we direct our work toward helping students manage the challenges, academic or personal, they face. We stifle our inclination to solve problems for our students in order to facilitate their ability to gather the information and develop the skills they need to negotiate successfully their way in the world.

The students emerging adulthood means the relationship between a parent and the college is unlike any previous relationship parents have had with schools, camps, or coaches. There are legal restrictions on the information we can share about students (even their parents) without their permission. We know this may frustrate a parent when their son or daughter needs help. However, we are also confident that this helps students and their parents adapt to the changes in their relationship college occasions and that students learn to manage their own affairs here wisely and well.

Every office and program in student affairs has thought about promoting students emerging adulthood. However, we know the issues are complex and, at times, difficult. We encourage students and parents to talk with each office and program about their policies and practices.

For a very good discussion of The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act go to the US Department of Education Website.