Road to mandatory orientation paved with good intentions

The administration has decided to expand The Orientation Program (TOP), and to make orientation mandatory for all students before they take their first class at ACC beginning fall, 2010. Student Life (SL) will have to cut the Diversity, Leadership, Intramural Sports and Recreation clusters to compensate. These changes have the potential to make SL more difficult to become involved with and less consistent from campus to campus.

The administration, in trying to further the ACC Student Success Initiative (SSI), believes that this new orientation program will be beneficial for students. The SSI states that it supports data driven decision making. In that respect, expanding orientation seems like a good idea if one is looking specifically at data that suggests that attending orientation helps students succeed. However, when looking at the broad implications of that decision, it is clear that it will hurt more students than it helps.

Like students who attend orientation, students who are involved in SL programs are more likely to succeed academically. Working with SL creates a connection to the college that helps students stay involved. Losing three SL programs for the sake of expanding TOP is not in the best interest of anyone.

Unfortunately, SL does not really have a choice. The administration asked for these changes to TOP, and the only way to create enough funding and man power to support the new orientation program was to cut some of the existing clusters.

One of the biggest changes to TOP is that students can complete orientation online. It is expected that many students will use the new option because it is faster, and can be done from home. In no way is three hours looking at a computer screen going to be more helpful to students than semesters spent building their co-curricular profiles and learning skills like leadership, tolerance and team work.

While everything is still very preliminary, the focus of the new SL will be to create more student-run SL departments on every campus, which will lead to inconsistency from campus to campus.

There are programs in place that help students decide how the money they spend for student activities is used. Student Government, and specifically the Student Activity Fee Advisory Committee, should have been in on this a long time ago. Instead of being able to decide if students wanted this change at all, they will now only have a say in what the changes will look like, and only because SL involved them, not the college.

The administration should make data driven decisions that take into account all the available information. When they decide to do things that force the entire SL department, which is funded by fees students pay, to be completely redesigned, students should be involved from the very beginning.