Could we not, if we really wanted to, "reinvent" college? Could we create a completely new model that more efficiently deployed the resources presently allocated to what students really need and want?
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NACADA’s new partnership with Complete College America strongly demonstrates the centrality of academic advising to college completion and affordability. This article presents numerous ways advisors can boost affordability for their students, including strategies which facilitate timely degree completion and methods for serving as advocates for affordability-related programs, services, and even campus mindset.
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.
The notion of peer mentoring for Indigenous students has captured all aspects of the author’s life, inspiring passion for development of a thriving and positive student community where students do not have to feel like just a student number, but a member of the community.
Over the past 10 years at the University of Hawai‘i’s Mānoa Advising Center (MAC), a number of small but significant changes have been made in the way that mandatory advising is offered—namely in format and tone—that have had a big impact in helping advisors to more efficiently and proactively assist their students.
Academic advisors promote student development through providing readily accessible information and guidance to students and by helping them feel stimulated and challenged as they work toward meeting their academic goals. Academic advisors can also help students develop in other ways outside of a traditional advising appointment.
One exploratory advising office’s success in mandatory advising can be attributed to allowing students choices to fulfill advising and sending multiple reminders to facilitate the flow of students throughout the semester. This is their story, growing from basic survival to streamlined efficiency, cultivated by nearly ten years of experiences and lessons learned.
