Gordon State College completed its last advising redesign three years ago. Before the redesign, we had five advisor/faculty members who taught our first-year experience course and served as advisors for students enrolled in those courses. These advisor/faculty members held a hybrid role at Gordon. With our redesign in 2020-2021, we adopted professional advising for first-year students. Under our current system, advisors do not teach. They advise their advisees full time, and the first-year experience course is taught by teaching faculty.
Our vision for this project is to overhaul our advising system and:
- Phase in two-year professional advising. This means all students with 60 credit hours would receive professional advising. Students beyond 60 credit hours would be paired with a faculty advisor in their major. To do this, we must expand our professional advising staff from 5 (Fall 2023) to 10 (Fall 2026). The number reflects current Fall 2023 enrollment and an average of 200 advisees per advisor.
- Update for Fall 2024 – this has been implemented, and we now have six full-time advising staff supported by two full-time personnel who provide advising services to specific student populations. We hope to hire a seventh full-time advisor for Fall 2025.
- Implement intrusive advising at Gordon State College. We will train our advisors and create a professional advising apparatus that is hands-on and proactive.
- Update for Fall 2024- We have taken strong steps in this direction and will begin formal training (through NACADA and other organizations) in the Spring of 2025.
- Better integrate professional advisors into our three academic schools and improve communication between professional advisors, faculty, and school administrators.
- Update for Fall 2024 – This has been implemented. We have assigned dedicated advisors to our schools and departments. Each of our three schools has two dedicated advisors, who are being integrated into those schools (increased communication with faculty and collaboration with administrators and academic assistants).
- Empower professional advisors with tools that they can use to help their advisees succeed. One way of empowering professional advisors is to create a system where they can provide feedback on what classes their advisees need and when those classes are scheduled. Traditionally, advisors and students have "taken" what academic departments have provided. We want advisors to be able to provide data-informed feedback to academic departments so that departments can schedule classes that students need. This is part of our data-driven scheduling initiative, one of our top success strategies going into the 2024-2025 AY.
Update for Fall 2024 – We have taken strong steps in this direction, and hope to have a data-driven course schedule available for Fall 2025.
Evaluation Plan and measures:
KPIs:
KPI 1. The number of advisees per advisor
KPI 2. Year-to-year retention for FTFT students
KPI 3. Student perception of advising quality (from survey) – "satisfied"
Baseline measure (for each KPI):
KPI 1. 200 actively enrolled students per advisor per Fall term and 175 per Spring term.
KPI 2. 1 percentage point
KPI 3. 1 percentage point
Current/most recent data (for each KPI):
KPI 1. 172.6 in Spring 2024
222.5 in Fall 2024
KPI 2. 49.7% (our Fall 2022 FTFT cohort retention number)
53.2% (our Fall 2023 FTFT cohort retention number)
This is an increase of 3.5%
KPI 3. No data
Goal or targets (for each KPI):
KPI 1. 200 actively enrolled students per advisor per Fall term and 175 per Spring term.
*We may need to crease this to 225 and 175 or 250 and 200 given the realities of 60 CH professional advising.
KPI 2. 51.7% (for the Fall 2023 cohort – results in Fall 2024) and 54.7% (for the Fall 2024 cohort – results in Fall 2025)
KPI 3. 80% "satisfied"
* New data not available
Time period/duration:
3.5 years for full impact (assuming transition to two-year professional advising is completed during the 25-26 AY)
We are in the very early stages of this redesign. However, we have taken several steps already, including:
- Reflecting on how advisors communicate with students. In this, we have begun to consider and design ways to "nudge" students into behaviors and choices that will benefit their academic success.
- Update for Fall 2024 - We are in the process of designing standardized advising campaigns with text and email nudges.
- Creating a plan for assigning new students to advisors (and mentors) before New Student Orientation. In the past, these assignments did not occur until the first week or two of the fall semester.
- Update for Fall 2024 - We had a difficult roll-out of this step due to staffing issues; we hired four new advisors during Summer and Fall 2024. We will achieve the goal of assigning advisors to new students for Spring 2025. Faculty Mentors may not be assigned until Week 2 of the Spring term.
- Reconfiguring and restructuring several campus offices that serve students and promote faculty and staff development.
- Update for Fall 2024 – We have merged the Student Success Center, Career Services, and other offices.
Some measures we plan to take during the remainder of 2024 include:
- Expanding our professional advising staff from 5 to 6
- Update for Fall 2024 – Completed. We hope to increase to 7 for Fall 25.
- Assigning advisors to students before NSO and sending several communications before and right after NSO informing students of their assigned advisors and other campus resources
- Update for Fall 2024 – We will achieve this for Spring 2025.
- Creating a series of template messages for professional advisors to send to advisees during the semester. The advising team will design these messages (no more than one a week) collectively and then create messaging campaigns within Navigate to schedule messages before the start of the semester. These messaging campaigns will reflect a shared success message and a graduation message.
- Update for Fall 2024 – This is in-process.
- Delivering paper advisement invitations to residential students who do not respond to emails or text message invitations.
- Update for Fall 2024 – This has been implemented for students who are at-risk at midterm.
- Reiterating the importance of students taking 15 credit hours per semester.
The greatest challenge to this plan is the ability to fund the expansion of our professional advising staff. To make two-year professional advising a reality, we must double the number of advisors over the next 2.5 years.
Even without fully adopting two-year professional advising, we can still implement intrusive advising and better integrate professional advisors into our three schools. While funding for training is a barrier, we should be able to secure at least adequate funds.
Another challenge we have identified during the Fall of 2024 is that we lack written processes, handbooks, and manuals for advising, tutoring, and related services. In addition, we do not have a master calendar for student success activities and campaigns. We are addressing this problem and hope to have remedied it by Summer 2025.
A variety of information could be helpful, including data about advising loads for professional advisors at peer institutions and training resources for professional advisors. We will contact staff at other institutions for some of this information.
