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Careers in Student Housing

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By Jennifer Jacobson

In his junior year at Ohio Dominican College, John (Jack) E. Collins could not afford to live on campus and had to live at home. But he grew tired of missing parties and friends. So when the college offered him a chance to live in the dorms and work as a resident assistant in his senior year, he accepted.

"I saw it as a way to move onto campus and get more involved in what was going on in college," says Mr. Collins, who graduated from the college, now Ohio Dominican University, in 1969. "At that point I never realized it would lead to my life's work."

Today he is the director of the housing division at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and for more than 30 years has worked in the branch of student affairs responsible for providing students a safe place to live, and sometimes for feeding them, too.

Like Mr. Collins, most student-housing directors get into the business by becoming RA's in college. They move up the administrative hierarchy with stints as hall director, then area coordinator of several dormitories, and then assistant director or associate director, before ultimately landing the top housing job.

Titles vary from campus to campus, as do the job duties. Most directors oversee the operation, maintenance, and construction of student housing. Some also supervise food service on the campus, while others have nothing to do with it.

Turnover can be high at the lower- and mid-level positions since the key to moving up in the field is jumping around to jobs with more responsibilities and better pay. According to the 2002-3 administrative salary survey for the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, the median salary for directors of student housing at all types of institutions was $52,132; at doctoral institutions, $79,316; at comprehensive colleges, $49,920; at baccalaureate colleges, $42,835; and at two-year colleges, $40,268.

With his $120,000 annual salary, Mr. Collins is one of the best-paid people in the business, but it took him years to get there. He pursued a career in housing after realizing in his senior year of college that he wanted a job similar to that of Ohio Dominican's dean of students. But the Vietnam War was raging, and Mr. Collins decided to get a teaching deferment -- he taught history and Latin in high school -- for his first two years out of college.

He then enrolled at Bowling Green State University and received a master's degree in 1972 in college student personnel. As a graduate student he worked as a full-time hall director at Mississippi State University before becoming a hall director at Temple University for two years.

From there, he took a job as assistant dean of students and director of housing at John Carroll University. He was 25 years old. "At that time in the early '70s, you were still able to make the jump from hall director to a small-school director," he says. "Today there's a little more defined route to being a director."

He earned $12,000 a year at the institution and stayed until 1986, when he left to lead the residence-life program at Ball State University. After three years, he moved up to director of housing and residence life, a position he held for nine years. In 1998, he came to Urbana-Champaign as director.

"If you want to move up, you have to move on," Mr. Collins says. Only so many directors' jobs are available, he says, and it may take years before an associate director's boss decides to retire or go elsewhere. "People tend to stay in director jobs," he says. "They're pretty good jobs and the compensation isn't bad."

And while a lot of other student-affairs administrators have budgets primarily related to personnel, housing directors oversee money for building projects, which is "great because you have more flexibility" and "more autonomy," he says. "It's not uncommon that I'm making decisions on project items that cost several thousand dollars or several hundred thousand dollars."

With a $60-million budget, Mr. Collins's department is considered an auxiliary operation, which means it receives no money from the state or university and operates solely on revenue from student fees.

His entire operation involves roughly 8,500 undergraduate beds, 750 beds in graduate dorms, and another 600 beds in student apartments. About 750 people work for him, although only 7 report to him directly. These include five associate directors for food service, facilities, residence life, family and graduate housing, and business technology; and two assistant directors, one for marketing and the other for dormitories that are privately owned and operated but affiliated with the university.

Mr. Collins, president of the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International, spends most of his time monitoring the budget and signing off on 1,000 different things a day. He reports to the associate vice chancellor for student affairs and says that his Ph.D. in educational administration, from Kent State University in 1985, helps give him "some standing academically in the institution" but is not crucial to doing his job.

While he once considered becoming a vice president for student affairs, the position does not interest him. "I no longer need that in my portfolio," he says. "I love what I do."

Meanwhile, Yolanda M. King, the director of residence life at Tufts University, would eventually like to move up to a vice presidency of student affairs. Next year she plans to enter a Ph.D. program, probably in academic administration, as that degree is typically required for the job.

She earned a B.A. in English from the College of Wooster in 1984 and so enjoyed working with students when she was an RA during her senior year that she decided to pursue a housing career. But first she had to get a master's degree, a standard prerequisite for housing directors. She earned hers in student development in higher education from Howard University in 1987.

After graduate school she landed a job as a hall director and then as an area coordinator supervising hall directors at Ohio University at Athens. She then became assistant director of residence life at the State University of New York at Buffalo and associate director of residence life at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She just completed her first year in the top housing job at Tufts.

As director, Ms. King oversees 3,400 student beds. She is charged with providing safe and clean living spaces for students and with helping them develop the social skills necessary for living peacefully with other people.

She declines to reveal her salary but says that someone in her position at a large private research university usually earns $65,000 to $70,000 a year.

The job, she says, has its challenges, many of which tend to pop up right when her workweek is supposed to end. "Every Friday without fail, right around 3:30, that's when the crises happen," she says. "It prevents one from going home on time."

Those crises can include telephone calls from parents who have not heard from their children for a few days and want her office to help locate them. Usually, Ms. King says, the students have just forgotten to call home. "On the other hand, maybe it's a student who's had an emergency regarding their mental health," she says. It's up to her to decide "whether they can remain in the hall without harming themselves."

Kenneth L. Stoner, who for 18 years has served as director of student housing at the University of Kansas, finds the facilities part of his job the most demanding. With a newly renovated dormitory set to open on the campus this fall, lately he has been spending his days monitoring and assisting as 10 truckloads of new furniture arrive, one every other day. In a couple years, his office will oversee the building of a new scholarship hall for about 50 students. "There's always something coming forward," he says.

What Jill M. Eckardt, director of housing at Mesa State College, most likes about the job is that every day is different and often fun. "You're planning lots of activities and different programs," says Ms. Eckardt, who also oversees the college's student-union building. "At our campus, students do a community trick-or-treat in the dorms and an Easter egg hunt."

But the real challenge lies in the disciplinary aspect of her position. "Students who have been asked to leave the residence halls will appeal to me," she says. For example, they may be asked to leave because of drug possession. Ms. Eckardt then has to function as a "long-distance counselor to parents," who may have trouble accepting what their child has done. "At times I can appear to be an incredibly cold and unfeeling administrator because I'm enforcing a policy we've all agreed on," she says.

Ms. Eckardt reports to the assistant vice president of student affairs and enrollment management, and pulls in a $60,000 salary for managing 935 student beds on campus. She says that one of the perks of the job is getting a budget (hers is $9-million) that she alone controls. "Being an auxiliary [operation], there's some freedom and autonomy with your budget that you don't really have on the educational side," she says. It's "your own little kingdom."

At this point, Ms. Eckardt does not know if she'll ever relinquish her throne. "I don't know what my next move would be," she says. "I may be hitting an educational ceiling by not having my doctorate."

Even though Floyd B. Hoelting has a doctoral degree, he has no plans to leave his job as director of housing and food service at the University of Texas at Austin. Headhunters have called to see if he's interested in vice presidencies in student affairs, but Mr. Hoelting, who earns $126,916 a year, has always told them no. "I know what I'm good at," he says, "and what I like to do."

One of 11 children and the son of a poor farmer, he jokes, "I knew all about group living even before I went to college."

"We do something that isn't done in a lot of components in the university," he says, "and that is, we allow students to discover themselves in a rich environment where they're around all kinds of different people in a residence hall. They don't get that in classes but for a year or two. I absolutely believe in what we do."