The Career Lines of Chief Academic Officers in Public Community Colleges

Administrative careers in higher education have typically been examined from two perspectives: individual and structural. The vast majority of these studies are from the individual orientation and place attention on the demographics and background characteristics of those holding a particular office. Probably the most well known example is the National Presidents' Study conducted by the American Council on Education (ACE). The National Presidents' Study began in 1986 and has presented a series of reports (Ross & Green, 1988; Ross, Green, & Henderson, 1993; Ross & Green, 1998; Ross & Green, 2000) that profile the professional and personal characteristics of college presidents. Studies using the structural perspective are based on the concept of organizational careers. Many of these studies point to Spilerman's (1977) definition of organizational careers as "sequences of related positions that are common to a portion of the labor force and for which there is a high probability of movement from one position to another" (p. 560). For this study, we followed the structural perspective, examining the sequence of positions held by individuals who currently occupy the position of chief academic officer (CAO) in public community colleges. Organizational career structures are most often termed career lines, career paths, or job ladders. We use career lines since "path" and "ladder" imply movement along the path or up the ladder. In fact, movement may also be lateral or even downward (Spilerman, 1977; Vardi, 1980). Ross and Green (1998) found that 20% of college presidents had been presidents of other institutions prior to assuming their current position. Birnbaum (1971) provides examples of downward movement in higher education where an individual moves from a higher-level position at a less prestigious institution to a lower level position at a more prestigious institution. One way to examine careers as structures of organizations is through labor market theory. As two-year institutions have become their own source for individuals to fill administrative vacancies, they constitute an internal labor market (Ferrari & Berte, 1970; Moore, Twombly, & Martorana, 1985; Schultz, 1965). Althauser and Kalleberg (1981) identified two distinct types of internal labor markets. They defined firm internal labor markets (FILM) as those "established by and confined to a single employer," (p. 131) while occupational internal labor markets (OILM) "consist of members of one or several closely related occupations and are not confined to a single firm" (p. 130). Twombly (1988) contends that the administrative labor market in two-year colleges consists of one or more OILMs. Viewing two-year colleges as OILMs suggests that careers do not exist solely at a single institution. Rather, the OILM consists of all two-year colleges, which are more like each other than they are other types of educational institutions. There are three structural features of internal labor markets. First, internal labor markets require all employees to begin in lower-level positions termed entry ports (Doeringer & Piore, 1971). Second, internal labor markets develop job ladders or career lines as a result of the need to minimize the costs of training employees (Bills, 1987). Third, movement up the job ladder or along the career lines is associated with a progressive development of knowledge or skill (Althauser & Kalleberg, 1981). Two of these features, entry ports and career lines, are included in this study. It should be noted that a basic assumption of internal labor market theory is that over time, the sequences of positions that lead to the top become institutionalized (Martin & Strauss, 1956). When sequences are institutionalized, identifiable career lines indicate movement from position to position. These positions can be thought of as training and testing points. The individual receives the training necessary for future positions on the career line and the organization is able to evaluate the individual to determine whether he or she continues to move along the career line. …