From the Office of the Provost
Episode 9: Advising Coordination at the University of Pittsburgh
[INTRO MUSIC]
Joe McCarthy: Hello and welcome to “From the Office of the Provost,” a podcast that highlights exciting activities and initiatives in the Office of the Provost or University-wide that bolster and enhance our collective vision for growth and transformation.
I'm your host, Provost Joe McCarthy, and today I'm joined by Associate Vice Provost for Student Success and Advising April Belback and Vice Provost for Undergraduate Studies Adam Lee.
At the University of Pittsburgh, we understand that collaborative and holistic advising and mentoring are integral to our University’s educational mission. Over the past several years, the Office of the Provost has invested in coordinating advising from an institutional level. In doing so, we've recorded high rates in student success measures such as retention, graduation, and postgraduation outcomes.
While we have made important gains in recent years, we strive to continually improve and aspire to be the best. So to streamline the student experience, boost student success, and align with the Plan for Pitt, the University of Pittsburgh is moving to a shared model of advising on the Pittsburgh campus.
April and Adam have led the progress thus far on this initiative, so I'm happy to have them here to discuss the plan further. Welcome, April and Adam.
April Belback: Thanks so much for having us here today.
Adam Lee: Very excited to talk today.
McCarthy: Adam, I mentioned that we've seen high rates and student success outcomes since we began coordinating advising at an institutional level back in 2019. But we can always do better, obviously. Can you go into more detail about how we decided to launch an advising plan that coordinates efforts across the campus?
Lee: Sure. For a little bit of context, our current advising model is decentralized, which means that across our different schools and academic departments, within some schools, we use different models of advising that allow the advising experience to be tuned to an individual student’s field of study.
Over the last couple of years, we've seen a small but worrisome trend of declining student satisfaction with advising, and this is complemented by student satisfaction surveys where students are asking us for more resources to support their academic success and exploration. In addition, while we have high degree completion rates — 86% of our students complete their degrees here — the majority of students who leave Pitt do end up completing degrees elsewhere.
There's opportunity for exploratory advising and leveraging the wide array of academic paths here on campus. Additionally, we've seen increasingly interdisciplinary students — students who complete courses and credentials from across the University — and this is the norm.
So obviously this is in line with my favorite pillar of the Plan for Pitt: We will cultivate student success. When our students thrive, the institution thrives. Academic advising is a crucial partner in the student experience, and we aim to make that experience more consistent and more connected across the campus.
McCarthy: So, April, when we talk about moving to a shared advising model, can you explain how that differs from what we've been doing since 2019?
Belback: Absolutely. In a shared advising model, there's typically a central administrative unit. In our case here at Pitt, that's the Student Success team in the Office of the Provost that provides high level oversight, coordination, and tons of support while students are still advised in their respective academic units, colleges and schools.
Ultimately, we’re looking to dramatically enhance communication and coordination of advising across the University and set some minimum expectations, which still allows for autonomy within the undergraduate colleges and schools for those specific student populations.
In other words, it's really shared services, centrally coordinated. This also means more clearly defining advising roles across the campus community so students and advisors can better understand their support team.
So, I'll walk through those four roles.
First, professional staff, academic advisors who have formally assigned student rosters based on their major college or school. In the rollout, all undergraduate students will have a dedicated assigned academic advisor who is knowledgeable about requirements and resources to proactively provide holistic advice.
Additionally, they'll provide standard interventions for University-wide college level school processes, something that we're calling the Big 5. Things like providing proactive intervention and outreach for continued non-registration in upcoming terms, first-year intake and enrollment, encouraging and acting upon early progress reporting, academic standing, and degree audit reviews.
Next are faculty mentors who are focused on issues in the discipline.
Then we have program advisors who work with students based on formal participation in a program.
And of course, resource advisors who work with students to fulfill a specific need on campus.
So, the approach that we're taking is really additive in nature and leverages the complementary expertise of primary role staff advisors and highly engaged faculty mentors as disciplinary experts and focuses in on receiving those high impact interventions. It's really about the connective tissue across our units University-wide.
McCarthy: Well, as you both know, I've been on the faculty here at Pitt since ‘98, and I've very much enjoyed my engagement with students in support of their success.
And Adam, you're also serving as a longtime faculty member, I'm sure feel the same way. Can you explain a little bit more about the role of faculty mentors in this framework?
Lee: As April said, this approach is to lean into holistic advising through coordinating the efforts of multiple people with different areas of expertise.
