Giving Compass' Take:

• Academic advisors are uniquely positioned to understand patterns of struggle and success among students, and can, therefore, best recommend system-wide improvements. 

• Who is usually involved in student success efforts? Besides advisors, who has important insights into how to improve school systems? 

• This insight makes it especially concerning that many community colleges have a shortage of academic advisors.

I wasn’t surprised when my first student delayed graduating because a required capstone class was full; perhaps she waited too long to register. But when my fifth and sixth advisees couldn’t get spots and when it happened again the following term, I knew the problem wasn’t the students. There were too few instructors due to a change in budget allocations, yet university policy required capstone class sizes to remain small—issues that were well outside my influence as an academic advisor.

While students can describe the challenges they face as individuals, advisors can describe the barriers to student success they see over and over again. Such insights provide administrators a window into the collective student experience by highlighting recurring issues that indicate a systemic barrier rather than an individual student problem.

Advisors are frequent and comprehensive users of the various systems in the campus technology landscape. Although they most frequently engage with integrated planning and advising services (IPAS), early alert, and student information systems, advisors also help students navigate student-facing technologies and utilize instructional technologies when teaching courses.

Having both frequent conversations with students and an understanding of university policies, advisors can bridge divides to increase success of cross-campus initiatives. When Purdue University wanted to redesign its change of major process, it gathered a team of advisors. They leveraged their empathy for students who switch majors and their understanding of university policy to create an improved process that better serves both students and the institution.

Read the full article on academic advisors and student success efforts by Alex Aljets at EdSurge