Giving Compass' Take:

• Universities are identifying at-risk students and working on solutions to help them graduate, whilst leaving the other percentage of students with less attention and the assumption that they do not need advisory help during college. This approach does not honor their voice or their needs in the changes that affect them. 

• In higher education, (and at the elementary, middle and high school level)  student's voice is once again excluded from the process of decision making.  Why not let the students learn to build coalitions and help make decisions like these in collaboration with the institution?

• Innovation in higher education creates many changes for students and affects them directly.  Yet again, they are not included in the innovation discussions or processes happening around them. 

The field of academic advising has received more attention in the last decade than in the thirty years prior for two primary reasons. The first is that higher education leaders have come to realize that academic advising can serve a powerful role in our new world of “student success.” Second, institutional leaders realistically have much more control of what happens outside the classroom than in, such as controlling campus resources, structures, and policies that are not instructional related.

Now, many institutions are truly asking and programming around what students need to learn through their interactions with academic advising, and then structuring campus approaches, staffing and advising curricula to fully support this learning.

But the new wave of academic advising has also had its pitfalls. For instance, many institutions have spent a great deal in time and resources trying to find a short-term “fix” by identifying a subset of students who need extra help or are what some term “at risk” of not graduating or persisting.

The unfortunate side effect of the quick-fix, metrics-driven method is that some educational leaders shortsightedly approach complex institutional challenges as though they only need to focus on select students, and the remainder of students will somehow successfully self-advise their way through the institution with minimal assistance.

I foresee the next decade of academic advising presenting us with two types of institutions: those that ask these deeper, more holistic questions, and those that don’t, and continue to focus on a student deficiency paradigm and short-term metrics.

Read the full article about the problem with quick fix metrics by Brett McFarlane at EdSurge