During the last week of September, undergraduate New School students throughout the university began to receive emails from advising announcing that, as of October, the roles of their academic and career advisors would be combined and performed by a single person.
This change came as a surprise to the New School’s student body, as well as to employees of the Center for Student Success, which is the university’s administrative body that houses advising, career services, and student affairs.
Student Success was created in 2014 to centralize advising and career services for all New School divisions, and it additionally brought all student affairs departments — which range from the Office of Student Development and Activities, to health services, to student housing — under one administrative body. Since this change, advisors still work within specific schools, and they all report to the Vice President for Student Success.
“Only 9% of the student population was actually using our career services area, which is really low,” she said, adding that, conversely, 81% of New School students were regularly making appointments with their academic advisors.
“Instead of visiting a separate office for career advice, you will be able to have an ongoing, holistic conversation with a professional Academic + Career Advisor, who is here to support you as you design your own unique degree pathway, discover passions that will shape your future endeavors, and prepare to effect change in the world after graduation,” said the announcements about the new advising system sent to students across New School divisions.
Michelle Relyea, the Vice President for Student Success, told The New School Free Press that the change in advising structure is an extension of the larger goals of Student Success.
“Professional outcomes are a very big part of the whole Student Success model. The idea was to create this sort of arch of the student experience that includes not only what you’re doing on the academic side, but how you’re tying that into what you want to do professionally,” she said.
She explained that only a small portion of the student body was previously making use of the university’s career services. “Only 9% of the student population was actually using our career services area, which is really low,” she said, adding that, conversely, 81% of New School students were regularly making appointments with their academic advisors.
“We’ve got thousands of jobs, thousands of internships, and it was the same cluster of unique students that used the [career services] office. With no one going to career services, we decided, why not bring it together [with academic advising] in more of a unified space?”
Relyea noted that another immediate benefit of the change is that each advisor’s caseload is now smaller, due to restructuring and the expansion of advising staff through the merging of the academic and career teams. “We understand that the conversation should be richer, and you should really get to know your students more, so the cases came down by about 25 students [per advisor],” she said.
By press time, the school’s communication office had not responded to The New School Free Press’s questions about whether this change will affect Student Success’s budget or advisor salaries.
The new model for advising is based on Tulane University’s advising model, Relyea said.
NSFP spoke to Amjad Ayoubi, who is a senior associate dean at Tulane and oversees Tulane’s advising programs.
Ayoubi said that Tulane began to centralize advising following Hurricane Katrina in 2006. It was initially done because of the practical need to centralize their campus during the rebuilding process after the hurricane. However, the centralization proved to be successful, and in 2009, the university implemented a combined academic and career advising program.
Throughout the evolution of Tulane’s advising program, other types of advisors for each Tulane student have been added, such as specific advisors for each major, as well as life coaches that work with students on a more personal level. Despite the fact that the advising program was started during hard times for the university, Ayoubi said that it has proven to be successful and has been praised by students and parents.
Many New School students whom the NSFP spoke to were apprehensive about the change and questioned the new advising system.
“The incompetence of our academic advisors is just beyond my understanding, [and] career services has always been a confusing department,” he said. “[Their unification] is the worst way to undercut the student body in general — especially the senior class.”
Maggie Cavaliere and Phi Tran, both Parsons Design and Management seniors, had strong negative reactions to the new advising system.
Tran said his previous academic advisor is now his sole advisor. He expressed that he is angry about the fact that, so close to his graduation in December, this advisor is now his contact to the university’s career services.
“The incompetence of our academic advisors is just beyond my understanding, [and] career services has always been a confusing department,” he said. “[Their unification] is the worst way to undercut the student body in general — especially the senior class.”
Cavaliere, on the other hand, said her advisors have been great — but that they’re already stretched too thin. “My advisor is lovely and has always been helpful, but she handles half [of the Design and Management] program,” she said. “The fact that they’re combining [academic and career advising] roles is mind-blowing considering the amount of students [my advisor] works with already.”
Tran said he has used career services a number of times in the past, but has mostly been disappointed with the experience and did not feel it added anything of value to his career development. He said, for example, that one of the career advisors he met with last year simply showed him a few job-searching websites that Tran had already been using.
Cavaliere said she is nervous about seeing what comes of this advising change during her senior year. “It’s unfair that we’re in our last year and this is happening now,” she said.
Relyea offered advice to students who feel negatively about the merging of academic and career advising. “Engage with your advisor,” she said. “Ask them what you need to be successful. Tell them, ‘these are the things that I don’t understand, these are the things I need, these are the resources that I need.’”
She questioned whether The New School will now be lacking the dedicated career services staff that other private institutions have.
Tran agreed, saying, “I feel so cheated. We’re paying close to the same tuition as Columbia and NYU.”
