Orientation by CD-ROM and mandatory attendance help turn around a deficient program
It’s the last -- and most chaotic -- day for students to register for classes at Richland College. But Noelle O’Hart, a sophomore business major, isn’t panicking.
As she thumbs through a course catalog while standing in a long line at the advising center, Ms. O’Hart jokes that at another college she attended, orientation and registration were akin to a painful day at the dentist’s office.
But at Richland, a 12,000-student suburban community college, things are different. Ms. O’Hart, who is from Boston, transferred to Richland from the University of New Hampshire not knowing what classes she wanted to take or what she wanted to do after college.
She had considered entering a premed program and also thought of becoming a hotel-management major at New Hampshire. But lengthy talks with a Richland adviser here sparked an interest in business.
The adviser registered her for a “fast track” program that allowed her to take 60 credit hours -- the equivalent of two academic years -- in just one year. Her courses were rigorous, she says, and each class had no more than 32 students and lasted three hours, Monday through Thursday.
At New Hampshire, “Advising was so rude that a couple of times I just walked out,” she says. “At my other college, I talked to students outside the advising office more than I did to advisers to find out about classes, but at Richland I felt like the advisers welcomed me with open arms.”
Ms. O’Hart’s experience reflects a sustained effort by this community college to improve how students pick courses and plan their academic programs. While many community colleges allow students to register for most courses with minimal advising, and to start degree programs with little orientation, Richland does not. And its approach in the last few years is attracting attention.
Without hiring outside consultants -- as many colleges have done recently -- Richland restructured how it uses the 20 professors who help the advising staff guide and register students for courses, and how it pays the faculty members for their work. The college also condensed its two-hour-long, sleep-inducing orientation lectures into upbeat, 20-minute orientations on CD-ROM’s that students can view at their convenience. And Richland made orientation a requirement for most new students.
“What Richland has done is truly structured its orientation to meet the needs of the student and not the needs of the institution,” says Neal A. Raisman, an enrollment consultant and former president of Onondaga Community College, in Syracuse, N.Y. “Many colleges get very much into old routines, and a lot of orientations are still geared toward the students that we had back in the 70’s, but those students are gone.”
Some of Richland’s techniques are common at four-year colleges, but only a few of the nation’s 1,200 community colleges can match its methods, according to Jeanine Ward-Roof, president of the National Orientation Directors Association.
But regardless of how community colleges go about registering students, the challenge is usually greater than at most four-year institutions. Budgets may be limited. This year, Richland’s orientation-and-advising budget is about $740,000 -- more than most community colleges can afford to spend. Also, when it comes to age, race, and economic background, Richland and other community colleges must orient a more-diverse student population than their four-year counterparts.
At Richland, the average student is 32, and about 80 percent hold outside jobs. Sixty percent of Richland students enroll in remedial courses, and more than half matriculate without having taken the SAT or ACT tests. And the revolving door of enrollment at community colleges spins at such a dizzying pace that it’s not uncommon for many community-college students to decide on a whim to enroll at the last minute.
“They may have just heard an ad on the radio, or read a billboard while driving down the interstate, or recently been fired from a job,” says Roger M. Swanson, a vice president for USA Group Noel-Levitz, an enrollment-consulting company based in Iowa City. “When they come to the advising center, they’ve got many questions they want answered.”
Five years ago, Richland’s orientation and registration programs were anything but successful. Full-time academic advisers were stretched thin from having to run orientations and staff cubicles in the advising center.
“When the advising center got busy, we would really need advisers to be in there, but they’d have to run off and conduct orientation sessions,” says Donna R. Walker, Richland’s director of enrollment services. At those sessions, hundreds of Richland students failed to show up. The few students who did attend usually sat with their eyes glazed over, staring out the window at ducks quacking on the lake in the center of Richland’s campus.
“It was too much information that wasn’t immediately applicable to ask students to digest in two hours,” Ms. Walker says. “We had to do something that wouldn’t put them to sleep.”
Enter the orientation on CD-ROM. It allows students to orient themselves whenever they want. If students can’t remember where to park or how to use the library, they can always get the help they need on the CD-ROM, year-round. Along with nuts-and-bolts material like procedures to drop or add courses, the CD-ROM provides Web links for intramural sports, campus activities, and clubs. About 60 percent of Richland students own computers, and the college provides more than 100 terminals on its campus for those who don’t.
“Putting the orientation on CD-ROM is not only rare at community colleges, it’s brilliant,” says Mr. Raisman, the consultant.
For about three-fourths of Richland’s incoming students, watching the CD-ROM is mandatory because they failed a portion of -- or did not take -- the Texas Academic Skills Program (TASP) test. All Texas students must take the examination to enter a public college, but if they fail a portion of it, they can attend college and take remedial courses. At Richland, about 3,000 a year take the TASP test, viewing the orientation on a big screen in the testing center minutes before the exam begins. “That way, we know we’ve got a captive audience,” Ms. Walker says.
When she arrived, in 1995, Ms. Walker restructured how the college uses professors who both teach and provide counseling. Under the old system, students would visit professors’ offices for advising. But many faculty members, some holding contracts for up to 240 hours of advising time per year, earned fees for hours in which they never saw students. They were paid whether students showed up or not. Now each faculty member is limited to 120 hours of advising time per year. When students need help, they meet with advisers in the advising center, not in professors’ offices.
