As chronicled in the 2007 National Survey of Student Engagement, academic advising is the strongest predictor of undergraduate students’ satisfaction with their campus. Thus, I was pleased to see the Daily Illini highlighting the importance of advising in the Oct. 8, 2008 article “Club criticizes pre-law program’s lack of resources.”

In the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES), we recognize and emphasize the importance of both academic and career/post-graduation advising for our undergraduates. We are quite proud of the fact that ACES students consistently rank the quality of advising relatively high in comparison to the campus average on the Chancellor’s Senior Survey, and we continue to strive to strengthen and enhance advising in the college. We also pride ourselves on the fact that being a smaller college, our undergraduates benefit from small student-to-faculty and student-to-advisor ratios.

For these reasons, I felt it was important to write to correct the statistics the author provides in the chart on student-to-advisor ratios. The source cited is “UIUC,” and thus I am not clear as to where these specific numbers were drawn. In reality, the number of advisors cited in the chart for the College of ACES is the number of advising coordinators specifically within our college. Each of our seven departments handles advising slightly differently, but the general idea of the advising coordinator overseeing advising and serving as a backup to a team of faculty advisors within each department is the same. In reality, there are currently 122 faculty and academic professional staff who serve as advisors for undergraduates in the College of ACES. According to the Division of Management Information, there are 2,340 undergraduates in ACES for the Fall, 2008 term (http://www.dmi.uiuc.edu/cp/Page.asp). Using these figures, the number of students per advisor in ACES actually is 19.18.

As I mentioned, the attention given to advising is appreciated, and I hope future articles will continue to focus on advising but also will cite accurate data.

Kathryn A. Martensen

Assistant Dean, Academic Programs

College of ACES