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The Mentor: An Academic Advising Journal The Challenge for Academic Advisers: We Are Instructors, Not Administrators A “call to arms” opinion piece by Donald N. McComb For many decades, advising was considered to be a collateral duty endured by college faculty as part of their tenured-faculty contracts. The responsibility was not significant enough to influence tenure and advancement considerations (publishing and research being the primary activities of value) and was often assigned as “punishment duty” by department heads. In the modern academic world, academic advising is valued somewhat more highly than in the past, primarily because of its impact on retention numbers and its importance as perceived by the students of our institutions. I believe that our organizations, however, still do not properly respect or support academic advising. Some professionals believe that advising is not adequately supported because administrations feel that inadequate advising helps the institutional bottom line. This occurs when students have to take extra classes after changing career paths and consequently must attend for five rather than four years (a fairly frequent occurrence). Others have voiced that academic advising is seen only as a collateral service, like student life or housing, and gets support only when there are problems. I propose that we are not valued and endorsed in many instances because of our own professional self-image as administrators within the overall academic machine. This image that we present to ourselves and to our institutional colleagues can define our profession and what we do as a “collateral duty.” By viewing ourselves as administrators, we assume a subservient and second-class role within our institutional hierarchy. We become the “extra hands” to take on new projects and institutional initiatives, giving even less time to our primary role and function. We devalue the role of academic advising in the way many of us treat it—giving fifteen-minute appointments and using a curriculum model and academic record to simply cross off the requirements met and present a list of remaining requirements for the next pre-registration period. Many of our institutions do not even require students to meet with an adviser prior to registering, especially as we transition to online processes. There is so much more to true academic advising, and it is up to us to educate our colleagues. We need to address not only the impact that proper advising has on the educational foundation of our students but its enhanced financial implications for the institution as well. I contend that academic advisers are, in fact, instructors in our institutions and are just as important as the faculty within their respective departments. Advisers, in the best sense of the profession, are life process teachers who affect students and their futures not only in their professional fields but also in their personal and social lives. Tenured faculty generally teach three to four classes per semester, which equates to about fourteen hours of classroom instruction per week (add some additional time for office work). Advisers generally see at least five or six students per day minimum, which translates to at least twenty-five to thirty hours of instruction per week. Advising, when done correctly, has the ultimate goal of “putting ourselves out of a job” with our students by the time they become seniors in our institutions. By that point, they should be able to advise themselves and check in to review their decisions with us. A good adviser properly supported by his or her institution should be teaching students requirements identification, alternative-approach strategies, career-skill identification, self-evaluation, process mapping, decision-tree analysis or force-field decision making, negotiation skills, and power-structure analysis. I have defined these subject areas in terms of general business and management terminology to help readers relate to them. These skills transcend any professional or business association and affect all of a student's life choices. Through our advisees' first year, we should meet with each of them at least six to eight times to review their choices up to that point and establish a framework for information gathering plus a timeline for future decisions. Discussions should cover career-skill identification (knowledge base about the careers they have chosen), self-evaluation (how those career choices fit within individual personalities and life goals), requirements identification (what they will have to do and possibly give up to be successful in certain career fields), and process mapping (what are the steps, timelines, and critical points leading to specific goals). Meetings during the second year would be only slightly fewer in number and include not only a review of those first-year activities but a decision analysis of progress to date (does anything need to change?) and on-going compatibility analysis (is this still the right choice for you?). The second year would also include alternative-approach strategies to the career goal, fall-back options, and power-structure analysis (both institutional and corporate) to understand where negotiation points are. Third year would focus on refining career fields and specialization areas, reviewing techniques used to reach this point, and broadening their applications to other life arenas. The fourth year is about mentoring—the students take the lead in reviewing where they are, what courses they still need to take, and any negotiations they need to make in pursuing a particular sub-specialization that interests them. By federal law—Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)—we treat students as adults once they enter our institutions, and they are expected to make their own decisions and choices with advisers available to advise and guide them. Most students rarely comprehend the full impact of their choices of career path or even institutional selection when they arrive. They have never been taught how to analyze a decision