May 2025

Today’s institutions must provide holistic support to help students navigate the complex demands of their personal, professional and academic lives. And as Gateway’s student population evolves, so must our advising practices to effectively meet these needs.

At Gateway, students start with an Academic Advisor, transitioning to a Faculty Advisor halfway through their program, but this creates challenges for students, faculty and advisors. To enhance the student experience, retention and graduation rates, Gateway is restructuring its advising model and leveraging technology to assist students with clear, comprehensive academic plans and adding support to help students complete those plans on time.

Goal Statement

Improve advising with a comprehensive model where Academic Advisors remain with students throughout their program while simultaneously developing the technology to identify students who are no longer following their academic plan. These changes will help improve schedule predictability, increase retention and progression, and ultimately shorten the time to program completion.

Work To Date

After exploring if and how Gateway’s advising model supports and achieves retention goals, the team used data, including assessment, survey, and focus group information, to determine the path forward to improve student outcomes.

Simultaneously, the team has defined exactly what off-plan means for Gateway students, settling on a definition that off-plan students lack an academic plan, register for courses not required in their program, have unsatisfactory progress, etc. Using this definition, Gateway’s Information Systems team in collaboration with Advising launched a tool in Spring 2025 to flag off-plan students.

Short-Term Goals

Starting Fall 2025, students will remain with an Academic Advisor through the entirety of their program. Faculty will no longer directly serve as faculty advisors supporting students with advising or course selection. Instead, all faculty across the college will continue to focus on building intentional student relationships, including developing industry connections, sharing content expertise and overall program support.

In addition, utilizing the college’s Advise Customer Relationship Management software, academic plan- related alerts for advisors will be created to help support them in their work to keep students on track to on-time graduation.

Questions? Please email Olivia Mayen at mayeno@gtc.edu.

Committee Members

Olivia Mayen (Committee Lead) – Director, Academic Advising
Amanda Robillard – CRM Manager
Charles Jacob – Programmer/Analyst, Information Systems
Amy Fontaine – Academic Advisor
Christina Sima – Nursing Instructor
Desmar McDuffie – Student Support Specialist, Multicultural Programs
Gina Stobe – Faculty Advising Coordinator
Steve McNaughton – Dean, School of Business & Transportation
Suzanne Sublette – Instructor of Sociology
Travis Jansen – Registrar
Yoceline Vargas – Academic Advisor