In tough economic times, higher education administrators are obliged to seek cost-saving measures and/or to conduct cost-benefit analyses of programs. Academic advising programs have often been the targets for such reviews. Academic advising administrators, therefore, must be prepared to respond to these challenges before they occur.
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Like many academic advisors, I occasionally receive email messages from former students who are somewhat disillusioned by their first post-graduation jobs and speak with some nostalgia about their alma mater. After all, finding a job, meeting workplace expectations, relocating, seeking new friends, and planting roots are all hard work. This unsettling life transition is the theme of the Broadway musical, Avenue Q (Lopez, Marx, and Whitty, 2003), which was written for the twenties generation finding their way in an uncertain world. Avenue Q can be fictitiously found in the furthest and least expensive borough of New York City.
I profess that the most important job duty of an advising administrator is to hire the right people, because no other function done improperly or poorly will so quickly damage the advising operation and the mission of providing quality advising services to students. Over the twenty plus years that I have been an administrator/manager, both in higher education and private industry, I have observed that the art of hiring the right people is constantly cussed and discussed. One must continually hone hiring skills, especially in light of the ever-changing workforce landscape.
A good advisor is essential when “real life” gets in the way. In graduate school, it is very possible for students to fall through the cracks....Graduate school can be tough. The biggest challenge is finishing.... Discipline and working with others can help graduate students see the light at the end of the tunnel. It can be done. Parents, professors, and society encourage education, yet at the highest echelons of education, some students may find that there is not enough support. Advisors can help students strategize and find the inner strength and the discipline needed to complete what they began.
Baxter Magolda’s (2001) Learning Partnerships Model (LPM) provides a three-principled heuristic for implementing interactive and engaged advising that may help advisors help students who are in need of learning to balance multiple perspectives...Implementation of the LPM with diverse college students, however, requires recognition of cultural differences.
Thanks to a flexible curriculum and customized pedagogy, advisors in first-year seminars have the opportunity to help students shape their academic goals and map out the necessary steps and skills to achieve them.
The student who does not complete their homework and then provides an outrageous excuse to their instructor is one of the most common tropes in popular culture. An excuse is provided, the student shrugs their shoulders, the instructor gives a sideways grimace, and then the audience laughs. Advisors know that, in academics, excuses are a regular occurrence and not as funny as television makes excuses seem.
Everyone grieves, yet when encountering a grieving student, academic advisors may feel helpless. The author suggests tools that can be used can regardless of where the students are along their grief journey.
Implementing a successful outcomes assessment plan, particularly one that assesses learning and performance across campus units, is a big undertaking. The authors consider ten essential, intangible elements of any successful outcomes assessment endeavor.
The author contends that gathering data for outcomes assessment or research does not have to be complicated, mysterious, or difficult.
One of the hardest things advisors face is the notion that they cannot always be the hero. As advisors, we want to help and we want to make things as easy as possible. Yet, there are so many things that are just beyond our control.
In the world of improvisational (improv) comedy, advancing is the process of moving a scene forward. In the world of academic advising where student success is a central narrative, it is imperative that advisors help students advance their own scene.
As a primary point of contact between universities and students, academic advisors are often asked to integrate data-driven tools into their practice but only rarely do the concerns of advisors guide the creation of new approaches to institutional data. By bringing the advising perspective to analyses of student data, new opportunities can be found to support student pathways with helpful information.
During the summer, the staff of Academic and Career Development at IUPUI works closely with other institutional offices to offer two-day orientation programs for incoming first-year students.
In today’s 21st century economy, it is no longer enough for advisors to help students choose a major and craft a course schedule. Advisors need to help students create a step-by-step plan for achieving their long-term goals and preparing for unexpected barriers along the way. Thus, career advising is now an important function of academic advising.
While Erik Erikson's psychosocial theory encompasses the entire lifespan, his eight conflicts can be readily applied to an undergraduate college student's lifespan, offering a unique paradigm through which to view the student-university relationship. Advisors, particularly, play a critical role in helping students overcome each conflict/crisis.
When an advising system redesign is needed, we cannot close the doors while we get it right. Redesign is an activity both creative and constrained; it must equally embrace the ideal and the real.
Research suggests that mental health and academic performance are positively correlated. Advisors are not expected to provide mental health counseling to students, but they would be remiss to ignore the impact of psychological issues and mental health on students’ experience, performance, and success. While treating students for mental health concerns may be beyond advisors’ scope, there are some ways in which they can address the issues.
Enhancing student success, as the purview of academic advisors, is ever-evolving, and recent success has been generated through course management software, an electronic tool that traditionally provides important links between students and their instructors.
