Minutes of the Committee on Advising
for November 10, 2000

Minutes of the meeting of Friday, November 10th at 12:00.

Present: John Longeway, Chris Zanowski, Brad Piazza, Joann Goodyear, Karen Thorne, Larry Duetsch, Mary Power,
Megan Mullen, and Stuart Hansen. Absent were Oliver Hayward and Gregory Mayer. Alan Crist, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management, was visiting.

John Longeway was nominated by Larry Duetsch to be chair of the committee, and eleected unanimously to the post.

The minutes for the last meeting should have been approved, but I don't remember this happening. So we should do that for both meetings next time.

Mary Power reported on those declaring majors quite early, in or before their first semester here. The only majors currently having entrance requirements are Communication, Computer Science, Criminal Justice, Modern Languages, Political Science, and Psychology. of 739 new students this semester, 20 were declared majors, 9 of these in Music and 6 in Business. By way of comparison, in 1998-99, 104 of 790 new students had declared in Business, and in 1999-2000 148 out of 813 had declared in Business. So the problem of premature declarations seems to have evaporated, and it it was agreed that no action need be taken by the committee.

The remainder of the discussion rotated around the half-position in advising. Alan Crist suggested that the position be devoted to advising adult students, and that more funds might be obtained to make it a fulltime position combining advising and recruiting of adult students.

Earlier, it had been suggested that it should go to help advising of Business students. There is a lower number of Majors now, since not so many are signing up so early, but Brad Piazza, when asked, said that he is still advising around 500 students, with factulty taking on about 150-200, at the rate of 30 per professor. Alan Crist seemed to think that help could be provided to Business from the Advising Center.

Joann Goodyear suggested that Rick Taylor might be available for advising adults, and Mary Power indicated that 25 per cent of his position is for advising, but that he has quite enought to do so that he cannot take on more. Moreover, the Advising Center is overloaded already, and could not provide further helpt to Business. Larry Duetsch suggested the Rick Taylor is interested in working with adults, and so he might move into Alan Crist's suggested position, with the new half position going to Business.

Mary Power also suggested that high risk students need the extra attention, identifying these as those on probation or strict probation (280 and 335 respectively), amounting to 12 per cent of our population. John Longeway suggested that we need to consider where the half position could do the most good, and that that was not necessarily in dealing with the worst cases, which can take up a lot of time and give very little payback in student retention. Mary Power confirmed that working with at risk students takes a lot of time, since one needs to be very intrusive to turn such students around. Alan Crist points out that we have an obligation to help all those we take in to get through. John Longeway suggested that we are facing a triage situation, without enough resources to help everyone as we ought. In such a situation one neglects those who can get along without help (as we do in practice, following the lead of the student in most cases), and those who are unlikely to benefit from help, and searches out a group of at risk students who are likely to survive with help and would not survive without it. It is the middle group that should be targeted for our limited resources.

We were at the end of our time about then, and we need either to continue with Longeway's suggestion, and try to identify the middle group, with the aim of having a maximal impact on retention with the half position, or find some other approach. it was suggested that students who are working more than half time might be a good target, and adult students, Business students who are underserved, and high risk students might all be suggested as well, but there was no time to discuss the matter.

I'm sure there were other important points made, but that's all I can recollect from my notes.

Respectfully submitted,
John Longeway.