I recently returned from a Student Services conference where I noticed a trend and I'm not sure what to make of it. In recent years, it seems like there has been a movement toward "Professional Advisers." Flyover State U even offers a Master's Degree in Advising. Not Counseling, mind you - Advising. These are non-faculty positions that are responsible for all academic advising within a major or college. One nearby university in particular created eight new positions for this role last year. This trend is not "new" at community colleges that I'm familiar with. Faculty at those community colleges abdicated advising a number of years ago and I can trace that sector's movement to a particular event. My conundrum is this: At my current institution, there is a push for increased academic advising by faculty, which seems counter to my recent observations.
Q: Is my observed sample size (state/regional) too small to make the assumption that my school is moving "backward"? How is academic advising handled on your campus? Are professional advisers the "new norm?" Taking it to another level, what was your academic advising experience like? In a nutshell, mine was, "Here's a degree plan. Check off the courses. When you're done, apply for graduation." Apparently that's too complicated nowadays.
- Sawyer in Student Services
My advisor is a MS Ed. I think even though he sits in the ECE building. For some strange reason he puts M Ed. after his name.
ReplyDeleteIn 4 years, I can count the interactions with him on one hand. My univ. also has an online system that will show you your degree requirements along with which you've fulfilled and which you haven't. Pretty "self serve".
Our undergrads have an "advising center" where they go for their gen ed stuff, but after that I'm pretty sure they're assigned a faculty member in their major as an adviser. The grad students in my department--MA and PhD alike--all share an adviser.
ReplyDeleteOn a side note, is it supposed to be spelled "advisor" or "adviser"? I like advisor, but my spell-check doesn't. It looks more, I guess, academic to me.
I use advisor, despite the red squiggle. I don't know where I first saw it, but it stuck.
DeleteIn my system (which is part of a massive Uni system), faculty are expected to do advising. I think I have 15 or 20 advisees, but they are not required to see me to register for classes, so I usually only meet with 3 or 4 of those listed so helpfully for me by our PeopleSoft system. I'm "encouraged" to contact all of the little darlings by email to tell them to meet with me, but the helpful PeopleSoft system is set up so that I have to do it one at a time--I can't just check all the names and send out a general "Hey, Hi There I'm Your Advisor" message. As SS pointed out above, the system is self-serve for the most part--students check midterm grades and degree progress on their own. The only ones I see for advising are the ones who either (a) have me as a professor and just want to come by for a chat or (b) require a tremendous amount of handholding (and oddly enough, those are few).
ReplyDeleteMy advising of undergrads is limited to honors students and those who self-select. The rest is done by a huge cadre of people I've never met.
ReplyDeleteWe've used professional advisors for a couple of years. They only handle the freshmen students. They take some of the burden off faculty by fixing students' course conflicts. Advisors have personal skills and time to devote towards contacting students who are in academic trouble. Although the students don't get to interact with an adivsor in their discipline, they get advisors who have more time to devote to them. If a student asks a question about summer internships or things beyond class schedules, the professional advisors send the kid over to see us. After the freshman year, all students have faculty advisors.
ReplyDeleteI have about 60 "advisees." I routinely receive an email from them telling me that I was assigned as their advisor. (adviser?) I see them once, maybe twice. A few have the notion that I am also the financial aid counselor, the transfer counselor and the registrar.
ReplyDeleteOf course, I see these students and these email at the busy busy start of the term.
I don't advise aas much as teach thme how to read a transcript.
I am at a small professional school. Faculty can "volunteer" some additional time for our formalized first year advising. We have a dedicated center (but geographically wayyy off center) where we all meet. The expectation is that any first year advisor be able to advise any student. So we have to know a whole zoo's worth of rodent-themed majors. First year students cannot do things like pre-reg, add/drop, withdraw from a course, change major, et al. without an advisor's signature. The signature therefore requires a visit and a discussion. There is a modest stipend that just barely covers the increased alcohol requirements.
ReplyDeleteupper division advising is supposed to be the 1-on-1 office visit, but has been largely replaced by the web-based system bypassing my input entirely (in some cases right up until its time to certify for graduation).
Does this "first year students cannot" include everything down to gen eds? For ECE prefix classes, for whatever reason, no matter if you're a senior or freshman you have to get the advisor's signature. It's just a formality though. I'd email him what I wanted and he'd add me no questions asked.
DeleteStill don't know why we have to go through the motions of "talking to the advisor" just to add a class. It's not like there's some secret recipe that you have to follow to get your degree that only the advisor knows about. Even the degree candidacy signature I was in and out in under 5 minutes.
