I imagine that Chief Academic Officers typically spend most of their time caring for the forest, not individual trees. Yet I spent my twenty-plus years in higher education working with the trees. I recently read a post on this blog about the benefits of teaching a class as a Chief Academic Officer (CAO). I also think CAOs could benefit from regularly setting aside time to engage with individual student experiences of academic policies and procedures such as repeating a course, withdrawing from a class, the length of the drop and add period, transferring classes, or returning from a leave of absence. 

While these policies and procedures are not flashy, trendy, or exciting, I believe they do significantly impact a student’s college experience. I spent 10 years as an academic adviser, and I had plenty of tears in my office. Often, the tears where the result of a challenging experience with a policy or procedure. 

For example, at one school where I worked, the repeated course policy initially stated that a grade of F would remain on the transcript but would be replaced in the GPA when a student retook the class. Alternatively, a grade of D would be averaged with the grade a student received the second time around. This resulted in students begging professors to give them Fs instead of Ds. 

My guess is that faculty eventually complained, and the policy changed. Yet if the school’s CAO got regular feedback from students and academic advisers, the policy likely would have changed more quickly. 

I also worked with students returning to school after taking a leave of absence for an illness or family emergency. Sometimes, I found the process to reenroll overly cumbersome, and the deadlines were a bit too early in the summer. When was the last time your school reviewed the various deadlines for your school’s policies and procedures? Could new technology or a redesign of a single webpage make academic processes faster or easier to understand? 

I would wager that the student experience with academic policies and procedures impact graduation rates, course enrollment, the size of particular majors, student stress levels, and even alumni giving. 

In the new year, consider carving out a bit of time to learn more about the student experience of your school’s academic policies and procedures. Acquiring this information doesn’t need to be complicated or time-consuming. A few simple lunches with students or an annual two-hour academic policy listening session might yield information that could help make sizable improvements in your students’ experiences. 

Written by Karen Dentler

Karen Dentler has over 20 years of experience in higher education. She has held positions in student life and academic administration at Rutgers University, Princeton University, and Carnegie Mellon University. She has her MA in higher education from the University of Michigan and a BA in philosophy from Colgate University. 

Karen Dentler is also the author of Go to Class: How to Succeed at College, a gift book for college-bound students. Go to Class is full of engaging tips about how to thrive at college. The book is available on Amazon or any online bookstore. Connect with her on Instagram or Facebook @collegegiftbook.