Relyea offered advice to students who feel negatively about the merging of academic and career advising. “Engage with your advisor,” she said. “Ask them what you need to be successful. Tell them, ‘these are the things that I don’t understand, these are the things I need, these are the resources that I need.’”
Not all students have a negative outlook of the change. Maria Zabolotnaya, a Communication Design sophomore at Parsons, said she sees the change as “helpful, because now [students] don’t have to make two appointments.”
She explained that she isn’t apprehensive about advisors’ abilities to fulfill both academic and career advising roles because she trusts the administration’s judgment about executing the change in a way that is beneficial to the students. “As long as [advisors] are all getting training to do both, I’m not nervous about it,” she said.
Relyea said that advisors are currently undergoing an eighteen-month-long training period, consisting of webinars and biweekly advisor forums, to be able to fulfill both roles as best as possible.
The New School Free Press attempted to speak to current advising directors in each college about issues such as proper training, salaries, and unrealistic workloads, but they all either declined to comment, did not respond, or referred questions to The New School’s Communications Office and to Relyea.
However, the NSFP spoke with students, as well as some former Student Success staff, who expressed confusion about the fact that this new structure was implemented and announced in the middle of the semester.
In response, Relyea said that it was in actuality an opportune time for the change.
“Here’s the reality: the university keeps moving — it’s on a schedule. There’s never a time when the university just stops so we can fix things. At some point, you’re going to have to make a change. We try to pick the best time to make that change.”
She said they picked a date before midterms and before students were thinking about spring registration.
Most former recent employees of Student Success’s career services either did not respond to the New School Free Press’s requests for comment or declined to be interviewed for this story. One former career advisor, however, spoke to the NSFP on the condition of anonymity.
The former advisor said that employees of career services within the Center for Student Success knew that the initiative to merge academic and career advising was an option that administrators were discussing for a few small programs; however, the anonymous source noted that details and a specific strategy were left vague.
“The why and the how were not communicated,” the former advisor said. Even after it was suddenly announced to career services staff in the weeks leading up to the start of the fall semester that the initiative would be put into place, the past employee noted that details continued to be obscure and that there didn’t seem to be a clear or cohesive strategy.
Hasin Ahmed, who was hired by Student Success’s Career Services in 2014 as their first data analyst and who left this past August, agreed with the anonymous former advisor’s thoughts about how sudden the change seemed.
The former advisor spoke of the experience working with Student Success administrators as “a blur,” largely due to Student Success’s decisions that the past advisor saw as unnecessary. The anonymous source went as far as to say that it thinks the overall decisions of Student Success administrators were “not in service to the students.”
“A lot went on,” Ahmed said of his two years of working for Career Services. “We expanded quite a few positions, we hired different counselors for specific schools, [and] also many people left. There were constant changes.”
The university-wide changes that have occurred in advising and in student affairs are mostly recent, taking place since the Center for Student Success was created in 2014.
Jonathon White, who is a current associate dean of students at NYU, was the associate dean of Student Affairs, Academic Advising & Student Support at The New School for eleven years until he left in 2015.
He described the university’s advising system as “fairly stable” for most of his time at The New School — until the Center for Student Success was created.
Of the initial push for the centralization of advising by Student Success, he said, “What ultimately was implemented was having all of the advising offices folded into the same department as financial aid and career services. I don’t know that that clearly followed as kind of the remedy. I’m not entirely sure what problems were expected to be solved,” he said. “This was also the discussion at many faculty meetings — the question of what problem are we trying to solve, precisely.”
Relyea recognized the occasional lack of communication between Student Success administrators and the wider New School community that various students and former Student Success employees pointed out.
“I think that for many of the faculty, they felt like there was a system that was in place and working, and had been open to small adjustments that were responsive to student need. The idea of having a more radical centralization, especially one that moved a critical department [i.e.: advising] that interacted with students away from the faculty and away from the [academic] dean — it wasn’t clear how that solved a particular problem,” White said.
Relyea recognized the occasional lack of communication between Student Success administrators and the wider New School community that various students and former Student Success employees pointed out.
“I think some of [the problem] is that people aren’t listening, or the information isn’t being disseminated down,” she said. “We’re a pretty open unit here, so if people aren’t hearing about it, it’s concerning. We’ve tried to provide as much information as we can about changes that are happening. Some of the changes are university-wide and structural. So in some ways they’re not my responsibility to talk about.”
She added that, although students “are a part of many of decisions” that have been made by Student Success, some decisions are “univeristy priorities” that come down from university leadership, which she said includes the president, the provost, and her boss, the Chief Enrollment and Success Officer.
“Decisions are made — and they’re not made in a vacuum — but there are leadership decisions that are made to move the university forward. And then it’s like, OK, this is what we’re going to do, and then I have to execute on it,” she said. “So in some cases, it is the way it is, and you have to move forward with it.”
Illo: Alex Gilbeaux