Groups meet to combat advisement problems

The Provost’s Office is teaming up with the Board of Regents and University College to streamline advisement all across campus.

At Wednesday’s meeting of the Regents’ Student Affairs Committee, representatives from the three groups outlined their plans to make UNM’s advisement more efficient. The student-to-adviser ratio in the University College is 770 to 1.

Wynn Goering, vice provost for Academic Affairs, said UNM is updating advisement software and consolidating advisement centers into a centralized advisement center. He said plans to remodel the Student Services Center are in the works, which will create a unified advising area for the College of Arts and Sciences and the University College.

“We have a highly complex system that we have to deal with,” he said at the meeting. “We know that we need increased access to advising and we want to do a better job of advising. We want to make sure that it is accurate 100 percent of the time. We want to make sure that it is consistent as students move from department to department.”

He said going to different places for advisement can confuse students, especially when advisers provide inconsistent information.

Student Morgan Matthew said she is frustrated with UNM’s advisement system. “I had to go to so many different people in different departments who all told me different things,” she said. “They didn’t seem to agree on anything, which is confusing.” The E-Progress audit program advisers use is a major source of advisement problems, said Henry Gonzalez, UNM program specialist.

He said he was involved in acquiring the $2.4 million Title Five grant that is funding advisement reorganization.

“E-Progress is outdated software,” he said. “It is approximately 15 years old. It is difficult to read, confusing and provides no way for students to plan with it.”

The new software program, AdvisorTrac, will work with LoboTrax, which will replace the E-Progress report. AdvisorTrac would ensure that advisers can communicate and access the same information for each student, said Annette Torres, senior degree audit analyst.

The integration of the various advisement centers into a single physical space will clarify the advisement process for students, Goering said. “About 2/3 of students will be walking to the same building to get their advising,” he said. “It will be a building, not an organizational chart.”

The renovation of the Student Services Center is slated to begin in November, Goering said. At the same time, the department will be structurally remodeled. “It will be more like a management group with a bunch of different units in different divisions doing different things,” he said. “They are all important to the success of the University and have diverse tasks.

But, at the particular mission of advising students, they all have to work from the same playbook and do things in similar ways in order to accomplish their mission.”

Matthew said she supports both the creation of a central advisement building and sharing information between various departments.