At the NACADA Annual Conference in St. Louis this past October, the Board of Directors asked members to participate in a series of discussions on various topics during our Town Hall event. Over the next year, we as a board will be utilizing this information to inform our work. We are also working on plans to share the information, answer questions, and address concerns.
[Read the rest of this article...]
NACADA: The Global Community for Academic Advising is joining with the John N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Undergraduate Education (Gardner Institute) to create and offer the Excellence in Academic Advising (EAA) process. EAA is a comprehensive advising strategic planning process that has the potential to change and affirm the role and influence of academic advising in higher education.
Students often lack the motivation to participate in the democratic process because they feel that they cannot make a difference. Academic advisors can provide knowledge and skills necessary for students to become politically engaged citizens.
Each year the question of whether or not to implement mandatory advising seems to surface across a variety of venues and mailing lists. In addressing this question, campuses must be able to answer other questions about how they meet student needs. When campuses pose an essential outcomes-based question, they strengthen their ability to conceive the most integrative and holistic solutions for ensuring that students can achieve desired advising outcomes.
This article aims to show that when communication improves across silos, or separate entities on college campuses that rarely interact, it might increase empathy for the student-athletes and facilitate simple programmatic changes that could increase the likelihood of student-athletes successfully completing the degree programs that they would ideally like to pursue.
The HLC Academy for Student Persistence and Completion at Marshall University created the MU EDGE mentoring program to pair experienced faculty mentors with incoming “murky middle” freshmen to find out what Marshall can do to better retain this under-served population through more intrusive advising.
Staff at WKU Owensboro have found success by strategically using all resources available rather than searching for a single silver bullet solution to challenges. This arsenal approach allows student engagement in a distinctive way from the beginning of their experiences with WKU in the areas of recruitment and pre-admission advising, through retention and graduation, and beyond as community members.
This article highlights existing concepts on how to develop an advising center at the university level while describing the process one specific college took to advising center creation, giving the reader examples of how suggestions from the literature can be implemented.
Although the blended position is known by various names in different institutions, there is one underlying factor: the incumbents do more than academic advising, while building relationships towards student success.