The idea here is to provide more time and space for faculty to lean into mentoring within their disciplines, and this might take the form of providing advice on the curriculum, right, tuning an elective path to meet ultimate career goals. Perhaps allowing students or helping students explore research or scholarship opportunities or disciplinary co-curricular activities.
In addition, career planning and grad school preparation would be things that faculty mentors might lean into, and many of our faculty advisors already do these things in addition to helping with the types of activities that April outlined for the primary role staff advisors.
It's a full-time job to stay on top of the discipline to know what's going on in your field. It's also a full-time job to stay on top of the changing landscape here at Pitt. And so, the idea here is not to change the amount of time that faculty spends with students, but really to allow them to tune that within the disciplinary area where they are irreplaceably the experts.
McCarthy: Thanks. That's very helpful, Adam.
So, the Plan for Pitt launched in April of 2024. And April, you and Adam started working on it this summer, the summer of 2024. Can you run the listeners through what the timeline is moving forward?
Belback: Absolutely. So, this semester we have expanded the UUAC, the University Undergraduate Advising Committee, to better align with the plan and as an opportunity to provide updates and information to the campus advising community.
And this also includes the working groups of advisors on each of those Big 5 interventions that I mentioned, which help us to provide input into those standard communications and processes. And we hope to have those working groups completed by sometime next academic year and those resources available to all colleges and schools within the next year too as we roll it out.
Additionally, we've been meeting individually with schools and the leadership in the first pilot phase as well as anyone who has questions and providing presentations to lots of campus stakeholders.
On the horizon in the next few months include some new and expanded advisor professional development opportunities and a leadership retreat where we'll set the next milestones.
McCarthy: So, it sounds like this is a a long-term effort and the planned rollout’s going to happen in a couple of phases.
Adam, can you talk to us in a little bit more detail about why the advising coordination plan is phased and how this will support us and measuring the success?
Lee: For sure. As I started out at the very beginning of this podcast talking about, we've currently got a decentralized model of advising with lots and lots of different implementations of the advising process across this campus. Trying to move everybody to the same place at the same time would be a huge undertaking.
In trying to do this collaboratively, you know, we want to be able to work closely with stakeholders as we move forward. And so, we're beginning by working with schools on campus that have already independently arrived at sort of this complementary model of advising that April described earlier.
So, the School of Computing and Information, the College of Business Administration, and the Frederick Honors College are all set up where all students are assigned to a full-time staff advisor already and are complemented by faculty experts as they make their decisions. And so, we've begun working closely with those schools.
They're organized similarly, but everybody's practices, as probably no surprise to anybody, are different. And so, the opportunity here is to standardize practice across these schools, learn from the best of everything that everyone is doing, and collaborating sort of with further stakeholders to think about what this implementation might look like in the future.
In addition, we're beginning to provide a twice-a-year advising snapshot data set to the leadership and advising directors in each school that gives a view of where things stand in terms of advisor caseload, student satisfaction, advising appointments, and other sort of key metrics that we want to track, student retention for instance, and re-enrollment.
We're working with the data analytics teams here at Pitt to begin developing some standardized data sources and dashboards for advisors, associate deans, and other school leadership to be able to make data-informed decisions about how advising impacts student success within their units.
McCarthy: As is typical, we always like to close with a bit of information on how people can learn a bit more and maybe stay on track with the progress of these projects. So April, how will updates about the project be shared with the advising community?
Belback: Well, first folks can learn more about the initiative on our website at studentssuccess.pitt.edu under Academic Advising Coordination.
Here, we've expanded our information to include a more detailed timeline, outlined our project goals. You can find FAQs and lots of resources to support the shared advising model.
We also want folks to share their feedback. So, on our website you can find a form for suggestions, ideas, or answer any questions.
And last, don't forget to check your inbox for our regular advising and mentoring messages. We'll be including some updates there, as well as opportunities to attend our workshops and professional development events.
McCarthy: Well, April and Adam, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing the great work that you and your teams are doing to cultivate student success through advising services.
I also want to take the opportunity to thank all of our faculty mentors and academic advising professional staff at the University of Pittsburgh. Your work is both inspiring and difficult. It also reflects a key pillar in the Plan for Pitt, as Adam alluded to earlier, cultivating student success. We can't accomplish that goal without your continued efforts and excellent work.
As we collaborate on the next steps in this initiative, the changes that we are going to embrace are not necessarily going to be easy or comfortable and we recognize that. But I firmly believe that our efforts will help us to further realize the best outcomes for our students and set Pitt up as a national leader in advising and in student outcomes.
So as usual, I want to thank you listeners for tuning in. I'm Provost Joe McCarthy, and as this has been “From the Office of the Provost.”
[OUTRO MUSIC]