Many college students fail to graduate in four years and one of the reasons why is that they often get poor advice from those people who are supposed to guide them.
In today’s Martin Center article, Megan Zogby looks at this problem.
She quotes the executive director of the National Academic Advising Association: “research clearly shows that when a student is more engaged on campus they are more likely to remain enrolled and persist to graduation. Academic advising is the key mechanism, and on many campuses, the only mechanism, through which students have a person they’re connected with.”
Sadly, excellent advising is not a high priority at many colleges and universities. After all, if students stay around longer because they’ve taken unnecessary courses or switched majors, that’s good for the bottom line.
Here’s one example Zogby gives: “An anonymous NC State junior studying biology told the Martin Center that her advisors said she did not need to take a microbiology lab class to get into Physicians Assistant school, so she took microbiology without the lab. But after the semester, a classmate clarified that she needed a lab course for PA school. If her advisors had given her accurate information, she could’ve saved time and done better.”
One university that has improved its advising is Arizona State, which has created a portal to make it easier for students to make the best course choices.
Zogby concludes that this is an incentives problem, writing, “For some colleges, advising problems could be solved by following Arizona State’s tech lead. For others, the problem may be with who advises students, or overloading professors without incentivizing high-quality advising. It may make sense to offer better pay for professors (part-time or tenure-track) who take on advising responsibilities. Some sort of incentive may do the trick in shifting students from poor advisors to better ones, keeping both students and advisors happy.”