Over the past four years, many of you have good-naturedly taken surveys that were sent out to the NAFA membership. Last year, in keeping with our “connected” society, we inaugurated an electronic survey, which expanded upon the 2003 work “Surveying the Profession: A Guide to National Scholarship Advising” by James Duban, Mary Engel, and Richard Badenhausen. The 2003 survey enabled us to do benchmarking by collecting quantitative information about salaries, education, gender, and other basic demographic information. The 2006 survey expanded the scope of the 2003 survey to include opinions as well as factual information about ourselves and our jobs. It was important to include open-ended questions in addition to empirical questions to avoid the possibility of overlooking something that is important to the respondents. Your responses to the open ended questions were substantive, providing qualitative information to complement the quantitative data, thereby enabling us to capture a broader, and in some cases more detailed, range of issues. Combining both an empirical and a qualitative component is especially important in a “pilot” study, such as in the 2006 survey, because it will help frame future research.

The evolution of the NAFA surveys reflects the growing capacity and development of NAFA itself. With increased membership and resources, we are able to carry out formalized, longitudinal surveys. In the Summer 2006 NAFA Journal, I presented the results of the empirical portion of the 2006 survey. In this paper, I present the results of the five open-ended questions which were offered to fellowship advisors as part of the 2006 National Fellowships Advisors survey. Content analysis of this qualitative data was conducted to give a general idea of what is going on in the field and provide the motivation for the kinds of quantitative data that should be collected in the future. These questions sought information on (1) how fellowship advisors evaluate their own performance; (2) how they believe their universities evaluate their performance; (3) what the career goals of fellowship advisors are; (4) what accomplishments fellowship advisors, as a group, have made; and (5) what obstacles fellowship advisors believe make their jobs challenging.

Completed responses to the quantitative portion of the survey were provided by 178 individuals for a response rate of 65%. (See the Summer 2006 NAFA Journal for an overview of responses and analysis of these data) The number of respondents for each open-ended question is indicated in Tables 1-5. Analysis of the qualitative results proceeded as follows. The author and an independent researcher read through responses to each question and developed categories into which responses would be categorized. The independent researcher and a second researcher, also unaffiliated with NAFA, both coded the responses, or assigned responses to categories. A single response may have been classified into one category or multiple categories, depending upon how many different ideas were presented by the respondent. For example, one response to the question about how fellowship advisors rated their own success was, “Helping students grow up (overnight) as they take on the challenge of applying for a prestigious scholarship; obtaining at least one prestigious scholarship per year.” This would have been coded as (1) student development and (2) winning fellowships. Initially, the two researchers agreed on classification of 77% of the responses. Following discussion of the disparities, inter-rater reliability reached 96%. Typically, 85% inter-rater reliability is good.

The first question asked fellowship advisors, “How do you define your success as a fellowship advisor?” A total 158 responses to this question were received. The results (see Table 1) clearly indicate that of those advisors who responded, most define their success in terms of the extent to which they help students develop through the fellowship application process (52% of respondents). This was followed by winning fellowships (23%), provision of quality advising (22%), and raising awareness of national scholarships (22%). Interestingly, only 8% of fellowship advisors defined success in terms of helping students get interviews or become finalists for awards. Getting to the interview is a tangible and crucial indicator of how well we are doing our jobs and how competitive our students are. Past winners, scholarship committee members, and the foundations that run scholarships all stress the elements of chance and good luck that make the outcome of interviews very random and hard to predict. As we look for more representative ways to define success, moving beyond a tally of winning, we must recognize and take pride in having students get interviews or become finalists. This is tangible evidence of a job well done and something that we all can realistically shoot for without losing our sanity. More importantly we must educate our administrators and the students themselves on what a significant accomplishment getting an interview for a Rhodes, a Marshall, a Truman, or a Mitchell (to name a few) is. For example, in the case of the Truman, finalists are listed and formally recognized.