The changes made it unnecessary for students -- who all commute -- to scramble in search of professors’ offices. When students arrive at the advising center, they meet with the first available adviser, whether that person is a professor or a full-time counselor. The overall changes have saved the college more than $25,000 a year since 1996, Ms. Walker says.
Another component of Richland’s orientation and advising programs is drop-in advising, a year-round office staffed by full-time advisers and open 10 hours a day. There’s also an advising manual online that allows students to juxtapose Richland’s course listings and requirements with those of all public universities in the state. Using the manual, students can map out four years of education rather than just two.
Then there’s what Richland calls “intrusive advising,” in which advisers ask students probing and sometimes-personal questions to get a complete picture of their background, family situation, past successes and failures, and goals.
While it’s difficult to determine exactly how many students and how much money Richland lost because of shabby advising and orientation, it’s clear that in Texas the deficiencies can be costly. Over the last decade, Richland and the Dallas Community College District, to which it belongs, were each fined $250,000, in separate incidents, for advising errors. State auditors found that Richland officials had allowed a student to drop a remedial course that, under state law, he was supposed to stay in because he had failed a portion of the TASP test.
To prevent similar problems, Richland also has new computer software that alerts advisers if they enroll students in courses that would be barred by the TASP rules.
While making good use of technology, the college is wary of losing the personal touch. But all of Richland’s one-on-one services make exceptional demands on the staff.
Greg Walker, Richland’s director of advising and no relation to Donna Walker, says the college desperately needs to add advisers to the staff of 70, which includes the 20 faculty members who work there part-time. Students have complained about having to wait in line for as long as two hours just to see an adviser. Other students have been so perturbed at waiting that they ambushed advisers in the bathrooms.
Lorrie D. Anderson, a career-planning specialist at Richland, says one determined woman fired registration questions at her while they each occupied their respective stalls.
Outside of a few complaints about long lines, Richland students have positive views of the system, particularly about the availability of the 20 professors.
“It makes a difference seeing a professor in there,” says Ms. O’Hart, the sophomore business major who transferred to Richland a year ago. “At bigger schools, I felt like the professors never even really got to know my name.” The professors -- who are paid $25 an hour for advising work, in addition to their wages for teaching -- are equally excited about the arrangement.
“It would be good if most faculty could do this because you really get to know the background of the students and understand who they are,” says David Shorow, a professor of economics who has worked at the advising center for four years.
Sid Chapman, a philosophy professor and five-year veteran of the advising center, says the work gives him intimate contact with students that he might never have in the classroom.
“It doesn’t mean we cut them any slack if they end up taking our classes, but we now might know why they’ll come to class sleepy sometimes,” Mr. Chapman says.
He’s also gained a greater appreciation of what the full-time advisers face. “As faculty members, we would sometimes ask, ‘Who was the idiot who assigned this student to my class?’” he says. “But now, some of those ‘idiots’ are us.”
Richland gives some students the option to register themselves on computers in the advising center, with no input from advisers. To earn that privilege, students must pass all basic assessment tests, and have at least a 2.25 grade-point average. Only about a third of students use the “cruise” method, as the college calls it.
Imran Shahdad, a first-year student who works full-time as a computer technician in Dallas, says he appreciates the freedom. “I figured I know myself and what I want to do better than a counselor would,” he says.
Chris Dellinges, a freshman who had high-enough SAT scores to be exempt from watching the CD-ROM, says he ignored orientation, came to the campus two weeks before classes started, and found his way around with friends from his high school. “We just kind of figured everything out,” he says. But when he went to register, the advising process helped.
“They asked me a lot about what I did in high school and what classes I liked,” he says. “I feel like I’m pretty well established now.”
Other students who ignore orientation material aren’t as lucky. “It took me a while to figure out how to use the library and where to get books if one bookstore was sold out,” says George Teh, a second-year freshman majoring in computer programming. “Last year, I didn’t get my books until three weeks after class started.”
When told about the new orientation CD-ROM, Mr. Teh says, “A CD-ROM for orientation? That’s cool. Where is it? I’d want to watch that.”
Because the CD-ROM is new, the college has not yet measured its effectiveness, or its impact on retention and transfer rates.
Fonda Vera, assistant dean of planning and research, says the college lacks data showing how the old system directly affected those rates. But in the spring of 1996, Richland surveyed 680 students on their satisfaction with the old orientation process. Half of the respondents to the five-question survey felt the orientation was helpful, 25 percent did not, and 25 percent had no opinion. A year later, the college surveyed students who had been enrolled at Richland in 1995-96 and 1996-97, to ensure that they had experienced both the old and the new processes. Of the 590 respondents to that 18-question survey, 95 percent rated the new system as “good” or “very good,” 83 percent preferred the new over the old, and 82 percent reported no registration problems. In another survey, in the spring of 1998, advising again received high ratings. Richland will continue to survey students about the new system, and track its effect on their progress.
“We will look at retention rates comparing students who participated in orientation and those who didn’t,” Ms. Vera says.
Students who are exempt from viewing the CD-ROM tend to be better prepared and to already have passed the TASP test. Students who have to watch the electronic orientation are those who struggled with the test, but when it comes to retention rates, Ms. Vera says: “We think that the new orientation will help level the playing field for those students who need extra information and support.”
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