Identifying Ideal Worker Norms in Student Affairs Practice: An Analysis of Latinx/é Mid-Level Professional Experiences

The student affairs profession faces structural challenges such as unsustainable workloads, limited compensation, and ambiguous advancement pathways that disproportionately burden education laborers. For racially and ethnically minoritized professionals, these pressures intensify under systemic inequality regimes that demand exceptional labor while offering limited institutional support. This qualitative study examines how 25 Latinx/é mid-level student affairs administrators interpret and navigate ideal worker norms within U.S. higher education. Drawing on narrative inquiry, the analysis centers on participants’ accounts to demonstrate how expectations of constant availability, emotional restraint, geographic mobility, and self-sacrifice are embedded within organizational inequality regimes. Findings show that Latinx/é administrators are rendered simultaneously indispensable and disposable. They are relied upon to stabilize institutions through care work, crisis management, and equity labor, yet denied transparent advancement pathways, recognition, or structural support. Participants described adapting to these conditions through strategic persistence, resisting institutional gaslighting that focused on individual limitations rather than structural exclusion, and selective distancing from identity-based roles, often at high personal and professional costs. Rather than framing these experiences as individual burnout or resilience, the study reveals how institutional practices normalize overwork, extract representational labor, and obscure inequity behind surface-level commitments to diversity. This article illustrates how Latinx/é administrators reproduce, resist, and critique ideal worker norms within racialized, gendered, and classed organizational constraints. The findings call for structural reforms in how student affairs labor is organized, evaluated, and rewarded.