The second question asked, “How does your college/university define your success as a fellowship advisor?” (see Table 2). Interestingly, responses indicate that a great deal of disparity exists between fellowship advisors’ perceptions of their own success and their beliefs regarding the perceptions of success of their institutions. For example, 56% of respondents believe that their colleges/universities define their success in terms of winning fellowships, followed by the number applications submitted (12%). Tied with number of applicants for second was the belief held by 12% of fellowship advisors that their colleges and universities did not evaluate their performance. Trends in the field, however, suggest that this will probably soon change. For example, both last year’s NAFA summer workshop in Florida and this issue of the NAFA Journal deal with assessment. This focus on the nature and practice of assessment is further evidence of the maturation of fellowship advising as a field and as an institutional entity within our universities. It also represents an opportunity and a necessity for advisors and directors of fellowship offices to be proactive, to begin “self” assessment, and thereby craft how advisors and fellowship offices will be assessed by their institutions.

Perhaps the most significant finding from the first two questions is the distinction between fellowship advisors’ perceptions of success (student development) and institutional definitions of success (winning). Research in industrial-organizational psychology and organizational behavior suggests that such a gap in expectations would create high levels of role conflict (Burke & Greenglass, 1995), a frequent correlate of job burnout. Although student development and winning may go hand in hand in some fortuitous cases, more commonly winning a university/college-desired fellowship or scholarship is not the outcome of the application process and is not an accurate measure of how much a student has gained from applying for a scholarship. Therefore, it is imperative that we more precisely define “student development” and identify reasonable indicators of success that we can quantify and communicate to university leaders and the community at large. One way institutions of higher learning and individual departments measure quality is by tracking what students do after they graduate. Only 1% of respondents, however, reported that institutions measure success of fellowship advising by the number of students attending graduate school. This measure of success was completely absent from the responses for fellowship advisors’ perceptions of success. Perhaps, this type of information should be used as an indicator of success (beyond winning a specific scholarship) because it does reflect the value of the scholarship application process for students (learning about themselves, writing a good statement, identifying goals, etc) and the benefits to an institution. In the final analysis, winning a scholarship should not be solely about glory for an individual or an institution but should also be about the pursuit of opportunity for a student and the creation of a culture of pursuit of excellence. Gaining admission to a good graduate school, possibly with funding, is an indicator that a university is doing well by its students. The extent to which scholarship advising facilitates and promotes that end is a measure of our contribution to the overall mission of our institutions.

The third question, which asked fellowship advisors what their career goals were (see Table 3), revealed three distinct categories of answers: (1) fellowship advisors who wish to remain in fellowship advising (student development 19%; expand/improve fellowship office 15%; direct fellowship office 6%); (2) fellowship advisors who wish to remain in academia, perhaps in another capacity (increased responsibility in institution 11%; teach 9%; administrative role in institution 9%; also research, earn Ph.D., earn tenure), and (3) fellowship advisors who wish to leave academia (retire 9%; job outside academia 4%; work for foundation 1%). What is interesting here is that as a group we plan to stay in the profession and aspire to do a “better” job but not necessarily more. In the future, it would be useful to examine career plans and goals in the context of satisfaction and other variables such as time in the profession, other duties in the university, salary, educational background, etc.

The fourth question solicited opinions regarding “what has been the greatest accomplishment by Fellowship Advisors as a group in the past 5 years?” Most fellowship advisors cited information sharing (26%), creating a supportive community (26%), the creation of NAFA (19%) and transparency with respect to process (13%) among top accomplishments. Despite the fact that student development was such a priority in terms of fellowship advisors’ evaluations of their own performance, student development was mentioned by only 11% of fellowship advisors considering significant group accomplishments. Clearly, NAFA has been crucial to providing a support structure outside of the institution and in some cases providing support that is missing within an institution.

