First-Generation Advisor Retention: Literature Review G.Rankin

GR
by Greg Rankin3 views·Updated Apr 20, 2023
Re-use contentCreate your own

First-Generation college advisors, their impacts on first-generation college students, and their retention.

Audio TranscriptAuto-generated

  1. Hi, everyone.
  2. My name is Greg Rankin and I am
  3. presenting on first generation college advisor retention.
  4. It's going to be a literature review discussion,
  5. which is the precursor to my larger study.
  6. I'm doing this as a conference proposal for the Nakata annual conference
  7. today.
  8. I'm going to talk about first generation college
  9. students and a little bit of their background,
  10. a little bit about why academic advising can impact their retention levels.
  11. And then I'm going to pivot and talk about the great resignation in higher education
  12. and how it relates to advisor attention and then larger research goals
  13. who are first generation college students.
  14. There is a huge debate about this issue,
  15. but I'm going to stick with the Higher Education Act of 1965 definition,
  16. which is that first generation college students are those
  17. whose parents have not completed a four year degree.
  18. So why is this important? Right.
  19. So what there's some people on campus whose parents didn't go to college?
  20. Well,
  21. they're often left behind in terms of
  22. their retention and graduation rates in college and
  23. a lot of studies, two of which are
  24. scala and page found that first gen students
  25. are an increasing percentage of overall college students.
  26. So as the percentage goes up,
  27. we need to look at how to kind of decrease
  28. the gap between traditional college students and first generation students.
  29. So I wanna start by talking about how students are retained very, very briefly,
  30. Vincent Tinto in leaving college argued that students are
  31. more likely to be retained when they're able to find
  32. a strong sense of community on campus when they
  33. become integrated academically between the institution and the faculty.
  34. Students who are first gen in a lot of ways,
  35. have an increased self efficacy because they're breaking kind
  36. of their family molds and they're going to college,
  37. which is great.
  38. However,
  39. um Pizzolatto
  40. found
  41. that even though they have this high self efficacy,
  42. it's diminished in college because they don't have the support structures,
  43. the background information that they need,
  44. this was
  45. this finding was backed up by Collier and Morgan who also found that students have a
  46. lack of background knowledge that helps them overcome
  47. kind of the normal college going problems.
  48. Furthermore,
  49. grace
  50. and Long
  51. Grace in 2008,
  52. found that first generation students are more
  53. likely to feel too intimidated to interact with
  54. faculty because they don't have the same social
  55. capital as their traditional college going peers,
  56. this in inability to work with faculty. Um
  57. kind of goes against what Tinto was arguing and that
  58. you need that connection in order to do well.
  59. So what on earth do we do
  60. well, it might seem like I'm biased because I'm an advisor.
  61. But the research does back that advising helps first
  62. generation college students be retained at a higher level.
  63. In fact, in 2012, Schwebel and their colleagues found
  64. that for first generation students advising outreach,
  65. effectively increased students number of professional advising appointments.
  66. So you're thinking, ok,
  67. why are important appointments important in a different study?
  68. Ser and their colleagues found that for every meeting with an advisor,
  69. the odds that a first generation student is retained goes up by 13%.
  70. So for every meeting, it goes up by 13%
  71. and
  72. outreach makes you come in. More
  73. working with advisors helps a lot. So a lot of the reasons for this are found in
  74. and pages
  75. studies.
  76. We're finding that these connections with advisers help kind of
  77. connect they like bridge the gap between the institution,
  78. student and faculty advisors can serve that role to
  79. help students feel a little bit more comfortable.
  80. And a lot of that is connections and relationships, right? This makes a lot of sense.
  81. Essentially advisors stand in as a campus connection when faculty seem
  82. too intimidating.
  83. However, right now,
  84. we're all quitting. So why is everyone quitting
  85. in an online Nakata publication.
  86. Gregerson cites the volume of work,
  87. the lack of institutional support and the emotional labor that
  88. often comes along with advising that coupled with compassion fatigue
  89. is contributing to many advisers fleeing the field
  90. in 2021 mcclure argued that higher ed
  91. employees are actually describing themselves as demoralized.
  92. I think a lot of us can kind of feel that and
  93. I want to look at ways that we can mitigate those problems.
  94. OK.
  95. Moving forward,
  96. I would like to argue that while advisors
  97. are key to increasing first gen student success
  98. advisers who were once first gen students themselves
  99. can provide an increased level of support.
  100. No one is talking about this.
  101. I presented at this conference in 2018
  102. about being a first gen advisor and the skills I bring to my students.
  103. And
  104. after that presentation,
  105. there was an outpouring of support and lots of other first
  106. gen advisors talked about how no one talks about it,
  107. but they really feel like
  108. they do great work and there's no research on it.
  109. I've had follow ups discussions with people there, there isn't any for this.
  110. I've looked and I have not been able to find any research looking at this
  111. since that presentation
  112. on
  113. a publication argued that using intrusive advising
  114. techniques with students and being willing to share
  115. experiences as first generation advisors can create
  116. a high level of validation in students.
  117. I can't agree more. This level of validation
  118. will help build those connections.
  119. And I think we'll do it at a at a
  120. quicker rate and probably with fewer appointments than others.
  121. So you can see the research questions I'm asking in my research
  122. and I hope this presentation can be a starting point
  123. to both start the conversation amongst advisors
  124. and to draw more attention to this unique
  125. and arguably growing population of advisers and
  126. the support we can give to students,
  127. essentially
  128. what this population of advisers is doing. That is unique
  129. or what are we doing?
  130. That's unique and what can we be can be done so that
  131. we don't feel the burnout associated with working in higher education.
  132. Anyway. Thank you for listening and have a great day.