The requirement for the signature applies to all courses. I was not around for the establishment of this center or its policies, so I could only offer speculations about its motives. In effect, we prevent clueless students from making mistakes like dropping an essential course and delaying their graduation by a semester or full year. There are a great many students who manage their academic progression entirely without supervision from the faculty. The clueless students are in the minority.
DeleteAlso, for some students, it is the only time they actually talk to a professor. ( Or at least, this is the case at my large anonymous CC.) And this is key when down the road, the student needs a reference letter from a professor. So, at least, there is one person who knows them and their academic work.
DeleteAdvising at my school sucks rocks. We're a performing arts college. Nearly all of our faculty are professional performing artists who teach with varying degrees of reluctance, rather than people who have any emotional or professional investment in teaching. All of the students are assigned advisors from among these faculty members, but there's no institutional or administrative incentive for the faculty members to actually put any effort into advising. It's a performance-apprenticeship model, basically, rather than an academic model, which would be fine except we are still actually a college.
ReplyDeleteYou can perhaps tell that I have All The Feelings about this subject.
Anyways, my dream is that someday my school will create a full-time academic advisor position. This person would be jointly associated with the offices of Academic Affairs and Student Life--handling academic advising that wasn't being done by faculty members, but also helping students with things like time management and organizational planning and all the things you need if the four years of college are going to be a useful transition into functional adulthood.
Of course, if they did create such a job, they would probably not give it to me, a financial aid officer with 10+ years experience at the school and a lifetime of learning to balance my performing arts activities with the demands of a day job, a social life, and general participation in a larger community.
They would probably give it to a 24-year-old who has never heard of our school, has no background in the performing arts, but has a shiny new Master's Degree in Advising.
Faculty at my small, rural, underfunded community college are, for the most part, the advisors. Students have to see them as the advisors have the key to open the registration module.
ReplyDeleteRight now we are all over the place. The studies show faculty involvement is the key to helping at-risk students, and we're all about at-risk students here at Large Urban Community College. One of the reasons so few students graduate is that until recently, advising was voluntary unless a student was registering for the first semester. That is all changing rapidly. We have a mix of initiatives. We used to have professional counselors do all the advising except on the tech side. Tech students have to have departmental advisers because their degrees and certificates are so specialized and sequenced that they really need someone who knows what's going on in that area.
ReplyDeleteNow we've quit hiring counselors because they're too expensive. Some colleges in our system don't have any. Others still do, but as they retire, die, or leave, they're either not being replaced at all or being replaced by advisers, who need only a BA/BS in something we teach. Those people (counselors and advisers) are still advising our first-year students and anyone on probation. Once a student declares a major or makes it through a year of credits, then he or she ends up in a department getting advised now, even if the student's major is the oh-so-popular-in-CC-land "liberal arts."
The powers that be just sent out something new that's yet another advising model. Leadership has seen it but not the rank and file. It's being unveiled one department at a time. Mine hasn't seen it yet. I shudder to think what it will be.
My own advising experiences were great. The SLAC I attended was so tiny that we pretty much knew all the professors even if we never took a class with them. Even though I knew what my major was going to be, the college's policy was that I couldn't declare it till November. My first adviser was not in English; she was the (and I do mean THE as they had no other) basket weaving proffie. I was pretty motivated and picked up on what I was supposed to do right away as far as reading the catalog, keeping track of my courses, and earning my degree. She handed me off to my departmental adviser that spring. That was a great love affair as I was her easiest advisee. I kept track of all my own progress, mapped out my plan, and would just come in and say, "I want to take X, Y, and Z. This fits here, that fits there, and the other fits as an elective."
It wasn't until I became a proffie myself that I realized how rare that was. Most of the students are just kind of drifting along taking courses, hoping that some day they'll graduate or transfer to State U. I have advised untold numbers of students who have attempted more credits at community college than I have in my BA. We're now being told students need to be be told exactly what to do and we should give them as few options as possible. College used to be a place for self-discovery. Apparently the taxpayers are pissed that Dakota and Madison are taking so long to find themselves on the state's dime, so they would like these students to just declare a major, take the courses, pass them (maybe actually having learned something), and graduate quickly.
On the adviser versus advisor thing, for some reason I recall adviser is the official English spelling, but advisor is as an equally correct alternate. I see advisor far more often than adviser now in US academia.
