By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post
Fort Hays State University has launched a new centralized advising program with most students enrolling with professional advisers for fall courses.
Departments across campus have rolled out the system differently, but all on-campus freshmen should be using the new system for classes that start in August.
Some departments have also included upperclassmen. Other departments will take a more phased approach to the rollout.
International cross-border and graduate students will still be advised by faculty. Online students were already being advised through a centralized advising system.
Although enrollment advising will no longer be a faculty responsibility under the new system, all students will be assigned a faculty mentor with whom they can discuss professional goals, Jill Arensdorf, FHSU provost, said.
The change will not affect faculty salaries.
The goal of the change is to increase student retention and success, which has been shown in research to be improved with centralized advising, she said.
"We want to keep our students here," Arensdorf said. "We want to make sure they are getting accurate information through to when they graduate and go on to jobs, second majors or graduate degrees."
All but one of the Kansas Board of Regents schools have some sort of centralized advising, although Arensdorf said it varies between campuses.
Grady Dixon, dean of Werth College of Science, Technology and Mathematics, said most of the students in his college have moved to the centralized advising model.
"We've seen faculty responsibilities creep up over the years," he said. "A lot of those responsibilities are areas that they were never really trained in professionally, and this is one of those. ...
"I think one of the advantages is that now we have people that this is their full-time job. They devote 100 percent of their effort to being good at that one thing. That one thing is really valuable for student success."
The FHSU Geosciences Department adopted a single adviser for all its students long before the university moved to adopt centralized advising as a whole.
The students liked the switch because they always knew with whom to discuss advising, Dixon said. The faculty were able to focus more attention on classes and mentoring graduate students. In the first year of the advising change, the department more than doubled the number of graduates from its master's program, Dixon said.
"The driving force behind this is to serve the students better — be better at helping them get the courses they need and understand their progress," he said.
Coming to campus for the first time can be very intimidating, and centralized advising can help students with answers to the nuts-and-bolts questions, Dixon said.
"It's so disappointing when someone fails out or drops out over those technical details, not over the high-end complex course concepts, but just administration," he said.
All of the professional advisers are on campus and are FHSU employees. An additional five advising employees were added to the already 20-member advising department to accommodate the centralized advising rollout.
Additional training has been provided to advisers so they will be able to better accommodate on-campus students and the new programs with which they will be working.
Advisers will specialize in certain colleges. With a broad knowledge of a college, students should be able to move between majors within a college with the help of their advisers, Arensdorf said.
Officials hope the new system will increase access to advisers.
"We had faculty who were advising 50 to 100 students on top of teaching, on top of research, on top of other service activities," she said. "That was a lot of extra responsibilities on faculty that we hope the professional advisers can supplement some of that work."
A task force studied the move to centralized advising before the rollout. That task force found faculty did not have time to advise on classes and mentor students on their careers, Arensdorf said.
"By giving that responsibility to two people per student," she said, "the student has the adviser who is always up to date on curriculum and system and they also have that faculty mentor that is really familiar with the discipline and career field and the internship and clinical opportunities there might be available for that major and student."
Arensdorf said she has not received any feedback from students on the new systems.
"The university has been talking about it for a long time," Arensdorf said. "It was finally time to implement it, and it dovetailed beautifully with our strategic plan."