Leading Academic Advising Redesign and Reform at Community Colleges
Gerald V. Bourdeau, Lyle McKinney, Mimi Lee, Yolanda M. BarnesObjective:
Timely and effective academic advising is critical to community college student success. As colleges engage in initiatives aimed at accelerating completion rates, many institutions are simultaneously working to implement new advising structures that bolster the success of these initiatives. Our goal was to identify the major challenges community colleges face in the early stages of reforming academic advising services—and to identify strategies for successfully overcoming these challenges.
Methods:
The context for our qualitative case study was Urban Community College (UCC, a pseudonym) in Texas, one of the nation’s largest and most racially diverse community college systems. Over a 3-year period aligned with UCC’s advising reform efforts, we conducted interviews and focus groups with 115 participants (78 students, 33 academic advisors, 4 administrators) to better understand this large-scale organizational change process.
Results:
Our findings underscore the foundational importance of establishing continuity and consistency in advising processes across different campus locations. Leadership transitions, employee turnover, and differing attitudes about the current advising structures slowed the advising redesign. While community colleges often possess the integral structures for effective advising systems (e.g., early alerts, technology solutions), our findings emphasis the importance of a consistent, shared-leadership approach to advising transformation.
Conclusions:
The key to academic advising redesign lies in bringing together multiple stakeholder groups from across the institution to engage in a prolonged, shared leadership effort to generate transformational change. Promisingly, our data illuminate strategies that community colleges can leverage to overcome these challenges and strengthen advising systems in ways that maximize student success.