Academic advisers help students remain in school by providing information about services known to decrease the effect of factors linked to withdrawal from academic study. Advisers can provide students who are family breadwinners with information that explains academic-success services and addresses family-related concerns. Student breadwinners, defined here as independent students with dependents, accounted for 27.1 percent of undergraduates and 33.7 percent of graduate students enrolled during the 2003–2004 academic year (National Center for Education Statistics, 2008). During the 1999–2000 academic year, women accounted for 62 percent of undergraduate students who had family obligations, and 69 percent of the women were single parents (Peter & Horn, 2005). Unlike others, these students are challenged to perform well in class while simultaneously attending to family needs and responsibilities.
Wlodkowski, Mauldin, and Campbell (2002) interviewed students who were family providers to identify the factors that led to their withdrawal from academic study. There were two basic causes: financial concerns and a lack of time to perform family, job, and student tasks. The interviewees did not identify difficulty with academic work as a major cause of their withdrawal from study; yet services available to enhance academic skills figure dominantly in most student retention plans (Kuo, Hagie, & Miller, 2004). With an understanding of the importance of academic-assistance services and information from the Wlodkowski et al. study, it appears that the most helpful advising information for student breadwinners addresses the following: academic assistance services such as tutoring, writing, and computation workshops; financial aid information focused on grants, loans, and scholarships that meet tuition and related costs; and information about local, state, and federal programs that help students with childcare and household expenses.
Most advisers are knowledgeable about academic support services on their campuses and are familiar with the names of campus staff and administrators who have financial aid expertise. Advisers might not be as familiar with programs that provide financial assistance to families to meet utility, health care, prescription drug, and daycare costs. Individuals knowledgeable about these programs often are faculty in social work programs and staff members working with federally funded academic support programs. Developing relationships with faculty and others who are informed about these programs is a strategy that keeps advisers current about benefits and programs designed to help breadwinners remain enrolled in academic study. For example, it is likely that social-work faculty, because of their commitment to effectively functioning families, would be familiar with Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS), a program that helps students with limited annual incomes pay for childcare costs (U.S. Department of Education, 2008).
Advisers can also obtain information about assistance services for students with families by browsing the websites of organizations, such as the Council for Opportunity in Education (COE), that are committed to helping low-income students, nontraditional students, and current and former members of the military succeed in higher education. COE (www.coenet.us) features news summaries and developments of particular interest to low-income students, as well as an online calculator to determine if a student qualifies for assistance to meet utility expenses (Council for Opportunity in Education, 2007).
The Council of College and Military Educators (CCME, available at www.ccmeonline.org) advocates for policies that address the educational needs of currently serving military personnel. Veterans Upward Bound (VUB, available at education.military.com/timesaving-programs/veterans-upward-bound-vub) provides veterans with remediation services that enable them to qualify for entry into academic study.
Routine visits to the CCME or any VUB website or to campus staff members who work with veterans and currently serving military personnel result in a continuous pipeline of accurate information about services available to help veterans prepare for entry into academic study. Candidates can also learn about financial incentives that are part of programs that target veterans for entry into the teaching profession.
The Association for Non-Traditional Students in Higher Education (ANTSHE, available at www.antshe.org) provides links to scholarships, news briefs, and helpful resources for adult students. One ANTSHE resource is AdultStudent.com, a site associated with an academic-success guide for adult students. Authors Al Siebert and Mary Karr post helpful stories and suggestions from other students, such as a family provider named Melinda, who describes reading a textbook while rocking her baby; and a Harvard undergraduate, Liz Murray, whose biography includes her experience as a homeless child of cocaine-addicted parents (AdultStudent.com, 2008).
As Wlodkowski et al. (2002) reported, students who support themselves and other dependents are strapped for time. For this reason, it is very important that advising reach these students via venues that require a limited expenditure of their time. The advising strategies suggested by Aiken-Wisniewski and Allen (2005) accommodate such students. Aiken-Wisniewski and Allen suggest that advisers answer questions and dispense information aboard shuttle buses that transport students from parking facilities to classroom buildings. Another suggestion recommends that advisers provide information while walking about the campus and wearing t-shirts that clearly identify them as advisers. Another idea is to station an adviser in a lobby area to solicit questions from students. Depending on the questions, the adviser either provides an immediate answer or makes an advising appointment for students who need a detailed response. Another idea proposes attaching advising information on cardboard cartoon characters strategically placed in high-traffic areas on the campus.
Metaphors that equate attaining an academic degree with finishing an arduous journey or successfully completing a marathon abound in the literature. If advisers compare images of participants in the Boston Marathon to the techniques suggested by Aiken-Wisniewski and Allen (2005) for conveying advising information to students on the run, what appears is a full-blown image of advisers stationed along the course to hand out bottles of water infused with advising information. Their gestures may represent small acts of concern, but the effect on student psyches and the motivation to stay the course is significant.