Pre-health advisers to be laid off in June

The budget cutbacks facing higher education in Oregon will drastically cut funding for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) at Portland State. As a result, undergraduate advisers in many departments around the university are being laid off.

One of the areas that will be experiencing these layoffs is pre-health advising. According to Melissa Leonard, health sciences advising coordinator, the current plan is to lay off all the pre-health advisers on June 1. 

Pre-health advisers have proven to be crucial to student retention and success at Portland State over the years, as over 7,000 Portland State students are currently on the pre-health professional listserv.

These students will be left without advisers, who help them not only figure out what classes to take but also suggest activities in which they should be involved.

Leonard, who will also be laid off, has expressed distress over the prospect of her impending unemployment.

“All advisers received termination letters in December telling us that we are going to be gone in June,” Leonard said.

In addition to their aforementioned functions, advisers also assist in graduate school application process, compiling letters of recommendation for students, and often writing the letters as well.

The competitive nature of most graduate and professional programs for health careers make this service fundamental to student success, Leonard explained.

“Med and dental schools really appreciate how we organize students applications, especially since these schools are so competitive, and having an easily readable application can mean the difference of getting in or not,” Leonard said.

Leonard said the major problem presented by terminating the advising position is the fact that the letters of recommendation that advisers had previously collected and filed would no longer be available to students.

The pre-health program is one of the many that attracts students to Portland State because they can get their prerequisites done before attending a professional program at OHSU, who are close partners with Portland State, or other leading medical schools around the nation.

“We go to conferences and network with deans of medical schools to bring as many advantages as possible to the students we work with,” Leonard said.

Craig Lowrie, a Portland State junior majoring in microbiology, works as the community outreach coordinator for the Pre-Dental Student Organization. He expressed concern over the upcoming layoffs on behalf of the students involved in the group.

“From our prospective, they give us so much help with six to 10 letters of recommendation needed to be compiled on top of discovering resources and contacting schools to see requirement changes,” Lowrie said.

Some students are worried about how they are going to further their careers without the advisers, as health programs are competitive and their link to these programs relies on advisers they have been working with over their entire academic career at Portland State.

Felicia Bautista, a pre-dental student, said that funding to run the pre-health advising resource comes directly from fees collected from those students who utilize the advising office.

With the advisers being laid off, some students are confused about what their fees will go towards next year, if they are required to pay fees at all, with the resource no longer being available.

Bautista expressed some concern about the fees she has paid for the adviser support.

“Where is this money going to go, is it going to cushion someone else’s salary while robbing students of an important resource?” Bautista said.