By: Ben Theriault, Staff Writer
As students know, signing up for classes can often be a process that can take days. USM required advice from advising prior to enrollment. Academic advisers used to review courses, ensuring that they properly correspond with the student’s intended major, and then they granted the student a pin number giving them access to official enrollment.
Failures in advising can bring large consequences, often unseen by our students. “Summer melt” is a phenomena where aspiring college students enroll in a university in the late spring and then by the time the fall semester is in session, they back out. This is an issue that is particularly prevalent amongst low-income students, affecting a national average of about 1 in 5 potential students.
Nancy Griffin, Vice President of Enrollment and Student Affairs, advocated for the creation of a Summer Melt Committee to help curb this issue. With new policy implementations at advising in regards to Freshman integration, the USM summer melt rate had dropped from 25% in 2015 to 13% in 2016 and now 11% in 2017. Through this committee and through communication with advisers, a conclusion was reached about the way USM students enroll: the pin system is incredibly unpopular.
The pin has been deemed a “barrier” to efficient scheduling and has been eliminated, meaning students now have the choice to be solely responsible for their own schedule and can enroll immediately after creating their course wishlists without approval from their adviser.
Over the summer, the change was approved by the Office of the Provost, the Office of Enrollment and Student Affairs, President Glenn Cummings and the Faculty Senate. Fall 2017 is the first semester where students have not been required to input a pin number passcode into their MaineStreet accounts prior to registering for the Spring 2018 semester. Director of advising Elizabeth Higgins speculated that this change could create a lot of positive change. She mentioned that prior to this new method, the pin system had loopholes. Two to three weeks before the last enrollment deadline all the pins would be lifted and students could enroll without advising consultation. She believed that this encouraged students to wait until the last minute to enroll.
Waiting until the last the last two weeks for the pin to be lifted often resulted in students not receiving desired classes or certain essential criteria being ignored. Higgins hopes that with this change, students will select their courses in a more timely manner and be more satisfied overall with their schedules.
Higgins is optimistic about this new situation but she notes that it is an experiment that could yield a variety of results. Though she is happy that advising policy is bending to the wishes of USM’s students, she has a couple reserves. With the pin lifted, it is expected that the immediate enrollment process will be easier. However it may prove to lead to more complications in the future. She acknowledged some concerns regarding students’ overall knowledge of their major. If the advising process is skipped, certain special, lesser known classes may go unobserved or classes may be selected inefficiently, making meeting graduation requirements more difficult for students in the long run.
“The office is still just as busy with back to back appointments still being scheduled,” said Higgins. She noted that while this change may have some issues, such as requiring students to become more knowledgeable about their majors, it encourages personal responsibility and engagement in students’ path to success.
Higgins thinks this will change the way students view advising. Instead of just being a mandatory step in receiving schedules, it will be seen as an essential step in future planning.
When asked about the enrollment process and the lifting of the pin system, USM freshman Scott Bertolini stated that “The process [of enrollment] was still confusing so I’m glad a step I didn’t even know about was lifted.” Despite this step being lifted, he had not enrolled in classes until he had met with his advisor.
USM sophomore Jason Cooney mentioned that he did not even know that this change had occurred. He said, “While I think this new process is definitely easier, I worry that unforeseen issues may arise if an advisor is not met with. Regardless in the end it is up to personal responsibility of students.”
With this change, the USM administration hopes that students will redefine their value of advising and academic planning.