Even though advising is a part of every Syracuse University student’s college experience, a recent survey has found the process is not up to par.

“I’m displeased with the advising service at SU. It is confusing and rather unhelpful,” a student commented in the survey.

Students made 362 other negative comments like this in the Undergraduates for a Better Education’s report that was released early last week. The report, which features the findings of a survey conducted in the spring of 2013, showed feedback about advising at SU, specifically in the College of Arts and Sciences and gave recommendations on how to solve the problems in advising.

UBE was founded at SU in 1986 as a student-lobbying group that strives to strengthen undergraduate education and garner student opinion.

Sawyer Cresap, a junior policy studies major and co-president of UBE, said the group received a high number of negative comments about advising in the comment section of the fall 2013 report, which looked at higher education overall.

“That was in addition to the fact that advising is an issue that affects all students as a gateway to learning, and is something we saw that could easily be improved in key ways,” she said.

The group spent three months developing the survey, getting it approved by a review board and sending it to students. It then took them five months to write the report, Cresap said.

UBE received 787 responses to the survey, of which 46 percent were negative across all colleges. William Coplin, director of the public affairs program at SU and adviser to UBE, said that even though 14,000 students go to SU, 787 responses are still “better than nothing.” It gives UBE a starting point for future surveys and reports, he said.

Cresap said UBE expected a variety of comments from CAS students because it contains many different majors and there is no set track to earning a diploma. However, she said, the group was surprised by the amount of negative responses.

Kandice Salomone, associate dean of advising and academic support in the College of Arts and Sciences, said in an email the student feedback is extremely helpful for her team to develop more effective ways to work with students.

Several students voiced their concerns in UBE’s report.

“The Arts and Sciences advising system is terrible,” one student said. “Why the school thinks that a geologist will have any idea how to help an anthropologist in their course requirements is beyond me!”

The UBE report provided policy recommendations for CAS advising, including: increasing the number of professional advisers, providing more liberal arts core advisers, allowing more open office hours for the dean of advising, giving short surveys on the quality of advising each year and creating a new advising website.

Cresap said SU currently has a professional advising system, but it has more faculty advisers than professional advisers. She said the new professional advisers would be SU employees and bolster the ones SU already has.

To help make recommendations, the report compared SU’s advising system to those of peer universities, including Duke, Georgetown and Vanderbilt. UBE found that 12 of 13 peer universities assign students to professional academic advisers.

Chris Libonati, a freshman newspaper and online journalism and policy studies major and UBE member, said the current CAS advising website is hard to navigate. He said he thinks the website should be modeled after the University of Central Florida’s.

“The UCF website is kind of like one-stop shopping when it comes to advising,” he said. “Having a website like that would probably alleviate some pressure from advisers and students.”

Cresap said UBE met with Salomone, the associate dean of advising in Arts and Sciences, who said she was positive about the group’s recommendations and looks forward to working with Cresap and Emily Ballard, the group’s other co-president, in the future. She said she plans to gather additional feedback and review UBE’s recommendations.

“In the meantime, I also plan to implement UBE’s recommendations regarding our website,” Salomone said. “My goal is the same as UBE’s: to provide the highest quality academic advising services as possible.”

The group hopes the report will start a conversation at all levels of the university.

“We want students to recognize the structure of the university, the amazing teachers, the many bureaucracies, the many offices and to lean away from personal anecdotes and have an intimate knowledge of what is actually going on in advising,” said Nedda Sarshar, a freshman English and textual studies major and UBE member.

While UBE’s fall 2013 report looked into the quality of higher education at SU, UBE hopes this report will affect how funding is distributed, Cresap said.

Coplin, UBE’s adviser, said he appreciates what the group is doing to bring awareness to issues within SU.

Said Coplin: “I applaud UBE for trying to represent the interests of undergraduates in an institution that is supposed to be democratic. I applaud the existence of a group that is trying to hold the university to its commitments.”

Published on April 22, 2014 at 1:20 am

Contact Justin: jmatting@syr.edu | @jmattingly306