The voices of students should be heard in all aspects of education, especially in academic advising.

Academic advising is an integral part of a students’ college career. The adviser is supposed be an academic resource for its’ advisee; specifically, professional and scientific advisers a.k.a. P&S advisers. These advisers are hired staff members of the university, and are not considered to be faculty advisers.

“If you’re in a specific major, your adviser should be someone who is kind of the hub of information. They should be that go-to person if you have an issue, academic or non-academic, you can start with your adviser,” said Jane Jacobson program director for the liberal arts and sciences administration.

A P&S adviser is also important in helping students through the many transitions they will experience. Advisers need to make transitioning from coming into the university from a high school or other institution easier for students. Students also need help transitioning to where to go next, whether its graduate school, internships or employment, and the adviser should be the one to help with that.

However, those expectations may be a tall order for some advisers due to a large workload. And by workload, I mean student advisees. Some P&S advisers located around the university can be assigned anywhere from 100 to 300 student advisees.

In a survey conducted in 2011 by the University Academic Advising Committee, it was recommended that Iowa State reevaluate the workload P&S advisers were assigned.

According to the survey, “a slightly higher percentage of P&S advisers have more than 150 advisees. Advising loads are gradually increasing, which has the potential to negatively impact the advising experience for students.”

Unfortunately, “you will not find any place that Iowa State says exactly what an advising load should be. The institution has made the decision that that has to be determined at more of a department or college level,” Jacobson said.

The good news is, the need to address the workload of P&S advisers has been recognized and hiring is being done to take off some of the pressure.

Even with actions being taken to address some of the concerns with advising, not all concerns are being looked at, the voices of students.

“Ideally, there should be some opportunity annually or at least every other year for students to provide feedback on how advising is going,” Jacobson said.

Just like a survey that is given for a faculty member at the end of a class, a student should be able to do the same for his or her adviser.

“An adviser in some ways is a teacher, it is a class of one perhaps, but there is an academic relationship between you, and so if we were doing our jobs ideally we would be asking on an annual basis to have students provide us with feedback,” Jacobson said.

However, the academic advising committee will probably only continue to give out surveys about every five years.

This is because it is a lot of work. “You do a lot of work to survey students. The committee was looking at trends over time to see what the changes were, and to do it every year… probably isn’t a big difference but one year, to two or three years, you might start to see differences,” said Karen Zunkel program manager for the senior vice presidents and provost office.

Is there an interest to do the survey more frequently, maybe? Right now; however, it will remain set up for every five years.

“I think what we are most likely to hear when we don’t formalize that process is concerns from students where the relationship (between the adviser) isn’t working,” Jacobson said.

For those students who have questions, comments or concerns about their adviser feedback can be given within the advising student services office of each specific college.

“If it is a general concern, it can be taken to the GSB leadership. They meet with the leadership of the university and the academic leadership on a regular basis, and they could say ‘here is an issue that we are seeing and we think it needs to be addressed,’ and that can help prompt some more discussions from that direction,” Zunkel said.

It would be nice if there were a system where we were more diligent about asking to collect that information from students, Jacobson said.

“I think that student voices are always important and if a student has an opinion about an adviser I would hope he or she would find a way to share that,” Jacobson said.