Department created to help first-year students
Parental involvement is an increasing trend at U.S. colleges and USU is revamping its parents program to accommodate it.
Noelle Call, the director of the newly formed Department of Retention and First-Year Experience, oversees a number of programs that assist the freshmen at USU, some of which include catering to their relatives.
“We want to partner with the parents,” Call said.
Mothers and fathers actively involved in their high schoolers’ lives don’t always want to give that up once their kids go to college, she said. The past two years of SOAR have evidenced this, as parent attendance has nearly doubled.
Assistant Director Aaron Andersen said concerned parents don’t always know which department to contact when they have a question or problem regarding their student and usually call the wrong people.
Because it’s near the top of many campus directories, Call said the Academic Resources Department gets contacted by many worried parents. Some even call President Albrecht’s office or dial “797- hit any number,” Andersen said. Confusion is a problem the program will help to remedy, he said.
The new department can better direct them to the people they need to talk to about things like their childrens’ roommate problems or health concerns than any other department can, Andersen said, and will help to “engage parents in this process.”
Though some parents call wanting to know if their kids are going to class or what their grades are, Call said private information is given to no one, not even blood relatives.
Concern for first-year students is nothing new for Student Services Vice President Gary Chambers. Within a few weeks of taking his position in June, Chambers organized the Department of Retention and First-Year Experience to better assist USU students.
“The goal: retain students and help them graduate,” he said.
Part of meeting that goal included forming a centralized office where freshmen and transfer students could go to for assistance, he said. Before the department was created, students had to seek out the Academic Resource Center for questions about Connections, the Registrar’s Office for help with matriculation and leaves of absence or the University Transfer and Advising Services for help with SOAR.
“We’ve never had it all under one umbrella,” Chambers said.
The new department combines all the programs, giving it power to direct students, he said, making it “a much more solid program.”
Free services on campus for students considering leaving USU for financial or academic reasons are available, and he said he hopes the new department will make it easier to connect students to them. People who drop out unnecessarily because they feel alone in the process is “the saddest thing in the whole world,” Chambers said.
Only about 50 percent of the student body fill out financial aid forms, he said, and many students aren’t aware of the tutoring and advising centers on campus that can help with academic struggles.
“Let us get you some help. We want you to be successful,” he said.
Call said her ideal is to have every student considering dropping out to stop by the Retention Office to see if there’s something they can do to help. The focus of their efforts will be primarily sophomores and they will “look at where the holes are and start building.”
Although they don’t have an office to call home yet, Call said she hopes to be operating out of the department’s new room by the middle of October. The room is currently occupied by the Tutoring Lab on the third floor of the Taggart Student Center, which will be moved to the room behind the TSC Auditorium before remodeling begins on Wednesday.
An ad hoc committee chaired by Programming Vice President Tabitha Perkins was formed at the ASUSU Executive Council’s meeting Tuesday to determine where the furnishings currently in the lounge will be moved.
mof@cc.usu.edu