BY RAEGAN NEUFELD
Tiger Media Network
University Provost Jill Arensdorf provided information on two components of academic affairs at Thursday’s Student Government Association Meeting: advising and program review.
Academic advising was the main focus during an open forum at a past meeting. Students shared their experiences, both positive and negative, as well as concerns. Vice President Emma Day passed on those concerns to Arensdorf, who presented at Thursday’s meeting to clear up any confusion and answer questions.
In the spring of 2021, the university changed its advising model so professional advisors advise students instead of faculty members. According to Arensdorf, research indicates this model benefits students and leads to better retention rates once in place.
“The people that are helping (students) are experts at advising,” Arensdorf said. “They’re not great faculty members that are trying to do advising on the side.”
However, not all students are with a professional advisor yet.
“As we elected to move to professional advising, we allowed programs to decide if they wanted to advise out students with their faculty advisor and start fresh with incoming students with professional advisors, or move all students to professional advisors,” Arensdorf said.
In addition to their professional advisor, students should be assigned a faculty mentor, an initiative that has been in place for about a semester.
“They’re experts in your field,” Arensdorf said. “They’re the people we want you going to for letters of recommendation, career advice, internship opportunity advice and connections to opportunities across the institution.”
Like professional advisors, faculty mentors will be in a student’s Workday when they are assigned.
The decision on how faculty mentors will be deployed is up to the departments and programs. According to Arensdorf, some have chosen to assign, while others have let students sign up for the faculty member they want.
“Eventually, I hope we can streamline it a little bit more, but we had to kick it off and we had to start somewhere,” Arensdorf said. “If we waited until it was perfect, we would never kick it off.”
Arensdorf encouraged the senators to fill out the academic advising evaluations with any feedback they may have.
Regarding program review, Arensdorf reported there are currently five programs marked as low-enrollment, per Kansas Board of Regents criteria: Music, Music Teacher Education, Philosophy, Modern Languages and Physics. The KBOR criteria include the average number of juniors and seniors in the program over a four-year period, the average number of graduates over a four-year period, salaries of graduates, and graduates working in the region (Kansas and Missouri).
Three possible paths forward are merging the programs with a similar program, putting them on a program improvement plan or discontinuing the programs. No decision has been made yet for any of the programs.
“We are in the process right now of determining what we are going to recommend in March,” Arensdorf said.
Arensdorf reported she has met with deans, department chairs, program directors, and faculty members of the programs to discuss the plan moving forward.
In SGA business, senators passed a bill creating a seat for a graduate student. The bill states that the seat will elevate the interests of graduate students, who help cultivate an inclusive and diverse campus.
The next SGA meeting will be at 7:00 p.m. on December 7 in the Black and Gold Room.