[Read the rest of this article...]
Why is it so important to foster resiliency in ourselves, our colleagues, and our students? It’s critical that we have the skills to learn from our failures, because to fail is an inevitable part of the human existence. In order to thrive and to become our best selves, we must learn how to engage with failure in a healthy and constructive way.
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.
In an era of accountability for students and higher education institutions, it is critical for advisors to consider creative strategies to cultivate meaningful partnerships with faculty colleagues while maintaining a focus on student success, engagement, retention, and graduation. Advisors have a responsibility to provide students with academic guidance but to also collaborate with faculty to promote engagement in high-impact practices that provide the holistic and deep learning opportunities that characterize transformational education.
Whether a student is attending a community college, a private liberal arts college, or anything in between, the inclusion of career competency or soft skill development into conversations with undecided students is important because it sets students up to apply, transfer, and integrate various aspects of their experiences.
Only a handful of institutional-level degree completion programs currently exist responding to senior attrition. Recognizing the societal and institutional value of such initiatives, a few universities have established their own institutional programs to help students who stopped out of school to return and graduate. In this article, four programs are discussed and compared.
