Keeping a watchful eye drives up college costs
When college tuition rates go up this year - as they will at most schools - one of the driving forces will be the cost to prevent football concussions, combat sexual assault, and keep hackers out of school networks.
When college tuition rates go up this year - as they will at most schools - one of the driving forces will be the cost to prevent football concussions, combat sexual assault, and keep hackers out of school networks.
Responding to growing legal and regulatory requirements and wary of becoming the next crisis in the headlines, colleges and universities have added staff, increased employee training, and overhauled policies.
Complying with new laws and regulations has "created a much better environment," said Harvey Kesselman, the president of Stockton University. "But there is a real cost associated with it, and we can't deny that very real truth."
Stockton employs at least 41 people, in departments including student affairs and human resources, whose primary jobs are to ensure that the university is in line with various regulations, he said.
Three of those are university lawyers. After its bungled real estate deal to create an Atlantic City campus at the former Showboat casino property, a lawyer now attends every trustees meeting.
Many college administrators agree that the tightening legal and regulatory environment helps to ensure safety and promote a positive environment.
"We have to kind of do that while balancing our core values, which are the pursuit of knowledge and access and equity," said Valerie I. Harrison, who last month moved within Temple University to the new position of senior adviser to the president for compliance.
It's the financial and time costs that are the challenge, especially as colleges worry about keeping student costs down. Nonacademic student services and administrative costs grew faster in 2012-13 - the most recent data available - than spending on instruction at many schools, according to a January report from the Delta Cost Project, part of the nonpartisan American Institutes for Research think tank.
"It's a wonderful thing to be able to make sure we have a safe campus, and we want that, but what that sometimes means is we need an extra body to help do the work necessary to achieve that goal," said Melissa Wheatcroft, Rowan University's general counsel.
Many schools create a high-level position, like Harrison's, responsible for overseeing regulatory compliance across the campus. In 2013, following the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal, Pennsylvania State University hired a director of university ethics and compliance.
Rowan, which has grown dramatically, recently created a chief compliance officer in part because the university now has two medical schools. It also is pursuing more federally funded research, which carries specific requirements in areas such as intellectual property, security, and ethics.
The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) this year has a new director of compliance to meet the need for oversight. The college, which formerly relied on the state's Attorney General's Office for legal support, now has an office of general counsel with two in-house lawyers and a paralegal.
Some issues have become particularly prominent: sexual misconduct, disability accommodation, cybersecurity, intellectual property rights, athletics.
Athletic regulations cover issues including player eligibility, academic work, and physical safety. Last year, Rutgers' now-fired football coach was found to have improperly reached out to a professor over a student's academic progress, breaking several policies.
TCNJ recently hired an additional trainer, watching especially for concussions in contact sports, to meet NCAA guidelines.
In 2011, the federal Department of Education made clear to colleges that they would be held responsible, under a new interpretation of Title IX, for failing to respond appropriately to sexual violence.
In the years since, the Education Department has opened investigations into the policies at dozens of schools, and students have filed civil rights lawsuits against colleges, alleging that they did not have appropriate policies in place or did not follow them. In response, colleges began adding Title IX coordinators and revising their policies.
"There is also an expectation that you can't just have a person, you have to have training for everyone in the university community," said Lynn Klingensmith, who became the director of social equity at West Chester University and the school's Title IX and Americans with Disabilities Act coordinator. "And you do your training in several different ways so you're meeting everyone's needs."
In November, TCNJ established a Title IX coordinator who also ensures compliance with several other federal laws governing sexual issues on campus: Reauthorization of Violence Against Women Act, Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security and Campus Crime Statistics Act, Higher Education Opportunity Act, Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.
There also are state laws, agency guidelines, and new legal rulings.
"Part of the problem with these is there are so many, and they're so voluminous," said Gary Miller, TCNJ's director of compliance.
Miller keeps a checklist with 266 federal line items and 27 state ones.
Those are likely to grow as lawmakers and the public expect ever more from colleges: heightened cybersecurity, increased accessibility tools such as closed captioning for online courses, greater mental-health services.
"The one thing about this work is it's constantly changing," said Klingensmith, who recently oversaw training for West Chester employees on how to respond to child molestation.
Colleges say they will keep responding, talking about best practices, and carefully watching as more responsibility falls to them.
There's nothing else they can do, Kesselman said - especially when the regulations are there to protect people: "It's just how we do business now."
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