About the Webconference
While structured meta-majors reduce the credit penalty for switching programs within that meta-major, they still do not mitigate the risk of students selecting the wrong program map that is out of alignment with their goals or misaligned with their true interests and capabilities. Community college students are likely to have either limited exposure to potential careers or receive misinformation as part of their prior education or work experiences, making the risk of choosing incorrectly even higher.
Guided Pathways reform is not complete without consideration of the advising model. Unfortunately, existing advising structures are inadequate or incomplete given that most interactions are still transactional, centered on course scheduling rather than on providing holistic and quality advice. Given the link between poor program selection, frequent major switching or indecision, and excess credit accumulation, any attempt to tackle student success must include improved guidance for students.
This resource is part of the Design Student-Centered Guided Pathways to Achieve Strategic Goals Roadmap. Access the Roadmap for stepwise guidance with additional tools and research.
The good news is that as students transition to program pathways and select the prescribed course sequences, certain academic decisions—such as determining which courses to enroll in each semester—should be made more easily. As a result, meetings with academic advisors, which previously had been dominated by transactional tasks such as course registration, focus instead on more substantive conversations about students’ academic and career goals. In order to conduct this work at scale, colleges need to rethink traditional formats of advising delivery.
Give administrators the tools they need to ensure advisors’ conversations are productive, their impact is measurable, and that advising is aligned with Guided Pathways goals.
This presentation will teach leaders how to proactively guide students to their best decisions throughout career and program selection by elevating the role of advisors as part of pathways reform, increasing student exposure to quality faculty interactions, and directing students that are falling off pathway. The webconference is meant for presidents, provosts and VPs of academic affairs or student affairs.