Advice for advising

The announcement that the Portland State University administration has chosen to bring on 14 new advisers to bolster the current staff this year is a good thing for students, as additional staff to support students is generally quite helpful.

The goal of the hirings is to help improve retention rates by giving students additional support. Not a bad plan considering there are 28,000 students, all of whom need advising. But will bringing on additional staff make advising any easier for students?

As a student who has been to the advising office enough times to know a few of the advisers by name, I have the sneaking suspicion that additional advisers may not be the only thing advising needs.

When I go to advising, I print off my DARS report—for any student who has never had to do this, a DARS report is more or less a summary of your academic history and your progress as a student. Once the adviser has helped me decipher the report, I take as many notes as possible to make sure that in a couple of weeks (when I forget the exchange with the adviser) I can figure out what my next move should be during registration.

It is a complicated process, made even worse if you are a visual learner and have to see a  flowchart or something for the progression to make sense. I feel that the biggest problem facing advising is the confusion associated with planning classes. While hiring additional advisers is by no means a bad thing, perhaps the university should revamp the system. Will the addition of more advising staff make the processes any easier, or will I just have more advisers to talk to when I drop by the office?

When mistakes are made in advising they are not only frustrating and expensive, but also waste a lot of time.

By far the most disheartening thing about advising is when the advisers themselves seem confused or are lacking the information to help make an informed decision. The solution is simply to send students to another adviser in a different department.

While it’s unreasonable to expect every adviser to be an expert on every corner of every major, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for the system we use to be simple enough to understand that our advisers don’t have to spend half of a meeting trying to figure out where students currently stand academically.

So here is an idea to revamp the advising process and make it more streamlined for everyone involved. Consider that while 28,000 students struggle with advising, there are probably around 10 million 12-year-old kids out there playing the computer game World of Warcraft and not struggling in the slightest to figure out complicated advancement structures with thousands of possible outcomes.

Did I just suggest that a university use a videogame as a model to help it organize academic pathways? Why shouldn’t academic advising be that simple to understand?

Consider that if the 12-year-old playing Warcraft wants to get his wizard up to the highest level, he has to follow a certain set of accomplishments to achieve that level. This is very similar to how a business major has to take specific classes to get his bachelor’s. Certain classes go towards certain credits, and thus we register for classes to try and follow the progression.

Yet when the 12-year-old gets stuck, they just look at a little chart that lays out exactly what they need to to be done to get the next level. On the other hand, the 20-year-old business major has to see an adviser and then another adviser specifically for their major to figure out how to grind out the next 12 credits correctly so they don’t waste a whole term accidentally taking classes that will not help with graduation.

Why not make a simple-to-understand progress tree for each certificate, major and minor the university has to offer so students can see exactly what classes they have taken, can take and must take in order to progress? Organization that simple could be the difference between students missing one or two credits needed to graduate, saving them thousands of dollars and months of time.

So while the addition of new advisers to the wonderful PSU advising staff is welcome and will no doubt be helpful to the large student body at PSU, it still remains that the advising process itself could be simplified.