First Year Network

We believe in first-year advising and the important impact first-year advisors can have on student success and persistence. Not only do we want to share best practices but, fundamentally, we want to ensure coordinated distribution of financial resources and make certain that resources devoted to first-year advising aren’t reallocated for other purposes.

We also want the experience our first-year students have with advising, during New Student Welcome and throughout the first year on campus, to be equitable. Each college’s unique disciplinary context will be maintained and we want to acknowledge that many of our students change their major/college in the first year—we want to ensure that every student who is newly transitioning to college has access to the same advising services when switching programs.

Further centralization of advising is not currently on the table. All advising programs on campus will continue to collaborate and align around key strategic goals related to student success while maintaining a disciplinary context and college/program-driven infrastructure.

Multiple project ideas related to “student success” were generated in the Retention Work Stream as part of the Financial Futures (FF) initiative. Advising, mentoring, coaching, and advising-related projects/requests arose from multiple campus groups, including the FoE Advising Committee. FF leadership, as they reviewed the business cases for student success funding requests, identified a gap: for various proposed projects, campus lacks the organizational structure to ensure coherent oversight of these functional areas and coordinated distribution of financial resources. Such coordination is essential to provide a consistent experience to students and to avoid unnecessary duplication. Provost Russ Moore charged Vice Provost Mary Kraus and Vice Chancellor Christina Gonzales to bring their teams together to produce a Student Success Plan. Though the FoE committee did not make specific recommendations about implementation related to first-year advising, Provost Moore, Vice Provost Kraus, and Vice Chancellor Gonzales, in consultation with the Deans, determined that centralizing this important activity is key to achieving our overall goals for the first year. Not every college has first-year advisors, and so we have committed financial resources to the creation of additional advising lines. Centralizing first-year advising via an embedded model will ensure coherent oversight of first-year advising, coordinated distribution of financial resources, and campus-wide adoption of best practice; most importantly it will ensure a consistent experience for our students across colleges and schools.

The likely timeline for moving lines/budget is next fiscal year (July 1, 2020), but we’ll aim to have a plan in place by February/March 2020 to align with the new evaluation cycle. The target for impacting the student experience is the summer 2020 NSW season.

Position Descriptions will be updated to clarify roles and responsibilities related to the first-year network and related to the academic college/program in which advisors sit and both Undergrad Education and the academic college/program in which advisors sit will contribute to the performance management process.

All first-year advisors will be part of the First Year Network.

First-year advisors and first-year campus partners will have the opportunity to participate in regular First Year Network meetings.