Staff Editorial: The Educational (Non)-Advisory Center

COAS students have long been the subject of jokes about post-graduation unemployment, in comparison to their School of Communications, and especially their School of Business counterparts.

However, the difficulty that many COAS students have acquiring the necessary information to make it to graduation, let alone succeeding beyond that, has also become a notorious phenomenon.

One of the biggest problems between students and advisers in the Educational Advisory Center (EAC) may be a lack of communication. For example, one of the results of The Hilltop's Quality of Educational Experience survey that appeared in the "State of HU" special issue found that the majority of students don't know where their adviser's office is.

While that poll did not separate the results according to schools and colleges, COAS's system of separate university and departmental advisers has long been a source of frustration and confusion for students.

While this assessment applies to the office as a whole and not necessarily to individuals, many students complain of being uncertain about whom to ask questions concerning what courses to take, as well as about sometimes being given misinformation about course selection.

Often taking place in the middle of or at the end of each semester when it is too late for students to correct any missteps, the poorly advertised and haphazardly executed class round-up in the overcrowded, microphone-less Locke 105 is not sufficient to ensure that students are on track for graduation.

Although students are responsible for obtaining their graduation schemes and for visiting their advisers on their own, the information needs to be streamlined and distributed in a much more effective way.

Another factor that often hinders the advisory experience is that there are too few advisers for all of the students in the College of Arts and Sciences. It is no wonder that certain students are turned away at certain times of the day or are unable to develop truly beneficial relationships with their EAC advisers when each adviser is assigned to hundreds of students. COAS students suffer if they do not have advisers who have the time to be personally invested in their futures.

Many students have also noted that in order to truly function as advisers and to benefit students in the best way possible, there should be some sort of collaboration between the EAC and the pre-professional center where advisers not only inform students of what courses to take in order to graduate, but where they also tailor their academic suggestions to offer career placement advice, resume building, and graduate and professional school preparation.

Many students feel that the pre-professional center itself is too tailored to pre-law and pre-med students with little guidance for students who aren't interested in either of those fields. How many more students don't even know that the pre-professional center and the EAC are different things?

Still even the most responsible, informed, and conscientious students cannot escape the uncertainty and the attitudes often associated with the EAC. We all know that "service with a smile" is sometimes too much to ask for at Howard, but no one wants to ask a question if he or she is afraid of being condescended toward or dismissed.

For an office responsible for facilitating the most important aspect of our Howard lives—graduation—that's a dangerous problem that we cannot afford to have.

Our View: Significant changes and improvements need to be made to COAS's Educational Advisory Center.