Chapter Two

In chapter 2, the authors discuss two main ideas that impact newly matriculating students at many community colleges. One, community colleges do not have good relationships with local high schools and two, the student orientation and advising process is generally very brief and surface level. The advising perspectives that the authors mention is what I will discuss in this post. This chapter delves into the importance of advising - especially what the authors define as "developmental advising". This theory of advising, according to the authors, encompasses helping students build self-awareness regarding their academic and personal strengths and skills and helps them draw connections to various careers and occupations. This process however, is more intensive and long term.

The authors also discuss how students success courses can do a lot to improve academic (cognitive) and non-cognitive skills such as perseverance.  Additionally, the authors suggest that e-advising tools and early alert systems (used in conjunction with effective advising staff) can be useful student supports in the helping students succeed.

Although long-term developmental advising and student support courses tend to be correlated with positive student outcomes, the majority of community colleges do not have these resources available to incoming students. One strategy, suggests the authors, is to employ e-tools that can free advisors up from more mundane activities (like course selection assistance) so they can free more time up for doing more intensive developmental advising with students.

To contextualize these ideas, the community college I work for has just implemented a pathways advising model that pairs one advisor to one student and moves away from programmatic advisors which change as the students' degree pathways changes (evolves). I feel that this one-on-one longer term student relationship has the potential for better and more consistent advising - which will hopefully lead to improve student engagement and persistence.