Inevitably, a senior student-affairs administrator at a large institution will deal with the extreme cases. These are the ones that can’t be described, even in veiled or disguised terms, because they are so sensitive and sometimes so unique that any discussion would carry identifiers. These are cases in which the next step for the student is usually prison or death.
Of the students in those situations with whom I have worked, some have, indeed, gone to prison or died. Some I have lost track of. But some of them have recovered and gone on to be fine. I sometimes bump into them around town, or they send me the occasional email to tell me they are okay, maybe many years later. It is impossible to know what real impact you had on those who went on to be OK, just as it is impossible not to wonder what you could have done for those who didn’t, or those whose fate is unknown.
These students might be, or might have been, in a bad drug scene. They might have become enmeshed in some fraud scheme. They might be on the verge of self-starvation, or near suicide following a trauma. They might be going through an identity crisis. Their family-support network may have forsaken them. In the worst cases, one or both parents are their tormentors, or worse, their mentors in crime. They may simply be kids who are on a mission to demonstrate that the system has failed them, and that no one can help them or will even support them. They can be very persistent in their quest to make their point. It is our job to prove them wrong.
One may legitimately wonder why college student-affairs offices, which may go by other names, must deal with these cases in the first place. The problems these students face are far bigger than what even those institutions with the best resources are equipped to deal with. Many of these students should not even be in college — they should be dealing with their nonacademic issues so that they can come back strong and fulfill their academic potential. But they are in college, and sometimes managing to maintain satisfactory academic standing. The student-affairs office is often a small but crucial part of the solution.
