Community College Times
New college students can drown in a sea of choices
By Ellie Ashford
May 10, 2013 

Students at Macomb Community College (Michigan) seek help at the enrollment services desk. 

“She gave me a list of general things that I can pick from. It was such a big list that I didn’t really know where to start.” 

“It’s like they get you in and out as fast as possible. They threw some papers at you, and then, like, 'Have a good one.'” 

“I have no idea what basic courses you have to take, your prerequisites. The [advisor] couldn’t tell me that because apparently they are all different for wherever you want to go.” 

Those comments from students in focus groups at Macomb Community College (MCC) in Michigan illustrate common frustrations with the advising process. Students at large community colleges who aren’t sure what programs to pursue often get confused about the large array of choices. As a result, they sometimes take the wrong courses or even give up on college. 

Officials at MCC, a huge institution with 48,000 students and more than 200 programs, were concerned about whether students were having trouble figuring what courses to take, so they asked the Community College Research Center (CCRC) at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York to help. CCRC hosted focus groups of MCC students to assess their experiences with in-person and online advising, conducted surveys and proposed recommendations for improving the system. 

The co-authors of the study, Shanna Smith Jaggars, senior research associate, and Jeffrey Fletcher, senior research assistant at CCRC, along with MCC Vice President for Student Services Jill Little, gave a presentation on their research findings, titled “Navigating a Sea of Choices: The Community College Student Perspective,” at the American Association of Community Colleges’ annual convention last month. The study is expected to be published in the next few months. 

Confusing options 

“When you have a large comprehensive community college, you have a large, diverse array of students, so you have a large array of programs,” Jaggars said. “That’s fine when students know what they want to do; it’s problematic when they don’t.” 

And even if students do have a career in mind, selecting courses is especially confusing if they want to transfer because universities have different requirements. 

Updating academic advising for the 21st century

Many students are the first in their families to attend college, so their parents and siblings can’t help them navigate the enrollment process, Jaggars added. Also, “the stakes are higher in community college. If students take a course that they later realize isn’t for credit, they may feel they wasted their money and could decide the whole college-going enterprise doesn’t make sense for them.” 

According to the findings from the CCRC study, MCC students generally found the advising session efficient—if they knew what they wanted to do, Jaggars said. Those who were uncertain found the session less helpful. In general, most students appreciated that there were online resources available to them, such as the course catalog, which lists the requirements for various programs, and the online degree audit, which tells students what courses they’ve taken and what they need. 

Some students, however, had trouble finding what they needed online, while others “wanted to talk to a real person or didn’t trust their ability to navigate the online system,” Jaggars said. In some cases, students “were totally bewildered about the transfer process.” And some students rushed through the online orientation, so their advisor had to spend time redoing that with them. 

More efficient advising 

Although the results from the focus groups “affirmed what we already know,” Little said, “they gave us an opportunity to look at our process from the student’s perspective.” The findings helped MCC officials realize how confusing it could be for first-generation students and “helped us make sure we explain things in a way that makes sense to them,” she said… 

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