Southern New Hampshire University is turning to automated tools to bolster its adviser-student relationships, particularly among its huge online student population.
Chrislene Georges, seen here during a photo shoot in Boston, began pursuing a college degree after she graduated from Manchester Memorial High School in 2013. She said developing a relationship with her academic adviser helped her finish her degree.
Southern New Hampshire University is turning to automated tools to bolster its adviser-student relationships, particularly among its huge online student population.
Southern New Hampshire University is changing how it helps students get to the finish line, as it experiences a pandemic-driven increase in the number of first-time college students — many a year or two out of high school — pursuing online degrees.
Delivering support to a student body spread out around the world, without the opportunity to develop in-person relationships, was already a challenge, but university leaders say they are always working to keep students engaged, through a mix of tools to measure student engagement online, and old-fashioned relationships with the university’s corps of academic advisers.
At any institution, advisers are key to helping students graduate on time and with degrees. They make sure students enroll in the right classes and help them connect to support services like writing help and tutoring. Because most of the SNHU student body is not on campus, walking past the writing center and studying in the library, advisers have to be highly proactive about putting resources in front of students.
“Almost so they’ll trip over them,” said Matthew Thornton, the university’s vice president for customer experience.
More than 170,000 SNHU students are online only, compared with about 3,000 on campus. At conventional colleges, students who have declared majors are assigned a professor as their adviser. But at SNHU, only advisers have the job of advising students.
Thornton said many of SNHU’s academic advisers are recent college graduates themselves, many of them SNHU graduates. They have heavy caseloads — upward of 200 students, with as many as 250 students each.
He hopes advisers are getting the resources students need to succeed in college, but the work is a challenge.
Graduation rates at Southern New Hampshire University are substantially lower than for almost all of New Hampshire’s in-person colleges, with the difference especially stark for first-time college students.
Including the tens of thousands of online students along with the 3,000 students on campus in Manchester, SNHU has graduation rates lower than almost every other four-year college in New Hampshire, according to federal data.
Just under 40% of students graduate with a bachelor’s degree from SNHU within six years of starting college there. Compare that to the 78% graduation rate for the University of New Hampshire, or 62% at Keene State College. In New Hampshire, only New England College has a lower graduation rate, at 33%.
Adviser relationship
College was a winding road for Chrislene Georges, who began trying to get a degree after graduating from Manchester Memorial High School in 2013.
“I didn’t have enough help,” Georges said.
She started a health sciences degree at Fisher College in Massachusetts, considered changing majors to pre-law and transferred to Southern New Hampshire University. Then she switched to an online-only marketing program through SNHU and eventually finished an online associate’s degree in fashion merchandising at Middlesex Community College in Massachusetts.
Chrislene Georges, seen here during a photo shoot in Boston, began pursuing a college degree after she graduated from Manchester Memorial High School in 2013. She said developing a relationship with her academic adviser helped her finish her degree.
Provided by Chrislene Georges
It wasn’t until she transferred to community college that Georges found the support she needed and the right fit for her academic journey. Even though she was primarily an online student, Georges said developing a relationship with her adviser helped her finally finish her degree.
“It was really nice working with her,” Georges said, learning from her adviser’s experience in the fashion business and feeling supported through her classes.
Tech support
Thornton said the advising model at SNHU is built around the adviser-student relationship. But that relationship is increasingly bolstered with automated tools, he said, especially as SNHU’s student body and advising caseloads have exploded in the past 10 years.
Although a national association for academic advisers does not mention standards for caseloads, adviser loads have more than quadrupled at SNHU, from 50 students per adviser in 2012, to more than 200 today, though Thornton noted that most advisers take on between 10 and 50 new students each term.
The university also can use real-time information it collects on students’ progress through assignments, and Thornton said SNHU is looking at ways to send an automated nudge to remind the student to post on the online class forum or submit an assignment to the writing center for editing.
“We like to measure engagement with our students in a slightly different way,” Thornton said.
Where an in-person professor might make note of how often a student participates during class, Thornton said SNHU tracks how often students respond when their advisers call, text and email. They track how often and how long students log into online classrooms, whether or not they download syllabi and assignments and even how long they spend with their digital textbooks open.
Advisers use these technological tools — not available to advisers of in-person students — to get a sense of how students are doing. Systems help advisers keep track of how engaged their students are and automatically pinpoint who might need more attention.
“We’ve got a lot of different data,” Thornton said.
Robot ready
The university also is exploring more automated supports for students who need help. Thornton said he thought students might be more willing to confide in a robot if they are having a hard time — and the robot can then direct them to the support they need, whether it be tutoring or health-related.
The SNHU approach differs from many smaller-scale colleges, where online and in-person students are paired with professors as academic advisers, who engage regularly with their students, though they may not have the same data on time spent with a textbook.
As Georges, the Manchester student, got closer to finishing her degree at Middlesex Community College, she said her adviser was critical to making sure she was on track to graduate. She knew the department and had worked in the field, so she had subject matter expertise in addition to knowledge about the college’s resources.
When Georges wasn’t able to land an internship during her last semester — a part of the major’s graduation requirements — her adviser helped her negotiate college bureaucracy to make sure she could still get her diploma.
Making the Grade is a reporting effort dedicated to covering education in New Hampshire. It is sponsored by the New Hampshire Solutions Journalism Lab at the Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications and is funded by the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, Northeast Delta Dental, the Education Writers Association and the Institute for Citizens & Scholars.
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