Checking the Box: An Analysis of Student and Faculty Satisfaction and Success
Abstract
Successful advising has shown to be essential to a postsecondary student’s academic integration (Hunter & White 2004; Hunt et al. 2012). Academic advising has the potential to help students find the resources needed to help them become integrated into college both socially and academically by providing students with cultural and academic capital that can help them navigate through college and persist. Research has shown that most academic advising may focus more on short-term goals like “what classes a student should enroll in the next term, and not as much with holistic issues, like preparing a student for major declaration or providing career counseling” (DeLaRosby 2015: 150). Students often don’t see advisors as helpful while advisors think they are efficiently advising students (Allen & Smith 2008). In this study, we will complete a case study analysis of the centralized advising model at one public liberal arts university. We will conduct an analytical case study that includes secondary data, survey, and in-person interviews. We expect to find that academic advisors feel they are playing more of a beneficial role to student success than students believe and that students in cohorts ([e.g.]education and nursing) may have higher levels of satisfaction with advisors due to the rigorous program, class size, and more focused course tracks. Results from the data are important because students have a lack of awareness of how they should be successfully advised. They are described as uninformed consumers in the sense that "they may be satisfied with an advising relationship that does little or nothing to advance the goals of higher education as articulated by the institution” (Creamer & Scott 2000, 8). Effective academic advising can align the goals of the student with the goals of the advisor providing a more successful advising experience, thus increasing student integration and retention.
Checking the Box: An Analysis of Student and Faculty Satisfaction and Success
Successful advising has shown to be essential to a postsecondary student’s academic integration (Hunter & White 2004; Hunt et al. 2012). Academic advising has the potential to help students find the resources needed to help them become integrated into college both socially and academically by providing students with cultural and academic capital that can help them navigate through college and persist. Research has shown that most academic advising may focus more on short-term goals like “what classes a student should enroll in the next term, and not as much with holistic issues, like preparing a student for major declaration or providing career counseling” (DeLaRosby 2015: 150). Students often don’t see advisors as helpful while advisors think they are efficiently advising students (Allen & Smith 2008). In this study, we will complete a case study analysis of the centralized advising model at one public liberal arts university. We will conduct an analytical case study that includes secondary data, survey, and in-person interviews. We expect to find that academic advisors feel they are playing more of a beneficial role to student success than students believe and that students in cohorts ([e.g.]education and nursing) may have higher levels of satisfaction with advisors due to the rigorous program, class size, and more focused course tracks. Results from the data are important because students have a lack of awareness of how they should be successfully advised. They are described as uninformed consumers in the sense that "they may be satisfied with an advising relationship that does little or nothing to advance the goals of higher education as articulated by the institution” (Creamer & Scott 2000, 8). Effective academic advising can align the goals of the student with the goals of the advisor providing a more successful advising experience, thus increasing student integration and retention.