EDITORIAL: Curing College advising's ills

Advising for College students is inadequate, but Dean Beeman's efforts to restructure the system are right on target. But the good news is this: Since everyone agrees that the system needs to get better, administrators have been able to focus on how to go about doing it. The major problem with the current College advising system is that it impedes the development of relationships between students and their advisors by limiting their opportunities to interact; this, in turn, prevents advisors from providing valuable long-term direction to students. The current system is also structurally flawed, burdening students with four separate advisors -- peer, faculty, College Office and residential -- and creating confusion as to whom should be contacted with which questions. An astonishing 73 percent of surveyed students in a recent Daily Pennsylvanian poll could not name all four of their advisors. Furthermore, it is not enough to simply assign students to advisors. Penn must find ways of encouraging faculty to take the job seriously, either through some form of monetary compensation, by crediting the hours spent advising toward a professor's teaching requirement, or by some other means. The College advising system must adjust to meet these challenges, and we applaud College Dean Richard Beeman for taking the lead in that restructuring process. Beeman's emphasis on the need to provide freshmen with "an unambiguous point of first contact" is right on target. And we believe his suggestion that students be assigned one advisor for the duration of their undergraduate Penn careers is an excellent means of fostering long-term relationships between advisors and students. Opportunities for bringing advisors and their students together in academic settings are also worth exploring. Finally, we would like to commend Beeman for reaching out to administrators at several peer institutions, inviting them to campus and asking them for suggestions on how to improve the College advising system.