Senior Associate Provost June Youatt, Assistant Vice President for Residential and Hospitality Services Vennie Gore and Senior Associate Vice President for
Student Affairs and Services Denise Maybank have spent the past three weeks examining the current organization of student support services and developing recommendations to improve the model.

“It’s from advising to health care to tutoring to assistance with cultural transitions,” Youatt said. “This is really all the people across campus who believe part of their role or responsibility is about supporting student learning.”

Youatt said the Office of the Registrar and the Office of Admissions — both part of MSU’s infrastructure — are among the few exceptions not included in the group’s scope.

Years of adding new programs without consolidating existing programs and services left the system overcrowded and difficult to navigate, Youatt said.

“We don’t take anything away, but we keep adding things because we all recognize it isn’t quite what students need,” Youatt said. “I likened it to it’s the best of the ’60s assembly line, where each of us has a part that we put on, but hardly anybody ever gets to see the finished product.”

Wilcox said the money saved by realigning the university’s student services could translate into multiple benefits, from saving faculty positions and offering more course sections, to reducing the student-to-professor ratio and avoiding Saturday morning classes.

“We can do a better job of helping students understand the university, helping students get the support they need to be successful at the university and spend less money doing it,” Wilcox said.

University officials began to reconsider the current system for student support services in 2007 — the same year Gore arrived on campus and initiated discussions about a neighborhood concept for MSU’s residence hall system.

“This is all about connecting students with their learning environment and also with their institution,” Gore said.

In the memorandum, Wilcox asked the group to create a model with an emphasis on support services for first-year students that could expand to students in their following years.

The First Year Experience program in Holden Hall is an example of the types of programs that could be created in response to Wilcox’s charge, Youatt said.

“The First Year Experience program that they’re piloting I expect to be highly successful … but that’s a program,” Youatt said. “We’re trying to create a model.”

Unlike the set of recommendations Wilcox will receive from college deans Oct. 16, he said recommendations for a new student support services model will be more visionary and less focused on concrete ways of remodeling.