There are many different models of this, and I doubt there's too much research on which is "best" - or even if there is, I doubt there's much research on why certain models work better than others.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was at a large state uni around a decade ago, we had two tiers of advisers - a professional adviser would advise students until they declared a major, at which point they'd transition to either professional advisers within the department or specific faculty, if they created a personal relationship with said faculty. This enabled faculty to advise students they wanted to advise, while everyone else was in the general pool. I believe faculty advising was generally seen as superior.
At my current, different state uni, there are a handful of professional advisers and FT faculty who together form a sort of advising corps - they split all major advising between them semi-equally, but FT faculty get course buyouts for this (so professional advisers get 4x the workload of the FT folks unless they also teach classes, which a few of them do in combined lecturer/adviser roles). This splits our 1000ish majors between (I think) 6 people.
Being a "professional advisor" for the last 12 years at an ultra-large university, I find it interesting to see how other universities arrange their advising. Our uni is very decentralized, but nearly all advising on ALL levels is done by professional advisors. Many have Bachelor's degrees, but the newer ones (like me) have a M.S. in higher education or counseling. Many of the professional advisors teach 1 credit courses, though I usually teach 6 credit hours (2 sections) of a career development course in the Fall. Our advising load is 150:1, but on our campus it is as high as 1000:1 in some departments. Our professional advisors also cross train and do recruitment tasks, as well as assist students in getting admitted to the university, dealing with various issues, probation counseling, refer them to valuable resources, internships, jobs, etc. In my department, we are also required to serve on a campus-wide policy committee and many serve on the uni advisor committee. You all make it sound like we just point at a plan of study and leave students to their own devices, but in my experience, we do a great deal more for the students, if they let us.
ReplyDeleteI went to a SLAC in the 1980s. I went to my advisor once per semester as required. He asked how I was doing. I said, "fine." I told him I knew I had to take classes X, Y, and Z to graduate. He said, "Yep." I thanked him and left.
ReplyDeleteAnd I am back in school now for another degree to help me break out of adjunct slavery and I can testify that it is incredibly confusing and complicated. I am constantly reading through handbooks and webpages to figure what the F* is going on and what I need to do. Since I am twice the age of everyone else, I am not in the student networks where people exchange information (although I have been told that this is sometimes a good thing, since ridiculous rumors abound). I get sent from one bureaucrat's office hours to the next. I ask "dumb" questions - but ones the people across the desk obviously hear over and over again. Either the internets have fried my brain and I really am dumber than 25 years ago or things really have changed. Probably a bit of both. Sometimes I feel like a snowflake because what I was asking about really is there in black and white three lines from the top on page 15 or at some URL I missed or read-over, eyes a-glaze. Sometimes I really do see pieces of information that flatly contradict each other because the system didn't take my particular situation into account or because some deadline got changed between two manifestations of the same policy and both are still online depending on with path you take to click there. Then I have to go ask. Or send an e-mail. Then the person who gets that e-mail probably comes and posts here about the dumbass student e-mails he gets. Sheesh.
And Eirinn7 - All the people I meet are knowledgeable and friendly. The system is broken, not the people working in it (except maybe some quantitative assessment and monetization goons at the top).
There are also places -- i.e. some for-profits -- where "adviser" = "salesperson," at least as of a few years ago. I don't know whether that might be driving the trend.
ReplyDeleteI know that we have an excellent departmental adviser with a mixed teaching/advising non-TT load (and a grad degree in one of our department's subspecialties, not in advising), but I honestly don't know how the whole system works, except that individual advising of some sort is expected of the TT faculty.
This is a very sore subject with me. I advise 50-70 students. I take advising seriously, and I am thorough and accurate. I find it makes for a better experience for students, and it heads off all kinds of problems on down the line. I have let administrators know that this kind of advising load is unreasonable (if not inhumane). They shrug me off. Self-serve advising is years away.
ReplyDeleteBecause of the sheer numbers, I do advise via email. However, getting students to read their email is another thing. Many contact me and ask what they need to do to advise. Read your email. Your university email, not your YAHOO or GMAIL. The email itself is rather generic... they also have to look at the attached worksheet to see specific recommendations.
I came very close to turning my resignation in yesterday.
At my undergrad SLAC, students are advised by a faculty member in their department, and nearly all faculty members serve as advisors.
ReplyDeleteI was assigned an advisor in a different subfield than I was interested in, so our meetings were just 5 minute confirmations that I was fulfilling my course requirements.
I know some people became very close to their advisors though, especially people who had classes or did research with their advisors.
here's a SLAC that has a nice take on advising. i wish my SLAC had something like this. http://www.beloit.edu/academics/advising/
ReplyDelete