Academic Advising: Big Impact, Little Data.
Academic advising is a tool given to college students to help guide them through the journey that is attaining a degree. Academic advisors help students manage their classes, plan their goals, get involved and overall, pave the way for their future career. However, for being such a crucial part in the development of students’ lives, there is little data to be found about academic advising. This is not only tough to find on a school by school basis, but overall there is a scarce amount of data around this topic. With the information gathered through surveys we conducted, 8 out of 10 students confirmed that they had negative experiences with the advisors at FIU.
When digging for more information I, Sebastian Zambrano, and my peer, Valentina Sanchez, were struck by the lack of data available. We decided to write this article not only because we believe that advising is a crucial step for a student during their college years, but also because we have both had negative experiences when it comes to academic advising that has led to issues such as a delayed graduation.
As stated earlier, there is little when it comes to quantifiable data, however one article we were able to find, sheds light on why this topic is so important. The Effects of Academic Advising on College students Development in Higher Education , written by Kelly Pargett, discusses and quantifies the effect academic advising has on students. In the research she sets out to solve three questions:
Is there a relationship between academic advising and positive student development?
Is there a relationship between academic advising and a student’s grade point average?
Is there a relationship between academic advising and students’ satisfaction with students’ higher education experiences?
The results of this research showed data showing that academic advising has a strong link to both students educational experiences as well as positive student development. While there was no correlation between academic advising and GPA, we felt as if these two factors alone were important enough to do our own bit of research.
We designed surveys to ask FIU students how their academic advising had affected their college experience. The survey gauged the overall experience students had with their advisors. We sent it out to multiple FIU students from different majors to understand the current situation at FIU, since there is no data published about FIU’s advising.
From the surveys we were able to find that most students had a negative experience with advising, but when comparing majors, FIU CARTA department had most of the negative experiences.
From our brief survey we cannot formulate any concrete answers as to what the problem is or if there really is any problem (this is because in comparison to all of FIU’s students our sample size is too small). However we believe that the lack of information merits action to be taken. With advising being so important in a students development and experience, even 8 students having a negative view merits investigation and change.
