COLUMBUS -- Ohio State is consolidating, streamlining and expanding its advising services as the university continues to refine and improve the quality of undergraduate education and student life.

Relationships will be strengthened and enhanced among offices specializing in services to undergraduates – ranging from financial aid to academic advising to career counseling – to reduce the need for students to visit multiple offices across campus.

A component of the restructuring will involve combining the resources currently located in University College and in the advising unit of the Colleges of the Arts and Sciences. This merger will create the Office of Undergraduate Student Academic Services (USAS), which will report directly to the Office of Academic Affairs.

Executive Vice President and Provost Edward J. Ray said the more effective use of resources devoted to advising undergraduates represents action relating to two strategies outlined in the university’s Academic Plan: enhancing the quality of the teaching and learning environment, and enhancing and better serving the student body. Up to 15,000 students annually are expected to experience the benefits of the new structure.

The new office will primarily serve the academic advising needs of students enrolled in the traditional liberal arts and sciences, as well as students who have not decided on a major and those reconsidering their majors. Both currently are advised in University College.

Academic administrators note that along with this change, the university will more aggressively pursue directly enrolling entering students into their desired areas of study as early as possible. Historically, University College served as an “intake college” for students, who typically entered their major home colleges as juniors. Direct enrollment has been a growing trend already at Ohio State – a little more than half the freshmen entering in 2000 directly enrolled into their colleges, compared to about a third of the entering freshmen in 1999. Between 60 percent and 75 percent are expected to be able to directly enroll into their colleges next autumn.

That early connection to faculty and advisers specializing in a given discipline is key to making students feel at home at Ohio State, officials say. “Students need to be confident that this is their place, that they belong in their programs, that their majors will lead to their desired futures,” said Martha Garland, vice provost and dean for undergraduate studies. “When such feelings of identification occur, we know that students are increasingly likely to meet our goals for them: They are likely to stay, to prosper academically and to graduate.”

In addition to improving student life, the streamlined advising structure will reduce redundancies, eliminate administrative competition and provide optimal resources for service to students, Ray said.

“Students frequently tell us that their experience with academic advising produces mixed results,” Ray said. “We know that the volume of students each adviser must work with is a major contributing factor, and this restructuring will address that problem. For example, the number of administrative staff will be reduced from 16 to 8 and the number of academic advisers will be increased from 31 to 40 as a result of the consolidation of University College and Arts and Sciences advising activities. This change makes great fiscal sense and aligns our allocation of resources with a top priority: improving the chances that our undergraduates will be successful and ultimately will become graduates of The Ohio State University.”

Students who intend to enroll in undergraduate professional programs with preliminary entrance requirements, such as business or allied medicine, for example, also will be advised through the Arts and Sciences unit. However, the hope is that such programs eventually will take most, if not all, of their students directly into the colleges upon students’ admission to Ohio State.

“As direct enrollment is phased in, faculty and advisers will work with students from their freshmen year through the senior year and graduation, rather than inheriting them from University College when they are sophomores or juniors,” said Jack Cooley, who, under the restructuring, will be named assistant vice provost for undergraduate studies. “That gives students a much greater sense of continuity.”

Within the new unit specifically, student support will include: advising and scheduling services, tutoring and extended learning support, retention programs, academic and retention support for minority students, advising for students re-thinking major selection, pre-health sciences and pre-law advising, and monitoring of courses and programs with high demand.

The advising reorganization will involve some personnel shifts in the academic arena, though no loss of jobs is expected. As already noted, a reduction of administrative positions is planned, coinciding with an increase in the number of counselors available to work directly with students.

“We’re going to be organized to work together in different ways than we have in the past,” said Cooley, currently assistant dean in the Colleges of the Arts and Sciences, a federation of five colleges that collectively enroll about 10,000 undergraduates. “This will tighten the net of people who are already linked to the undergraduate experience.”

Cooley noted that the new structure will provide a better way to work with students according to their interests. “The best organization of advising resources is to structure them according to student interests. We want to make counseling both deeper and broader. We’ll build on the depth by strengthening the connections to colleges, departments and faculty, and we’ll create greater breadth by seamless linkages to a much wider variety of service offices than at present.

“Counselors specializing in biological sciences or the humanities will be connected with the departments and faculty in those colleges, but they also will be connected to an extensive array of academic, financial and personal support offices. To students, it should not appear to be a single kind of academic counseling. Rather, there will be a variety of academic and career-related clusters of counselors commingled in a seamless web of support.”

Cooley said the counseling specialties will be connected to many other offices – including the Office of Minority Affairs, the First Year Experience Office, those housed in the Younkin Success Center, the Honors and Scholars Center, and Residence and Dining Halls. “The aggregation of services will create a new spirit that will help people think of themselves as connected in a seamless way rather than having to move from silo to silo,” he said.

Administrative details concerning other functions operated by University College are yet to be finalized.

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(LO)