Seventy percent of IT directors and 80 percent of those in cybersecurity and privacy in education technology are reporting excessive workloads, according to Educause workforce studies. Student success professionals are, too. Elise Newkirk-Kotfila, the assistant vice president for strategy and partnerships at NASPA, a network for student affairs professionals, said an ideal caseload for advisers would be 250 students for one person — but in reality, the number is more like 500 or 1,000 students per adviser.
Institutions have leaned on technology more and more in recent years to augment work in both fields. Many intend to hang on to digital initiatives created during the COVID-19 pandemic, including virtual appointments with mental health professionals and student advisers, and online components to campus events like orientations and career fairs.
Newkirk-Kotfila and Kathe Pelletier, Educause senior director of community programs, discussed the top trends in implementing advising technology, and where there is still room for improvement, Tuesday at the 2024 Educause Annual Conference.
Today’s students want and expect an individualized approach to advising, they said, citing NASPA focus groups and case studies. Students want somebody at their institution who considers their strengths and goals, who will help them create a personalized academic and career plan, and then help them remove barriers to bringing that plan to life. This, they noted, is even more true for barriers that are institutionally imposed.
“If I can't graduate because I owe $30 on a parking ticket,” Newkirk-Kotfila said, “I expect somebody to help me work through that.”
While students don’t expect each adviser to be a trained mental health professional, they expect advisers can help them find one if they need it.
Student data can make creating individual advising experiences more doable, and advisers today have more information on students than ever before. Many can access data on enrollment, course progress and grades, GPAs, attendance and financial aid, and more personal information like demographics and extracurricular activities.
However, Newkirk-Kotfila said, advisers do not always understand and trust the data.
“When we presented last year to the advisers and said, ‘Can you please raise your hand if you trust the data that is coming out of your SIS system, out of your predictive analytics system?’ Very few hands were raised,” she said.
Additionally, some advisers don’t know what functionalities are available to them, and this lack of knowledge can bloat the budget. When individual departments have a specific goal in mind, they may seek out or even procure a new tool to achieve it, not knowing that their existing suite could meet that goal, too.
Collaborating with IT professionals — including advisers in tech procurement meetings and inviting IT folks to meetings on advising goals — can help advisers increase their understanding of the technologies and data available, the presenters said. But time is always short and the problem is cyclical: no time to collaborate leads to a lack of understanding among IT professionals on advising needs, and among student success professionals on IT capabilities. And, as universities become more digitally oriented, the need for these collaborations is exacerbated.
Some institutions have creative solutions to the issue.
SUNY Schenectady County Community College, for example, keeps data acquisition simple by having students fill out a personal survey during new student registration. Other institutions have simply written out their advising goals so other departments can refer to the document for guidance when needed. Claflin University has implemented a faculty liaison model to strengthen collaboration and better understand each student.
At the Educause session, Newkirk-Kotfila and Pelletier pointed to additional opportunities for collaboration through professional development, either having IT professionals leading sessions for advisers or finding professional development opportunities that are mutually beneficial and can be attended by both groups. Identifying common goals can help make collaboration run smoother, they said.
“We work in higher education because we care deeply about students,” Pelletier said. “Students are why institutions are investing in AI, for example, we learned that in our landscape report recently, and students are why we're doing this work too. So, finding that common ground can be really important.”
