Reevaluating academic advising

Dean Monique Rinere GS '00, who obtained her master's degree and Ph.D. from the University and served as director of studies and dean of Butler since 2000, has decided to leave Princeton to become Harvard's first associate dean of advising programs. We as a Board are concerned by this for two reasons. First, we are sorry that Dean Rinere, who has been with the University for so long and who has been a source of great help and encouragement to so many, has decided to leave the University. Second, it piques our interest that Harvard is making a high-profile push to improve its advising system when, as this Board argued last year, it would be a good idea for Princeton to do the same. In particular, we feel that the new four-year residential colleges are a wonderful opportunity for the University to make substantial improvements to the current advising system.

While the four-year college planning committee has made recommendations for improving academic advising, we recognize that these recommendations may not be perfect or comprehensive. The most significant way in which the new system will affect academic advising, as currently planned, is that nondepartmental academic advising of juniors and seniors will be transferred from West College deans to the deans and directors of studies of the residential colleges. We feel that this is, at best, a marginal improvement in nondepartmental advising for upperclassmen.

Whether the adviser for nondepartmental courses is a dean at West College or a dean or director of studies at a residential college, upperclassmen will still be assigned to a single nondepartmental adviser who is responsible for hundreds of other students in their class — and in the case of residential college deans and directors of studies, for freshmen and sophomores as well. The setup of such a system is such that upperclassmen turn to their nondepartmental advisers only in emergency situations, such as when they are missing an ST or HA needed to graduate. There is simply a lack of institutionalized nondepartmental advising support for juniors and seniors who are looking for ways to fulfill their distribution requirements or want advice on courses in a department that they are not familiar with.

In addition, it strikes us that the University administration does not appear to be fully exploring other possible improvements to the advising system that can be implemented along with the four-year residential colleges. These might include, though are certainly not limited to, recruiting more senior and tenured faculty to serve as advisers, improving the adviser-student ratio and introducing procedural checks to make sure that a student is on track to fulfill University distribution requirements.

Academic advisers are an important resource for undergraduates — they are the first mentors with whom students develop a personal relationship from the beginning of freshman year. With the start of the four-year residential college system coming in less than two years' time, the University should carefully consider and explore possible improvements to the advising system to facilitate the kind of great relationships that many in Butler enjoyed with Dean Rinere.