process, gather information and evaluate the choices, and weigh the possible outcomes. They have had little guidance at the high school level (other than college track and Peterson's guide to help select a college), because most high school guidance counselors' time is used primarily to resolve problems with difficult students, interact with parents, and carry out lunchroom duty. Yet these students are committing one-fourth of their lives to date, as well as financial resources that may keep them in debt for the next fifteen or more years. As advisers, we hear “my best friend is going here so we want to room together” and “my parents thought this was the best profession for me to get into” as students' prime motivators for attending our institutions. We are expected to help them validate their choices, follow the convoluted academic requirements for each major, and successfully advance on the track to graduation. I think it is amazing how much we undervalue our skills as professionals, rather than recognize that we are truly magicians! While our institutions still do not value our contributions as much as I believe they should, they have consistently made the role of an academic adviser harder. These difficulties increase because of the administrative regulations and curriculum modifications imposed over the years. Most institutions now place a first-year student in an undeclared or non-matriculated status for the first year or two. These students develop expectations about courses they must take for their majors by talking to upperclassmen or viewing online curriculum models; but this can be inaccurate, because students are not locked into a curriculum model until they are accepted into the major. This delay seemed to evolve in institutions during the early 1990s, not for academic reasons but to “enhance” the organization's statistics (completion rates are higher because non-major or pre-major students are not counted in the reported statistics; ergo, drop rates are lower). Although it is just a classification change on paper, it creates confusion and apprehension in the student. With the proliferation of community colleges and articulation agreements with four-year institutions, our four-year curricula have suddenly been suborned to accept the designs of community colleges. This now gives us two categories of students— those who meet our internal design and those who meet the “feeder” agreements—consequently creating different sets of requirements for students within the same majors (and the students talk among themselves about the differences). Transfer credits have easily doubled in volume during the last decade, requiring significant evaluation of course compatibility, acceptance, and evaluation to help students identify “weak points” in their outside preparation (so they may self-instruct) to meet in-house expectations for the next level. There are significant financial rewards for institutions that properly advise and work with their students, and there are academic performance rewards that other teachers in the institution (departmental and core faculty) may reap. Involved with adult education over the years, I once received a great compliment from a full-time departmental faculty member whom I had convinced to teach a course that had a mix of adult students and traditional-age students. He felt it was enriching to have a class composed of traditional students, along with people already working in the field. The mix evoked real-life case studies and examples from direct observers that he felt strengthened the understanding and application of what he was teaching. When you have students in your class who have actually researched the profession and are committed to that field, they, by default, become committed to learning the course work that is foundational in the field. Motivated students mean a motivated and involved class, which means a challenged and interested faculty. Students who graduate from our institutions feeling both suited to their fields and properly prepared for them are more successful in their professional lives. If we do a better job in giving them an education and foundation of knowledge in fields to which they are committed, then their satisfaction with our institutions will increase substantially. This equates not only to verbal support and recommendations for the institution, but also translates to alumni dollar support that we know is of increasing organizational importance. A few decades ago, when I worked at Penn State, a staffer from the alumni office commented that the larger and more consistent donors were alumni who had gone on to have happy and successful careers in fields they had studied at Old State. So better advising to validate career paths coupled with students who more clearly understand career requirements and their relationship to education translate into students more involved and committed to their majors. This commitment should lead to greater success in their careers, as well as greater satisfaction with the preparation our institutions afford them. Satisfaction and appreciation easily translate into alumni giving. Without redefining our role and professional responsibility to our institutional colleagues, we will never break the image mold we have been assigned by decision makers at our institutions. We need funded, professional research to analyze the different patterns of advising in use and to document what we as professionals hypothesize is the value of advising—as life process instructors, rather than checklist administrators. About the Author Donald N. McComb is the former coordinator of academic advising, Cabrini College, Radnor, PA; director of adult and off-campus programs, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA; and assistant academic dean, Spring Garden College, Chestnut Hill, PA. He can be reached at seanmccomb@juno.com. Published in The Mentor on November 30, 2007, by Penn State's Division of Undergraduate Studies Available online at www.psu.edu/dus/mentor/ Privacy and Legal Statements | Copyright | © The Pennsylvania State University | All rights reserved | |