Waldner was born in Philadelphia, and received his undergraduate degree in government from Cornell University and his doctorate in politics and international studies from Princeton University.

He began teaching in 1973 and moved into academic administration in 1982 because he said he became interested in colleges as a phenomenon, and in helping institutions improve, prosper and be of service to their students and communities.

Waldner previously worked at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre and Oglethorpe University in Georgia, according to the college.

There is no one overall mission of higher education in America, Waldner said. The strength of the system is in its diversity, with institutions judged on what their missions are and how well they perform, he said.

Waldner recently shared his perspective on how the college has changed since 1991 and what he sees as prevailing trends in higher education.

Q: You said recently you plan to retire when a successor is found. Why retire and why choose to do it now?

A: Well, I will be 67 (in 2013) so it seems like a logical time, and I will have completed 22 years here as president. So it seemed like the right time for me.

How has York College changed since you took over in 1991 and how, in general, might have higher education changed in that time?

We've changed a lot and we've gone in a direction that in some respects is the opposite of much of American higher education. When I got here, we were 50-50 residential-commuter; now we're strongly a residential college. We were 50-50 full-time, part-time; we're now strongly full-time. We've been extending our geographic scope of recruitment.

In qualitative terms, we've gone from 57 percent with terminal degrees to nearly 90 percent doctoral-qualified faculty. So our program quality has increased noticeably during that period of time along with the enrollment numbers, the shift from part-time to full-time, the shift from commuter to residential — (while) much of American education has gone in contrary directions during that period of time.

Another change: We are much more of a traditional age institution — 18-to 22-year-olds — than we were in 1990. That of course goes along with the commuter-to-residential shift and the part-time to full-time (shift).

Why the disparity? Why take York College in the direction it has been going in, whereas the rest of higher education might be taking a different direction?

Well there has been a lot of increase in participation in the higher education system and some of that has come from part-time enrollment, and some of it has come from adult learners coming into the system.

And we still have adult learners at York College; it's just that we've attracted traditional-age students from a widening geographic scope given the qualitative improvements in our curriculum and the very noticeable improvements in our facilities.

In terms of the trends in higher education in your years here, what have you seen as the most positive trend, both here in practice at York College and throughout higher education, and what do you see as the most negative trend?

I think (a positive trend is) the focus on assessment of learning outcomes, which has been going on throughout that 20-year period and is now very much a part of every curriculum — being able to define with much greater precision what the expectations are of a given program and then measuring that; measuring those outcomes in terms of student achievement; and then feeding the results of that assessment process back into curriculum improvements.

That's been going on for 30 years, and the outcomes assessment approach to higher education has supplanted what was the more traditional approach, which was a capabilities analysis. How many volumes do you have in your library? How many faculty members do you have in a given discipline? How much is your physical plant worth? And so on. It tended to be the assumption (that) if you had the capabilities, then you must be using them wisely to produce good learning outcomes. Well that's not necessarily the case.

(For a negative,) I think the regulatory environment has become more intrusive. The number of reports, forms that higher education institutions need to fill out, for the federal government in particular, has grown exponentially.

It's driven increases in administrative overhead in the higher education system. I don't think it's done anything particularly positive to improve higher education, so I think federal intrusions and regulatory burdens imposed by the federal government have been a negative trend.

And those are different than looking at learning outcomes?

Well the outcome assessment movement has come from the independent peer accreditation process. Not governmental — it is a voluntary process where institutions of higher education over the years have increasingly focused on quality as expressed in outcomes assessment more so than in capabilities.

What is the core mission of any higher education institution and then, based on that, what other responsibilities do you see it having to its students, its community and then to society?

Well the first one is there is no such thing because the great strength of American higher education is that we have a diversity of institutions. We're a comprehensive regional college of about 5,000 students. So we're not a small institution; neither are we a mega university. But we are a regional college with a full range of programs in the arts and sciences, but with an emphasis on professional programs. Most of the students who come to York College come here to major in a field that is the name of a job.

Is there any one initiative you will walk away most proud of?

Well I think we have broadened and refreshed our curriculum over the years, and that's very important. To keep assessing what students expectations are, what opportunities there are for graduates, to see what the needs of the community and the society are, and to refresh and to add to and in some cases prune the majors that the institution offers.

So I think a dynamic responsiveness to the society and the community in which we are functioning, and to the hopes and expectations of students, that's the ethos that I think has become even stronger at York College under my leadership.