Boise State is rolling out a new Student Success Hub that aims to function as an all-inclusive platform that allows students to schedule advising appointments and share files and advising notes with their advisors. Boise State has future plans to include financial aid on the platform as well.
Vice Provost for Undergraduate Studies Susan Shadle, a co-sponsor for the project, visited an ASBSU meeting on Oct. 28, 2024, to present the new platform to the ASBSU students.
Shadle explained that the Provost’s Office and the Office of Information Technology (OIT) are working together to roll out the new platform.
“Student Success Hub is a platform to support advising on campus,” Shadle said in the presentation. “I’m really excited about this because we have not had a really good system to support advising on campus.”
“There’s lots of little things that advisors do, many of you probably have had an advisor who gave you an Excel spreadsheet that showed your schedule,” Shadle said.
Shadle explained that due to a lack of consistency among advising resources, such as the use of Excel spreadsheets, emails and PeopleSoft, it can leave advising in “kind of a clunky place”.
The Arbiter asked students on campus what they thought about the advising process at present. Most students were frustrated with the current advising system.
Calvin Baldwin, a junior majoring in Mechanical Engineering at Boise State said he appreciates the new platform.
“I know they have a new process of doing [advising] and it makes it really nice and easy to line up, but just going through the emails has been easy for me,” said Baldwin, who had met with his advisor the day prior.
“I really appreciate it,” said Savanna Philpo, a Criminal Justice major who transferred to Boise State her sophomore year.
“My first year here was last year and I had no idea what I was doing, so I found it really helpful that they just have an entire list for you and they check it for you and tell you how many more credits you have,” Philpo said.
Freshman Wyatt Trask is a Health Studies major and said the only thing that confused him about the advising and enrollment process is the shopping cart function in PeopleSoft.
“You can add stuff to your shopping cart, but you’re not actually guaranteed to get into those classes, so I feel like it adds an extra level of stress,” said Trask.
Shadle told The Arbiter in an email that the new platform is part of a larger effort to adopt a Customer Relationship Management model.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a practice that uses data collection and analysis from interaction with customers or students in Boise State’s case. The goal of CRM software like the Student Success Hub is to create a centralized platform to consolidate a variety of customer-related information on a single database for faster, more streamlined access and analysis, according to a Forbes Advisor article.
“We started a several months-long process of building the system with advisor input in Spring 2023,” Shadle said in an email to The Arbiter.
The following semester, some advisors in the College of Arts and Sciences (COAS), College of Health Studies (COHS) and Extended Studies, began using the Student Success Hub to help advise students.
“Not surprisingly, we learned a lot along the way, as you would expect with any new, complex system. In Summer 2024, we onboarded two more colleges, who started advising in the system this fall: College of Engineering and the College of Education,” Shadle said.
Shadle said the remaining colleges will be onboarded over the next 6-8 months.
“In a few years, we expect students to be able to log into the system and easily get connected not only to their advisor but also to other support (e.g., Financial Aid, Career Center, etc.). One way to think of it is as a ‘one stop shop’ for student support.”
