Last week I reconnected online with a longtime friend and former colleague. It was great to see her, but afterward, I was struck that we had both spent much of our careers dealing with the side effects of an industry that’s geographically dispersed.
In other words, we’ve both moved more times than either of us ever expected.
And that hasn’t been a function of deliberate job-hopping or attempting to stay one step ahead of the law. It’s what has to happen when a situation changes and there aren’t local alternatives.
It’s one of those things that nobody tells you when you first move into administration.
That’s particularly true in community colleges, as opposed to four-year colleges or universities.
Many industries cluster geographically. Silicon Valley is probably the most famous now, but there’s no shortage of examples. Hartford, Conn., and Des Moines, Iowa, are insurance industry clusters; people in that industry can move from one employer to another and another again without moving. Detroit is an auto industry cluster. New York City is a financial services cluster.
Industries typically do that to take advantage either of physical traits—Pittsburgh’s multiple rivers and proximity to coal and iron made it an obvious place to make steel—or of a workforce with specific skills. Even if the initial location is an accident of history—I’m thinking here of Kodak in Rochester, N.Y.—over time, related industries tend to pop up in the area, and local educational institutions start aiming students toward that cluster. Supply chains emerge, making it easier for new competitors to start in the same region.
The effect of geographic clustering for employees is positive, as long as the industry remains healthy. Even with industry-specific skills, it’s relatively easy to switch employers without moving. In an era of two-income families, that gets around the two-body problem cleanly. One spouse can switch jobs while the other stays with theirs, and the family stays put. (Of course, the opposite is true when an entire industry goes sideways, as residents of many Rust Belt cities can attest.)
Community colleges are dispersed by design. Yes, a few big cities have multiple within driving distance, but as a percentage of the industry, it’s a small group. More often, a given county or district has one community college in it, and that’s it. It has a local monopoly, either legally or effectively. Sometimes it’s less than that; Pennsylvania has 15 community colleges, but 67 counties. More counties don’t have one than do. Iowa has 15 community colleges for 99 counties. That’s more representative of the sector than, say, the cluster of CUNY schools.
Geographic spread is key to their mission. People who live outside major metros deserve access to higher education as much as anyone else. Online courses have offset that to a point, but many students prefer in-person classes, many vocational fields only work in person and students will drive only so far.
From an employee perspective, though, that kind of dispersal can create a condition of monopsony. When there’s only one local employer that values a particular skill set, the employees’ only options are to accept it as it is or to move.
In my limited observation, the situation is somewhat different in the four-year sector for two primary reasons. First, they tend to be more clustered, particularly when private institutions are included. Boston, for example, has literally dozens of colleges and universities in it, of which only two (Bunker Hill and Roxbury) are community colleges. The second reason is that it’s common practice in the four-year sector to offer senior administrative appointees tenure in academic departments, so the option exists to leave a position without leaving an institution. Most community colleges don’t have tenure systems, and in those that do, I’ve never seen tenure offered with an administrative appointment. It may have happened somewhere, but I’ve never seen it or heard of it. Without a concurrent faculty appointment, leaving a position requires leaving the institution. People who aren’t in a position to do that may find themselves forced to go along with decisions they otherwise wouldn’t, on pain of losing their livelihood.
From an institutional perspective, this arrangement has advantages. At my current institution in Pennsylvania, the president has experience in Maryland and West Virginia; the chief student affairs officer has experience in Ohio and West Virginia, and I bring experience in New Jersey and Massachusetts. Our college gets the benefit of comparative perspectives. Combining the deep local ties of many faculty and staff with leadership experience from different places can offer the best of both worlds. That can benefit the institution.
But from an employee perspective, each move gets a little harder than the one before it. Nobody told me that when I started in this industry. Given that interstate movers charge by weight, I don’t even want to think about how much I’ve spent over the years moving books. They’re surprisingly heavy when you have enough of them. For better or worse, my book-buying habit hasn’t tapered off much over the years. That becomes more of an issue with each move. And carrying heavy boxes and furniture up flights of stairs is a different experience in your 50s than in your 20s. I’ve been lucky in many ways, not the least of which is that TW works remotely—so she brings her job with her—and brings her considerable project-manager skills to each move. But even with that, moving is exhausting.
I’m hoping to be here for a good, long time. Part of the reason is that I genuinely like it here. But part, honestly, is that all this moving gets old. I don’t know if I would have done anything differently had somebody given me a heads-up back then, but nobody did. This is my heads-up to the next generation. Industries that don’t cluster have rules of their own.
