About Student Affairs

Higher education is more than just academic learning; it’s a transformative experience shaped by growth, discovery, and connection. Student affairs professionals play a vital role in this process, ensuring that learning extends beyond the classroom. They adopt a student-centered approach, ensuring that all learners are met where they are and prepares them for where they are headed. By creating opportunities for ongoing learning, student affairs educators promote leadership, teamwork, communication, and other skills that ensure students who complete college are ready to make a difference in their community and in the professional world. NASPA supports these efforts by equipping student affairs professionals with the tools, resources, and networks that bring the true worth of a college education to life.

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The Student Affairs Profession

Foundational and Guiding Documents

To understand the field of student affairs and its role in student learning and development, it’s essential to explore its historical roots and how higher education and society shape each other.

Once called student personnel administration, student affairs has evolved to address enduring and emerging priorities, such as the value placed on developing the whole student, well articulated in the 1937 Student Personnel Point of View, as well as the 2015 ACPA/NASPA Professional Competency Areas, and the more recent developments with the Student Affairs Educator Domains in the Certification for Student Affairs outlined in 2019.

The foundational and guiding documents compiled here not only reflect the history of the profession, but serve as dynamic tools for teaching the principles and values of the student affairs.

Consider using them in the following ways

 

Host discussions for undergraduates exploring careers in student affairs.

 

Add them to reading lists for interns, mentees, or student leaders like Peer Educators and RAs.

 

Assign them in graduate courses to prompt reflection on the profession’s evolution.

 

Integrate them into new employee orientation, especially for those without a student affairs background.

 

Use them in professional development sessions, staff meetings, and retreats.

 

Reference them for job descriptions or guiding individual/organizational evaluations.