The final question asked “In your opinion, what are the primary challenges and obstacles that face Fellowship Advisors?” Fellowship advisors cited factors such as pressure to win (24%), lack of institutional support (24%), identifying and mentoring students (24%), unrealistic expectations of key stakeholders (16%), understanding and communicating scholarship criteria to students (13%), faculty participation (11%), burnout (10%), and the profession becoming a female ghetto with low salaries (10%). Responses to this question are particularly alarming. Although only 10% of respondents specifically cited burnout as an obstacle associated with their job, they cited many factors which have been widely established as conditions which precede burnout. For instance, previous research has shown that over time, employees in jobs with a great deal of pressure to perform and insufficient resources and staff support tend to burnout (Moore, 2000), as do employees who spend a great deal of time interacting with others, particularly when such interaction may be geared towards helping others handle emotions and controlling one’s own emotions (Brotheridge & Grandey, 2002). Who among us has not had to console a deserving but unsuccessful scholarship applicant or conversely nominate a student who looks good on paper but may not be a very nice person? In addition, insufficient rewards (Jackson, Schwab & Shuler, 1986), constantly working towards deadlines (Jackson et al., 1986), and role ambiguity (Burke & Greenglass, 1995) are all shown to be antecedents to burnout. Note that in Table 5, fellowship advisors’ uncertainty related to where their positions fit in their institution’s structure and isolation of fellowship advisors on campus.

The findings from the 2006 survey, coupled with the incongruence between performance standards held by fellowship advisors and those held by their institution, make it a possibility that fellowship advising could be a profession which is highly prone to burnout. This is supported by anecdotal evidence from the membership. I mentioned to a fellowship advisor with 8+ years of experience that there seemed to be a potential for burnout in fellowship advising. Her response was immediate and provided anecdotal corroboration for my observation. She cited her own conversation with a veteran fellowship advisor when she began in this line of work. The advisor observed that there seemed to be two types of people in fellowship advising—those who left the field within a year or two and those who remained for the long haul. I was immediately curious as to what could explain this, eager to more precisely define the “pressures” and challenges of our work, and hopefully highlight those areas where we could change or ameliorate a situation.

This has been a challenging question to tackle because we are a heterogeneous group as evidenced by the empirical data from the 2006 survey. We report to different units, we work in different kinds of institutions, we have different educational backgrounds and levels of education. So, what causes burnout? Does the answer lie in the differences in the personalities among advisors, individual differences in approaches to the job, or is the answer to be found externally in differences among the institutions for which we work—in organizational or reporting structures, where fellowship advising is within an institution, or even the nature of the institution itself? Indeed, future research studies should investigate factors that mitigate the relationship between job pressures faced by fellowship advisors and job burnout. The 2007 survey explores these questions about the pressures and challenges of our profession. Collecting this new information along with the kind of information collected in 2003 and the 2006 survey in a quantitative format will allow us to perform more rigorous statistical analysis and look for correlations. Conducting annual surveys can help us see what is happening from year to year and allow us to better see changes across the profession. The surveys must therefore maintain continuity while adapting to changes that emerge from year to year. In this way, we as individuals and as an organization (NAFA) can better help our students, our colleagues, ourselves, and our profession.

View Survey Results or download a pdf

Brotheridge, C.M., & Grandey, A.A. (2002). Emotional labor and burnout: Comparing two perspectives of “people work.” Journal of Vocational Behavior, 60, 17-39.

Burke, R.J., & Greenglass, E. (1995). A longitudinal study of psychological burnout in teachers. Human Relations, 48, 187-201.

Eckhardt, N.V., (2006) NAFA Fellowship Advisors Survey. NAFA Journal, http://www.nafadvisors.org/journal/Fellowship_Survey.htm.

Jackson, S.E., Schwab., R.L., & Shuler, R.S. (1986). Toward an understanding of the burnout phenomenon. Journal of Applied Psychology, 71, 630-640.

Moore, J.E. (2000). One road to turnover: An examination of work exhaustion in technology professionals. Management Information Science Quarterly, 24, 141-168.