Colleges often define student success by commonly used metrics like grades, attendance, and retention as well as metrics associated with their strategic planning, without considering how students themselves define their success in college. This creates a need for colleges to more regularly incorporate student voice in defining success metrics and outcomes. CSW’s Learner-Centered Benchmarking Project (LCBP), with funding from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, partnered with Kennedy-King College to explore how Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) could move student voice from consultation to leadership by training students to investigate different perspectives on “success” as a college student and explore how the resulting data could help colleges better align their supports with student priorities.
YPAR is a research approach that positions young people as partners in investigating issues that affect their lives and communities. Throughout this project, the student voice continuum was frequently referenced to ensure that student researchers had the capacity to play a leadership role in research decisions and that their expertise and experiences as college students were valued as an important part of the process. Based on these experiences, the student researchers developed a collective definition of student success.
“Student success means a stable career with growth opportunities that pays well enough to fund a home or business.”
As their research continued, they identified and explored related topics, including belonging and student awareness of academic and career services resources.
In this blog post, Student Researcher Dominic Fry shares insights from his literature review on advising models in secondary education. You can learn more about Dominic’s experience and research during the upcoming SHIFT Conference Session, September 23.
LCBP Findings: Student Advising Models
Driving Toward a Degree is a yearly report published by Tyton Partners that examines many aspects that drive student success. In its 2023 issue, it looked at how the student advising model can help or hinder students in achieving their goals. Advising services come in many shapes and sizes, but not all approaches are made equal. The way that a campus integrates these services can have a large effect on the frequency with which they get used; if a student goes to the advising office for academic advising and ends up being referred to mental health counseling services, but has to go to completely different building on the other side of campus, they are far less likely to take advantage of those services.
According to the same study, when advising services are spread across the campus, students’ awareness of services drops by 19% compared to a college with a single building housing all advising services. This drop in awareness underscores the importance of colleges providing an easily accessible way for students to navigate their support services.
The visibility and location of support services are important issues; if they aren’t properly advertised and conveniently located, the school might as well not have them at all. The way the services are set up need to be streamlined, and if the institutions that don’t have solutions to make their student support services more visible, those colleges are failing to properly support their students.
In an effort to rectify the situation, colleges can make simple changes such as creating an easy-to-navigate webpage that links to an online version of the services. The difference that this simple act can have is captured the Driving Toward a Degree 2023 report, where students from schools that had an online portal and students from schools that didn’t were both asked if they felt that all students had equal knowledge of the support services offered by their school; the schools with an online portal had 20% more “agree” responses than the schools without one. Those same students were also asked if they felt that all students equally use the support services offered, and the schools with online portals had a 14% higher “agree” rate than the schools without one, showing that not only does having an online portal increase awareness of services, but it also increases the use of those services.
There are two groups most affected by the problem of support service location and visibility: the first is, obviously, students. If students cannot find, or worse, don’t know about, the services offered to them by their college, they are more likely not to use those services or to seek them elsewhere, which may entail external costs that could be avoided with more effort on the institution’s part. This lack of knowledge can also contribute to students dropping out before finishing their degree path. If a student doesn’t feel they have the support they need, they might decide the burden that higher education is putting on their life outweighs the outcome.
The second group affected is the administrators; if services are spread out or disjointed, remembering where all of the services are becomes much harder for any administrator.
The best thing that students can do to change this situation is figure out what type of advising model their school has: a one stop shop, a mini hub, or separate. If the advising model is anything besides the one stop shop model, make a petition to change it. Once you have enough signatures to support the change, bring it to the dean of the school and make your case for the value of the change.
The next thing students can do is find out if their school has an online portal. If not, then once again it is time to consider a petition and plead your case to the dean. If they do have a portal, make sure that it has a support page that lists all of the links to the various student support services. If the page is missing those links, send a letter to the dean of the school requesting they centralize the links for support services on the online portal. In the end, it is up to the students to advocate for themselves and demand that these institutions provide the support that they are owed.
Comments are closed.