Colleges Can Redesign Advising to Better Support Students

College students are struggling. Since the onset of COVID-19, college students have experienced unprecedented levels of isolation, anxiety, stress, and increased economic hardship. As more college students face mental health challenges and basic needs insecurity, there is a heightened need to ensure students at all colleges–especially community colleges–have adequate support to manage the challenges they face. While college students face substantial challenges, colleges and the federal government can advance solutions that ensure all students have the necessary support to succeed academically and personally while pursuing higher education.

Colleges can work to provide students with support that alleviates barriers to success inside and outside of the classroom. Ozarks Technical Community College in Springfield, Missouri, is one college that has committed to advancing student success by designing student-centric support systems. To institutionalize its commitment to meeting students’ needs, Ozarks Tech implemented a new student-support model, entitled Student Success, which ensures all students have a relationship with professionally trained staff members capable of navigating students through academic, economic, and personal challenges.

Central to Ozarks Tech’s student success model is a belief that all students can thrive if they develop meaningful relationships with professionals who can help students navigate academic and non-academic challenges. To do this, each Ozarks Tech student now has three staff members assigned to their student success team; an admissions counselor who helps students from the application process to class registration, a college navigator that helps students from initial registration until program completion, and a community resource specialist who helps connects students to community resources that can help students thrive.

Under this model, students develop consistent relationships with their college navigator, whose sole job is to help manage barriers students face to academic and personal success. As college navigators work with students, they build meaningful relationships with students and learn when to connect students with a community resource specialist. Community resource specialists are specifically trained to connect students with resources that can help meet their basic needs. At its core, Student Success allows the college an opportunity to meet the unique academic and personal needs of each student it serves.

In reflecting on the program’s initial successes, Steven Fouse, the College Director of Student Success at Ozarks Tech, explained the important role data plays in adequately serving students’ needs. Fouse shared that “data is how we document our relationships,” and explained:

“Our biggest win…has been accurately tracking data and then reporting it out…We started small and measured impact (and saw) that (our) Student Success (program) students (completed) the FAFSA at higher rates and had higher retention…It showed that it's not just a monetary benefit for the college, but there’s a return on investment.”

Achieving this return on investment has not been easy. To redesign the college’s approach to advising and student support, Ozarks Tech had to undergo substantial systemic changes. First, Ozarks Tech had to ensure that faculty saw the benefit of the Student Success model. Initially, Fouse explained that

“Some faculty thought we were trying to get between them and their students, when it’s the opposite. We’re trying to take things off of faculty’s plates. (We had to explain that) no one’s doing a bad job, but it’s really hard to support students, and we’re going to take some of these things–like FAFSA and career exploration–and hire professionals to take care of that.”

Ozarks Tech has been able to use data to both increase faculty support for the Student Success model and to help maximize the impact of the new program. Using data to recognize which students likely need additional support, college navigators at Ozarks Tech proactively reach out to students to ensure they enroll in the right classes and receive the academic and non-academic support they need. To Fouse, identifying students in need of additional support is only possible because of the college’s robust efforts to collect and analyze student data on a host of academic and non-academic measures. In large part because of the data infrastructure Ozarks Tech has built, Fouse shared:

“It’s been a total 180 with the faculty. We originally started this with our technical education division and they’ve been doing this for 2 years and never want to go back. The faculty members love it. The navigators know programs inside and out and accurately advise students. This model has allowed our professional staff to specialize and become experts in the programs and divisions they serve.”

The initial results of Student Success suggest that both colleges and the federal government can take action to better meet the needs of students. To meet the heightened needs of college students:

The Federal Government Should Increase Funding for Student Support Services

The federal government should increase its investment in student support and advising services that can meet the holistic needs of college students. Given the myriad of challenges that students continue to face resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and economic downturn, the federal government needs to ensure colleges have the resources necessary to hire trained professionals that can manage students’ unique needs. Colleges, particularly community colleges and those with constrained resources, need to have adequate funding so they can hire enough trained professionals to advise students throughout their entire higher education journeys.

Colleges Should Redesign Advising Services to Meet Student Needs

While it's important to ensure colleges have the resources necessary to offer students with adequate support services, it’s also important that colleges design their advising services from a student-centric perspective. To do this effectively, colleges must ensure they have the data infrastructure necessary to assess the academic and non-academic success of their students as well as the opportunity to develop meaningful relationships with professional staff who are trained to help students manage academic and non-academic barriers to college success. This is a big shift in the culture of advising. Using the data to demonstrate impact and hiring advisors who are on board with the new model will ensure colleges can support students to the best of their ability.

If the government adequately funds student support services, and if colleges design their advising models to foster meaningful relationships between students and professional staff members, we can advance student wellbeing and academic outcomes.

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