By SHANNON WELLS
Looking at fresh approaches to undergraduate advising is one of the pillars of the strategic Plan for Pitt 2028, which was launched last spring.
“This is not a typical strategic plan that, as the chancellor says, sits in the back of a drawer and collects dust,” Provost Joe McCarthy told the Sept. 11 Faculty Assembly meeting. “This is really driving, effectively, everything that we do. (There are) a number of pillars and metrics within the Plan for Pitt that we’re hoping to address with this effort.”
McCarthy; April Belback, associate vice provost for student success and advising; and Adam Lee, associate vice provost for undergraduate studies, led a discussion at the meeting on approaches to improving and streamlining undergraduate advising services at Pitt.
Over the summer, McCarthy and his colleagues took part in an advising workshop in Colorado “that we wanted to take advantage of, rather than wait a full year before we could do that,” he added. “So those two bits of timing really conspired to have this project start in the summer.”
The strategic pillar of cultivating student success, which McCarthy said he considers perhaps the most important part of the Plan for Pitt, contains specific call-outs for enhancing student support services to improve retention, graduation rates, and ultimately, post-graduate success.
“When we thought about launching a project around advising, which is really an advising coordination plan … the goal is really to improve the student experience, provide wrap-around supports for students as they navigate an increasing number of academic offerings that span multiple schools and centers,” he said. “(Including) how we might standardize University-wide holistic advising practices and ultimately boost the student success for every one of our increasingly diverse student body.”
While McCarthy said he’s “really thrilled” with the “increasing intellectual curiosity” of Pitt students, it also creates difficulty in helping them navigate a path toward a degree. When he was in Lee’s current role as vice provost for undergraduate studies for six years, McCarthy said not one year went by without “likely a dozen, if not more, of our students that completed more than 120 credits, but were not going to graduate anytime soon.
“And I’m talking about students … at the tail end of six years. So these students are six years in of expense, time, effort and a lot of academic achievement, and yet they were not going to graduate,” he added. “That’s been a subject that’s been really weighing on me for a number of years.”
Here are some key points McCarthy shared on the advising improvement plan:
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The “vast majority” of details about implementing the new advising approach are “yet to be determined.”
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Groundwork laid this summer included engaging with all schools that serve undergraduates, including deans, associate deans and advising directors. “But we weren’t trying to have a ready-made answer,” he said, but rather “build a community that can help us forge ahead and co-create what that answer is in terms of goals.”
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The approach is intended to be additive in nature. “You’ll see that we get into staff advising and faculty mentoring. … What we want is a complementary experience for our students, where we have our primary role of advisors, largely being a staff role, but (also) leveraging the highly engaged faculty members, disciplinary experts, to help students in choosing the appropriate classes to achieve their academic goals in figuring out what experiences are going to prepare them for those proper career moves, etc.”
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A goal is to create more time for faculty advisors to lean into mentorship roles, “cultivate that academic experience for students within their discipline,” and focus on standardizing supports that students receive.
Learn more about the plan, the shared model of advising, and next steps at 2024 Undergraduate Academic Advising Coordination Plan.
“We have six first-year admitting schools, and (around five) of what we call upper division schools, and every single one has a completely different advising model right now,” McCarthy noted. “That causes a very uneven experience for students that are doing degrees that cross schools. … We really want to lean into how we can have advisors that are trained to help students navigate that space through high-impact interventions.
“Probably the most important thing we want to do is to build a community of practice across the entire University, where folks are more in tune with handing students off,” he said.
Increased comfort with this approach benefits students who start in a professional first-year admitting school, such as the Swanson School of Engineering, but realize midway through their first year that’s not where they really want to be or where their skill set resides.
“And transitioning to another program has tended to be very, very challenging, so retention numbers in those schools have not been as high as we would like,” McCarthy said. “So I want to underscore the fact that faculty will continue to support the student experience: ‘Faculty mentor’ is not anticipated to be a pejorative in any way. … That’s what is used for scholars that study this kind of activity.”
April Belback said since 2019, the provost’s office has invested considerably in coordinating advising and student success from an institutional level, with advising and mentoring being one of the team’s interconnected work streams.
“We’ve really laid the groundwork to shift toward this model of advising by providing some things like standard professional development resources, training opportunities for advisors and administrators and mentors across the University,” she said, including Pitt Advising Certification and Training program, an onboarding training module, early progress reports, workshops and the University Undergraduate Advising Committee.
Noting retention and graduation rate of more than 90% at Pitt, she said, “even with the progress that we have made with these high student-success outcomes and the coordination that we have established so far, we always know that we can do better, right?”
For example, she cited the fall 2023 first-year intake survey, in which all first-year students participated, where academic concerns occurred at the highest frequency. Seventy percent of students among all schools expressed some uncertainty about degree requirements, selecting courses and academic exploration.
“So they’re telling us that they want more information around those things,” Belback said. “And we also know that these measures are multifaceted, and that there’s many other factors that contribute to student success, things like course experiences, Financial Aid and Student well-being.
“So what we’re trying to do (with) this plan is build pathways to make academic advising a key partner in the student experience at Pitt,” she added, “so advisors are really better equipped to help the University continually improve support that we bring to our students.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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