Opinion

I lived with an engineer last year, and while I never envied her late-night sessions solving problem sets or 8 a.m. hikes across campus to a lab on Northside, she and her fellow rocket scientists did hold a distinct advantage: Her undergraduate adviser knew her name.

Not only did she have one adviser — she had two. While I was waiting in line for a lightening round of questions with one of the rarely-spotted advisers from the College of Letters and Science, she enjoyed career advice from her faculty adviser and specialized support from her college’s counselors.

We were both paying the same tuition, but what we got for our money was strikingly different.

This discrepancy in advising distinguishes colleges across campus. While some students are left to fend for themselves when it comes to decoding university graduation requirements, others are assigned a dedicated guide to ferry them through the system.

Advising strategies are not mandated from above — how a college structures student support is a decision left up to the dean in question, according to Cathy Koshland, Vice Provost for Teaching, Learning, Academic Planning and Facilities.

“We are looking at completely different scales and different needs,” Koshland said. “So it is something we left to the discretion of deans and faculty, who know their programs best.”

This means schools like the College of Chemistry feature a “one-stop shop” when it comes to advising, according to Marcin Majda, undergraduate dean of the college. His students meet with one of five staff advisers when they arrive for CalSO and the same adviser stays with the student until graduation.

In a bureaucracy where staff excel at their jobs but cannot point students in the right direction within the broader system, the strategy used in the College of Chemistry ensures a continuity of support and an assurance that answers to students’ questions can all be found in one place.

J. Keith Gilless, dean of the College of Natural Resources, said that his small college has found “the right way to organize”: While all advisers are assigned a specific major, “cross-training” guarantees that anyone can answer a student’s question in an emergency, and everyone is located in the same facility.

Of course, the College of Natural Resources houses 1,800 students, according to Gilless, while the College of Chemistry has 850, according to Majda. These figures are diminutive compared to the size of L&S, which is home to roughly three quarters of all campus undergraduates, according to Tyler Stovall, dean of the undergraduate division of the College of Letters and Science.

While L&S’s two-tiered advising method seems antiquated, Stovall attributes the necessity of this system to the college’s sheer size.

When dealing with such a magnitude of students and major subjects, L&S opts to offer college advising support to freshmen and sophomores and then pass them along to departmental staff once the students have declared. Despite its flaws, some administrators feel this system is the best way to go.

I don’t buy it. Although a college’s advising system depends on its size, I agree with Majda that, from students’ perspective, L&S advising is “intrinsically less personal, more time-consuming, and far more difficult, confusing and cumbersome.”

L&S is inefficent because of its split-level structure and the unven distribution of students to advisers is uneven — although the ratio of students to college and departmental advisers is actually smaller in L&S than in the College of Chemistry. Instead of finding all the answers in one place, L&S kids flit from one office to another. And while advisers may be stellar within their own area of expertise, they often have trouble helping students with issues involving other areas of the university.

So what is the solution? Work is underway on the Student Services Initiative, a proposal to be presented to the Operational Excellence board. Hopefully it will lead to improvements, including a computerized system to facilitate information sharing, according to Koshland.

This is a swell start, but the discrepancies are so egregious that we need more profound changes.

Rather than continuing to impose idiosyncratic case loads and sequestering staff in specialized roles, the L&S advising system should be overhauled and centralized.

Majda’s proposal that advisers should specialize according to major concentrations — in areas like biological sciences, hard sciences, and languages —  strikes me as a good start. Ideally L&S kids would also be assigned faculty advisers, and may even be required to check in, like kids in smaller colleges do.

Better informing students about how to navigate requirements may even cut down on late graduation rates, and will certainly augment efficiency on campus.

Comment Policy

Comments should remain on topic, concerning the article or blog post to which they are connected. Brevity is encouraged. Posting under a pseudonym is discouraged, but permitted. The Daily Cal encourages readers to voice their opinions respectfully in regard to the readers, writers and contributors of The Daily Californian. Comments are not pre-moderated, but may be removed if deemed to be in violation of this policy. Click here to read the full comment policy.

Comments

comments