Moving from Course Selection to Degree Completion; Creating a Guide to Redesign Academic Advising

Community colleges must constantly work to improve student persistence, retention, and completion rates as data on these variables reflects less than stellar performance. Community colleges admit many students but less than 36% of them graduate within six years (Jenkins, 2011). Low student success rates caused community colleges to implement different strategies to positively influence student persistence, retention, and completion. Some of these strategies are promising, specifically the Guided Pathways model (Bailey, Smith-Jaggars, & Jenkins, 2015), which helps students enter a career pathway, stay on that pathway, and ensure completion.
Academic advising is a crucial element of Guided Pathways; academic advisors help students enter and stay on career pathways and provide close monitoring of the students’ academic progress. Current academic advising services at most community colleges act as an extension of the registration office, providing short-term and prescriptive information to students for term-to-term registration purposes. This model originated in the early days of community colleges; their academic advising and counseling services followed the K-12 model with little attention to individualized student needs or advice for course selection.
The product created for this dissertation disassembles the existing registration model of academic advising and presents ways to assess and redesign academic advising services to improve student success outcomes. The guide provides readers with assessment exercises and implementation practices, including activities and checklists.