A new advising initiative at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) is establishing a stronger connection between students and their colleges and ensuring freshmen are meeting their general education and freshmen requirements.
The Second Semester Freshman Advising Pilot Program requires all freshmen to meet with an adviser during the spring semester. It is a major campus-wide advising endeavor that has required close coordination between three divisions, all seven colleges, campus advisers and Enrollment Services.
Freshmen already meet with an adviser in the Academic Advising Center in the fall, but this initiative puts those freshmen who are declared in a major or are Pre-Majors in touch with faculty advisers in their colleges. As a result, it is helping colleges identify advising and curriculum changes that will improve student retention and help students stay on track for graduation. Undeclared freshmen also had an opportunity to attend a Career Development Center workshop and then meet with the Academic Advising Center.
“The number of freshmen who have continued to meet with advisers exceeded all expectations for such a large pilot involving campus-wide support,” said Gayle Fenton, Senior Director of Advising for the Division of Academic Affairs, who coordinated the program with Donna Green from Enrollment Services. “As this pilot program evolved, many unexpected positive benefits, in addition to the advising connection of freshmen and their academic departments, began to unfold.”
Among the additional benefits of the program are:
- Development of new advising workshops to assist in changing the “culture of advising”
- Discussion in all colleges, major campus committees and councils brought “advising” into the forefront in the university
- Requests by faculty for training on General Education, academic advising and CMS reports and processes
- Dissemination of information by colleges/departments about majors that require specific sequencing of prerequisites and major. In addition, academic departments discovered that some freshmen were unable to register for appropriate courses in the major during SOAR because classes were already filled which led to discussions at the Deans’ levels on enrollment management.
In addition, officials from the colleges discovered that a CS Links, a report, produced by Enrollment Services, can help them reach out to students who have not met the advising requirement.
In an effort to improve the program for next year, meetings have been scheduled with each college advising coordinator and the directors of special student group advising units to begin exploring other positive changes for spring 2009. Academic Affairs, Institutional Research and Assessment and Enrollment Services will also develop a means of monitoring the academic progress of the fall 2007 freshman cohort for the next few years.