Academic Support & Advocacy Center (ASA)

A goal is to start establishing a central footprint for the Academic Support & Advocacy team so that students have a location they can come to. This will be an ongoing process that slowly groups ASA team members together. The specific location is still be determined, and we expect our initial location will be short-term in nature.

We recognize the critical work Student Success Coordinators do to support the students and faculty within their units. It is our goal to ensure these supports are sustained. There is no plan to pull resources back from colleges and departments. As such for the summer and fall 23 terms, existing SSC resources allocated to departments & colleges will be retained. The long-term goal is not to remove these resources but rather to consider how best to layer on campus-wide intentionality for differentiated and coordinated care.

If existing SSCs embedded in departments/colleges opt to take another role within the Academic Support & Advocacy Center, their former roles will be rehired to ensure the work is covered.

Existing student success coordinators who are serving colleges & departments will remain connected to those disciplines for the summer/fall 2023. All SSCs will report centrally to ASA leadership effective July 2023. This will allow us to centralize supports, build in redundancy, and coordinate training and professional development.

A key objective is to add additional resources to support student success. At this time, hiring is focusing on the following positions: Director of ASA, Two Assistant Directors, Advocates (SSC level positions) focuses on high-touch are for students.

It is WCU’s commitment to support every students’ success and ensure every student has a success network of faculty, student success coordinators, chairs and deans.

Differentiated care challenges to think about what each student might benefit from and scaffolding support to meet students where they are. We are still determining ultimately what a full-scale advocacy model will look like. However, we recognize that for our start in fall 2023, we will need to focus our limited resources in specific ways. Initially advocates will be assigned to students whose records indicate more high-touch coordinated care is needed. These are students who are facing academic standing challenges.