As colleges face a growing list of incentives to boost retention and graduation rates, and help students find jobs, many are overhauling their academic-advising operations.
Guiding students to majors that suit them—and giving sound advice that helps set them on a firm path to graduation and beyond—can be critical, campus leaders believe, in improving metrics that have always been important but now, too, increasingly affect institutional revenue.
Fourteen states now use student outcomes to make at least a portion of appropriations to public colleges, with several more considering similar policies. Meanwhile, President Obama has proposed tying federal aid to student and college performance. The White House’s College Scorecard, an online tool for students and their families, already evaluates institutions using, among other indicators, graduation rates and employment outcomes.
As a result, many colleges are taking a more deliberate approach to advising. Administrators hoping to revamp those services, however, often find that there isn’t one model guaranteed to be effective. They must decide whether faculty members will advise students, or professional advisers, or both. They have to get creative in attracting students to advising centers. And once they get students in the door, colleges need to offer new guidance on familiar questions about majors and job prospects.
Part of the challenge is getting students to see advisers as more than they have long been perceived: as course-registration tools, says Charlie L. Nutt, executive director of the National Academic Advising Association, or Nacada. “You’ve got to do that from Day 1 with your freshmen every single year,” he says.
Yet as institutions pay more attention to advising, says Marc Lowenstein, a retired administrator who has followed some of the recent developments warily, they may be looking at it through the wrong lens. Academic advisers, he says, should focus on what’s best for each student. They shouldn’t feel pressured to move students through courses and toward graduation as quickly as possible.
“If we get told in advising that our job is to improve degree completion, we are not going to have an opportunity to focus on learning,” says Mr. Lowenstein, a longtime academic-affairs official at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey and a fixture at the annual Nacada conference. “We’re going to be back to being clerks, and our job is just going to be to improve numbers for the institution.”
As student performance affects more colleges’ bottom lines, though, Mr. Lowenstein acknowledges that it may be difficult to persuade others of his argument.
And while good advising can help colleges keep students engaged, enrolled, and on track to graduate, administrators shouldn’t view it as the only way to better student outcomes, says Mr. Nutt.
“There is no silver bullet,” he says. “Student retention is based on improving the entire undergraduate experience.”
A University in Transition
At Marymount University, Eric Baldwin calls his office a “triage center.” The academic adviser tends to a steady stream of students. As they stop by—some with appointments, some unannounced—they pepper him with questions: What should I take next semester? Where can I find an internship? Should I take classes over the summer?
Mr. Baldwin is Marymount’s first professional adviser. Before he came to the campus, in Arlington, Va., in 2012, faculty members had handled all of the university’s advising. Concerned about retention, however, and having found through a survey that some students were unhappy with advising, campus officials decided to try a new approach: placing a professional adviser in the School of Business Administration, the largest undergraduate college.
Now in his second year as an academic adviser, Mr. Baldwin, a former dean of students at Queens University of Charlotte, has become an integral part of the business school. Its latest freshman-to-sophomore retention rate was six percentage points higher than the universitywide rate, according to a Marymount spokeswoman.
Mr. Baldwin challenges students’ assumptions about different majors, he says, like that getting a business degree is the only way to get hired after graduation, and tries to help them find fields or concentrations that match their passions. Sometimes, he says, the alignment just isn’t there. In those cases, he’s honest: The business school, he tells some students, may not be right for you.
“It’s connecting the student and who they are to what they’re doing,” Mr. Baldwin says of the process. “That means having a real relationship with the student.” As described by his dean, Mr. Baldwin’s job is to put students on the right path. But institutions like Marymount are starting to see that helping students find the right major also keeps them enrolled.
Marymount plans to hire two more professional advisers next summer to work with students in its other colleges. Like Mr. Baldwin, they will advise mostly freshmen; faculty members, meanwhile, will continue to advise sophomores, juniors, and seniors in their respective departments.
Many faculty members at Marymount enjoy serving as advisers to their students, says Carolyn Oxenford, a professor of psychology and executive director of the university’s Center for Teaching and Learning. But many tell her they don’t have enough time to do so effectively, and some have found it difficult to counsel students looking for direction.
“We don’t want to lose touch with this completely,” she recalls many faculty members telling her. “We just need help.”
While professors are well suited to guiding students in their fields, helping a struggling student find the right academic path calls for skills faculty members might not possess, says Mr. Nutt, of the advising association. Marymount’s transition to a hybrid model that uses both professionals and faculty members is increasingly common: 60 percent of colleges used such an approach in 2011, according to a Nacada survey.
Ana Lobaton, a senior at Marymount, says her faculty advisers were too busy to see her on a regular basis. When they did meet, she says, their conversation usually did not range beyond course registration.
Ms. Lobaton’s faculty adviser started teaching graduate students last year and was unable to continue their meetings, so she was assigned to Mr. Baldwin instead. After starting a business degree with a focus in accounting, then switching to international business, Ms. Lobaton is now finishing with a concentration in sports management.
Her decision, she says, was sparked by “engaging” conversations with Mr. Baldwin. He asked her tough questions that other advisers hadn’t: Do you like the classes you’re taking? Where do you see yourself going with this major? What do you see yourself doing?
“He really made me think about what I wanted to do,” she says. “He sat me down and asked me so many questions. Once we realized that business and sports can go together, that was a great fit.”
In the Door
After several days of scrolling through emails that advisers at the University of Southern Maine had sent students, Rodney Mondor stood before a staff meeting and held up his iPhone. “If your email does not fit on this screen,” he said, “it’s too long.”
That was two years ago. Mr. Mondor, student-success coordinator at Southern Maine, was trying to attract more students to the new Student Success Centers on the university’s three campuses. Part of that strategy, he says, was shortening emails so students could read them quickly on their smartphones. These days, the success centers are hubs of activity, where students can go if they need help with classes, scheduling, or career planning.
Getting students in the door to see an adviser can be important: A recent report by ACT, the admissions-test company, found that one-third of collegebound students in 2013 went on to choose majors that were a “poor fit” for their interests.
Some institutions are hoping to set students on track from the moment they arrive on campus.
At John Carroll University, a Jesuit institution outside Cleveland, officials are trying a new, more intensive advising program this year that aims to help students answer a vital question, says Maryclaire Moroney, associate dean for academic advising there: “Where do the world’s needs meet your joys?”
In the university’s “cohort advising” pilot program, all first-year students choose one of five subject groupings: humanities and social sciences; science, technology, engineering, math, and health professions; business; education; or “undecided and exploring.” Each student is then paired with a faculty adviser who helps him or her draft a four-year academic plan—before course registration in the fall. In the spring, students review their academic plan again with their advisers.
In Tennessee, where state funding for public colleges is based entirely on student outcomes, one of the largest public institutions, Middle Tennessee State University, is trying something similar. Students who have not yet declared a major can join groups organized by major interests, such as sciences and the arts. The students take courses with others in their group, and from there, advisers help them understand specific degree options.
Even if students begin college unsure of their major, most have a general idea of what they’re interested in, says Mike Boyle, interim vice provost for student success. The new model lets advisers help students decide on a major earlier.
“We don’t want to force a major on anyone,” says Mr. Boyle. But if students are undecided, he says, it’s the adviser’s job to make sure they understand what their options are.
“Student success is the focus,” he says. “But if you do that right, it’s going to improve graduation, which is going to increase your funding.”
