We can’t take a step if the stairs are crumbling. Photo by Anna Gritzenbach. 

ANNA GRITZENBACH | OPINION EDITOR | agritzenbach@butler.edu 

Academic advising is meant to guide students through their college careers, ensuring that they remain on track for graduation, get the most out of their tuition and provide a sense of clarity through an often very confusing point of their lives. However, for many Butler students, academic advising is anything but that. 

With inconsistent communication, overwhelmed advisors and an unnecessarily confusing registration process, students are left scrambling to piece together their own academic paths — leading to extra stress and sometimes delayed graduation. 

Junior criminology-sociology major Cate Pugliese shares these frustrations with the advising system and feels a great lack of individualized support within academic advising.

“I had not met with an advisor in person one-on-one, until this year,” Pugliese said. “The third year here I’ve had three advisors. My first one, she would just put us all on one big Zoom, and then be like, ‘Here are the options you can take, bye.’ The second one was also like ‘Here are the options, bye.’ Now I have Dr. [Stephen] Barnard, and I met with him in person, and up until I met with him, I didn’t know if I was graduating on time.”

Pugliese went two full years at Butler unsure if she was on track to graduate. That is incredibly alarming. Academic advising is supposed to prevent students from falling through the cracks, not hang them out to dry. However, she is not the only one who has had a rocky relationship with the advising system.

Junior psychology-criminology major Molly Goodman shares Pugliese’s concerns within her own interactions and the advisors’ experiences. 

“My experience didn’t start out too great,” Goodman said. “Since I have two majors, I’m supposed to have one [advisor] per major, and I didn’t know that coming in, and it turns out that one of my advisors actually quit, and I had no clue, so I wasn’t able to get into any of the classes … It’s complicated because you know they’re trying, but it’s not the right system.”

Butler’s academic advisors are all simultaneously professors who balance coursework, research, their personal lives and advising all at once. From the student perspective, that can be easy to overlook when you’re frustrated with registration. 

Both Goodman and Pugliese agree that professors can be valuable mentors. Still, they are not full-time advisors, and asking them to juggle dozens of students’ academic trajectories in addition to their own teaching and responsibilities is unrealistic and unfair to all parties involved. 

With the current system, students aren’t receiving the individualized attention they deserve, and professors are stretched thin trying to do a job that isn’t their primary responsibility.

Assistant professor of anthropology Julie Searcy feels that the system is poorly structured to aid both students and faculty. 

“The hard part is — because of the nature of professorial work — maybe the [advising] trainings are on a day that you’re teaching … or it feels like one more add-on to a whole list of things you already have to do,” Searcy said. “So I think that’s a tricky part, because to be a good advisor, you really have to have a sense of how to help students navigate the bureaucracy. I feel like four years into my tenure track position, I’m just barely starting to understand that [system], and so that’s another thing that’s frustrating for faculty, but I’m sure ends up being really frustrating for advisees.”

The problem doesn’t end with academic advising itself. Butler’s multi-step registration process only adds to student frustration. 

Faith Thompson, a senior strategic communication and anthropology double major, serves as the class of 2025 SGA senator and the academic affairs committee chair. She is currently working to address these concerns with an event hosted in April. 

“Registration Roundtables came out of my own committee members expressing problems with the interconnectedness of the university,” Thompson said. “I mean, they’re not taught about the other happenings of the university, and honestly, just registering, in general, can be kind of difficult. We have a multi-step system that’s not always fully explained, and not every advisor is fully versed in it.” 

There is no excuse for unclear or inconsistent advising at a university where students are expected to navigate course prerequisites, scheduling conflicts and various university requirements. While faculty may assume that students will “figure it out,” the reality is that many students end up taking unnecessary courses, delaying graduation or struggling to receive the support that they need because of the convoluted process. 

Thompson hopes that the Registration Roundtables — hosted by the SGA Legislative branch and the Student Success Center — will help to alleviate some of these issues. 

“We are going to have individuals from the Student Success Center and the advisory committee [Advisory Champion Network] sit at tables, and students come and go, ask questions and fill in the blanks,” Thompson said. “They can learn new majors. They can learn new minors. They can figure out the steps if they’re in their second year and want to completely change. All that information is going to be in one go so that they finally have the right people to ask and it’s not a big confusing multi-step thing.”

The Advisory Champion Network is a committee of advisors from different colleges and departments available to students through the Student Success Center. 

Students should not have to rely on one event to get the necessary answers. Information about majors, minors and planning should be easily accessible year-round — not just when they stumble upon the right resource. 

The people within the system are trying their best to keep students afloat, but when advising is inconsistent and unorganized, students pay the price. 

Advising at Butler is broken. Some students get lucky and are matched with an engaged, present advisor, while others are left to fend for themselves. Advising should not be a game of chance, and it certainly shouldn’t leave students wondering if they are even on track to graduate. 

Butler needs a real change when it comes to how advising is structured. Whether that means hiring advisors, streamlining the registration process or ensuring better communication between departments, one thing is clear: students and faculty deserve better than the system they have now.