One part of the ongoing curricular review focuses on alleviating some of these problems directly with an Office of Advising, which would be charged with coordinating all aspects of the system.

Marquand Professor of English and American Literature and Language Daniel G. Donoghue, a member of the Committee on Advising and Counseling charged with exploring earlier recommendations, explains that the office is not centralizing advising, but rather coordinating it on a larger scale.

“The main duty of that office would be to coordinate, not to impose a kind of top-down model,” he says. “If advising is lagging behind in some department, the office can put some pressure on that department.”

As it comes into being, the office will be faced with highly differentiated advising structures, with some departments offering resources that lag behind in effectiveness and student satisfaction.

SIZE DOES MATTER

A linear regression completed recently by the Committee on Advising and Counseling showed a direct negative correlation between the quality of advising and the number of students in the concentration, says Deputy Dean of the College Patricia O’Brien, who aso sits on the committee on advising and counseling.

In his memo, Lewis cited data from 2001 senior surveys that showed overall satisfaction with departmental advising at an average of 3.19 on a 5-point scale across the College, but at only 2.57 in economics and 2.62 in government, the two largest concentrations.

In responses to three separate questions about whether advising meetings covered topics of academic interests, picking classes, and post-graduate or summer plans, students answering “yes” represented a low, and falling, percentage.

For example, 56 percent of the Class of 2001 responded “yes” that academic interests were covered in advising conversations, down from 59 percent in the Class of 1999 and 65 percent in the Class of 1997. The disparities between concentrations were also apparent empirically. In economics, the numbers were 28, 31, and 40 percent respectively, and in government they were 37, 41, and 52 percent respectively, according to the memo.

Large departments, and the systems they use to guide concentrators, seem to produce lower satisfaction ratings. And while almost half of all Harvard upperclassmen are in six of the 41 concentrations, faculty numbers are not proportionately distributed.

“There’s no way [faculty] can know 400 students as well as [they] know 100 students,” says social studies concentrator Shalini Ananthanarayanan ’05.

These differences are evident to students who have experienced both ends of the spectrum. “In philosophy it’s a much smaller concentration, so the head tutor could advise me,” says Joshua A. Barro ’05, a psychology concentrator who changed to philosophy—a department about five times smaller—for one semester. “In larger concentrations, advising is more bureaucratic and not personalized.”

Government concentrator Francisco Aguilar ’05 doesn’t think that concentration size should excuse departments from providing good advising. “What they really should have is a professor or graduate student who actually knows you,” Aguilar says. “The best thing it could do to strengthen the department is having a greater emphasis on advisers, especially advising by professors.”

And this contact has been shown to be beneficial to undergraduates’ academic experience. “We know that students who develop a relationship with a faculty adviser tend to be more satisfied than students who don’t,” O’Brien says.

It is no coincidence that the two largest concentrations have graduate student advisers staffing an advising office: the economics undergraduate advising office and the government tutorial office.