Academic Advising: an Indispensable Service for Adult Learners

“Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.” ~ Suzy Kassem

The primary reasons why working professionals choose to go back to school are career advancement and better financial opportunities, according to a Gallup study. Imagine being under so much pressure already, and add to it the ambiguity about credits, courses, and colleges. Overwhelming, isn’t it? The solution is Academic Advising. It targets the core elements of a learner’s success: right from choosing a suitable school, credits building, credits transfers, setting academic goals based on career interests, developing an academic plan, to staying on track to achieve those academic goals. The significance of Academic Advising is compounded for working adult learners who don’t have the bandwidth to navigate through heaps of information while balancing the act between their personal and professional lives.

Academic Advising, being the cornerstone of learner support, ensures that students who avail of this facility are more engaged, focused on taking courses that satisfy degree requirements, and have higher likelihoods of course completion according to an in-depth study by CCCSE. Advantageously, traditional academic advising is now augmented by leading software platforms that help the counselors effectively manage the caseloads, and guide each learner to successful course completion.

It’s no secret that Learner success translates to skill transfers back to the job and overall bottom-line improvements for organizations, which makes it imperative for organizations to add this service as an extension to their educational benefits portfolio.

Why Edcor Academic Advising?

From our vantage point, we have a deep understanding of organizations we work with and deeper insights about the organizational theory,  multidimensional nature of the human aspect, and various motivators’ for individuals and groups. This pegs us as valuable Academic Advising partners along with the educational benefits administration services that we already offer to our Clients.

We believe that Adult learners are unique in their needs of not requiring coaching and mentoring per se, but a deep authentic relationship where the advisors are invested, from day one, in their success guiding them through the shortest route for course completion. With a clear understanding of the impediments faced by Adult learners, Edcor has put in place a fail-safe support structure.

Every Client employee or student who experiences Edcor Advising is served by their ‘success team’ comprising a well-trained and knowledgeable Counselor, Advisor, and Success Coach – the three pillars of support throughout the learning cycle that catapult the student towards success.

• The Academic Counselor is the primary point of contact during the initial advising and planning stage. They identify the student’s educational goals, career ambitions, the motivation behind seeking a degree, the financials, and provide a host of personalized recommendations to choose from. The advice includes considerations like regional accreditations, credit transfers, credit building, and optimally utilizing employer’s tuition benefits dollars.
• The Academic Advisor is the technical expert who partners with the Academic Counselor and works behind the scenes to research and develop personalized degree plans for the student. They develop year-by-year academic plans with timelines for completion, and out-of-pocket cost estimates taking the employer’s tuition assistance policies into account.
• The Success Coach is the primary point of contact once an academic degree plan has been developed and the student begins coursework. Constant interactions via email, text, chat, and phone ensures that the student foresees and overcomes life obstacles that would hamper academic success. There are monthly- and on-demand coaching calls with each corporate student to keep the students on track.

The Edcor Advantage

Edcor has chosen the industry experts in Pearson – an Education Mass Media company – to be our Advising partner. They have a proprietary research database that leverages information from over 2,000 schools and 10,000-degree programs at U.S. institutions to match the needs of a Client’s talent management and upskilling strategies. The key advantages of this synergy to corporates are:

• Unlimited school and degree program options
• Agnostic, unbiased white-glove advising service based on research
• Personalized student portal with well-researched programs & school options with costs
• Customizations by schools, degree, or program types
• Customization is also available based on the organization’s school/course preferences
• Maximizing the reach of employer’s tuition benefit dollars
• Options to take courses via Global Digital Classroom to earn college credits at a low cost

The Cherry on the Cake

For undergraduate programs, there is guidance available for employees to save more by taking online regionally accredited college courses through Pearson’s proprietary Global Digital Classroom platform.  Moreover, there’s a 100% transfer guarantee of courses taken through the Global Digital Classroom to each student’s final school of choice for their degree program. Clients have saved hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on the cost of their tuition assistance programs by leveraging this additional world-class benefit, while thousands of employees have been able to stretch their allotment of tuition assistance to fully fund the cost of a degree program leading to zero out-of-pocket costs.

Our Student Success Client coaching Net Promoter Score (NPS) score is 60 and advising services have achieved a 70 NPS rating, which are world-class benchmarks for student services. Students leveraging their employer-sponsored tuition assistance benefits have a 90 percent success rate with online college courses through the Global Digital Classroom.

Is ROI on your mind?

Our efficacy and research teams are engaged at the start of the contract to work with clients to establish data gathering requirements for the ROI analysis. The data is leveraged to create “current state” benchmarks for which the programs will be measured. Further, we work with the client to establish program measures and/or Key Performance Indicators. These established measures are evaluated against the initial benchmarks established, generally every quarter, or at a rate comfortable for each client. Also, we provide other analyses and reporting such as  NPS scores, year-over-year savings on the education assistance benefit, program savings (as a result of the advising sessions), and success rates as well as program savings for employees that enroll in courses through the Global Digital Classroom.

Reach out to Edcor for more details.