Abstract
This project explores the effects of an enhanced advising intervention at a large, public, 4-year institution on measures of students’ postsecondary progress, performance, and completion. The intervention privileges face-to-face* interaction with advisors and augments advising appointments with pieces of information often absent from discussions of academic planning and progress, such as up-to-date financial aid information. We partnered with a large, public institution in North Carolina. We provided feedback to staff at that institution as they crafted the intervention to address students’ needs and reflect the institutional context. The intervention targets students who are at least halfway through college and remain at some risk of dropout. A team at the institution developed the holistic enhanced advising research trial (HEART) over the course of a year and will implement it during the 2020-21 academic year. Randomization will occur over the summer of 2020 so that treatment-group students can be contacted leading into fall 2020. Implementation will occur throughout the 2020-21 academic year. We will evaluate the effect of the treatment on 5-year graduation rates, as well as a number of intermediate outcomes along the path to completion, such as credits attempted and earned, year-to-year persistence, course performance (i.e., GPA by term), and declared academic major by term.
[*Due to COVID-19, all meetings with advisors will take place via videoconferencing technology.]