As students, we all know that advisement is important to our success. A knowledgeable, helpful adviser is going to make it easier to get through each semester. A disorganized adviser is going to make it difficult to form a plan or to ask any questions. That being said, we as students need our advisers to have a manageable workload, so they can give us quality advice.
Recently, ETSU has decided to restructure the advisement programs in the future and partnered with an organization called Educational Advisory Board to create a diagnostic plan for future changes. Along with this diagnostic report, ETSU has created an Undergraduate Advising Implementation Task Force to review the plan and give students opportunities to provide their feedback on the current method and the possible plan for the future.
Although I personally had a positive experience when I was advised in the Academic Resource Center (ARC), I know that for many others, the current system is flawed, which is why I was happy when I heard restructuring was planned. However, after reading through the EAB’s report, I was not happy with what I saw, and I think the plan takes advisement in the opposite direction it should be going.
One of the big changes they want to implement is to adjust how students are advised. Typically, once students reach 60 credit hours, they move from their professional adviser to their faculty adviser. With this new system, faculty advisers would be renamed “faculty mentors,” and they could offer students career advice, but they will no longer be required to give students academic counseling. Students would rely on their professional advisers, which are renamed Student Success Specialists under the new plan, for academic counseling through their entire undergraduate career.
Now this doesn’t necessarily sound like a bad idea in theory, as I’ve also seen and heard of faculty advisers’ shortcomings when it comes to academic advisement. However, the plan doesn’t include the funding to hire additional professional advisers.
In turn, the adviser to student ratio would go up to 1:312, according to their projections on page 14 of the report. That means these advisers will be even more overworked than they already are. ETSU needs to decrease the adviser to student ratio, not make it bigger than it ever was. The new plan would make the lives of both students and advisers harder. In order for the plan to be successful, they need to come up with the funding to hire more professional advisers.
I encourage anyone who has comments with the system or the possible plan for the future to share their thoughts with their department’s professional adviser or contact the co-chairs of the Task Force, Karen Hirst and Jeff Howard.
