Journalism advising policy aims to improve graduation rate
By Jessica Zapiain
Skiff Staff

About 20 percent of journalism majors still have holds on their accounts since the department mandated the holds in an effort to increase its four-year graduation rate.

The holds prevent students from registering for classes until they are advised. As of Thursday, 100 out of 484 journalism students hadn’t been able to register because of the holds.

“I totally thought I was right on track,” said Brad Escue, a senior advertising/public relations major. “After seeing my adviser though, I found out that I haven’t taken enough liberal arts courses. Guess I’ll enjoy TCU an extra semester.”

Ballet, theater, music and nursing are a few of the other departments that require advising. However, those departments have not placed holds on registration, but instead they have made students get closed class permits for classes in their departments.

Many journalism students are finding that they will not be able to graduate on time because they have failed to meet the department requirements for graduation, department chairman Tommy Thomason said.

Thomason said FrogNet gives students the option not to see their adviser and is one of the reasons students are having a harder time meeting their graduation requirements.

“Less than half of the enrolled journalism students went to see their advisors last semester,” he said.

Kristin Delorantis, a first year senior broadcast journalism major, said she has not found past advising helpful.

“My freshman and sophomore adviser told me that taking 12 hours a semester without summer school would allow me to graduate on time,” she said. “However, I found out my junior year that I’m going to graduate a semester late.”

Graduation rates for journalism were unavailable from the university’s office of institutional research.

The TCU journalism department is one of 15 private university journalism departments that has received accreditation from the Accrediting Council for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications. Thomason said journalism accreditation makes advising more complicated than in other departments.

The journalism department hastaken the steps necessary to train the journalism professors on proper advising methods in order to prevent students such as Delorantis being misinformed, said the journalism department’s administrative assistant, Doris Wallace.

Associate Registrar Pam Sanguinet said many students have stopped seeing their advisers and have relied on the advice of their peers.

“Friends are great to drink root beer with, but they’re no good as registration advisers,” Sanguinet says.

Some students are unaware that in addition to taking the required 124 hours, 65 of those hours must be liberal arts Thomason, said. Journalism students must also have at least a 2.00 GPA in their major in order to graduate.

Thomason said advising helps students keep track of when they need to file for degree plans and intent to graduate forms. He said the journalism department has helped students meet the graduation requirements in the past by substituting classes for liberal arts.

The new policy affects all students in advertising/public relations, broadcast journalism, news-editorial journalism and international communication sequences.

Terrill Estabrook, an advertising/public relations major, said, “If advising wasn’t mandatory I’d really be in trouble.”

She isn’t the only student in the department who is pleased with the decision to mandate advising, but there are other students who don’t feel advising is necessary.

Jessica Zapiain