Illustration By De Luna / Staff
There are an awful lot of students who have been at Southwestern College for an awful long time.
And that is awfully frustrating.
Barely 10 percent of us successfully transfer from this two-year institution in three years. The average time to transfer or “graduate” is 5.5 years.
There are many reasons for this. One is that Southwestern College students work between 25-30 hours a week and cannot take a full course load of 15 units. Many of our students are parents or care providers. Some just want smaller loads because they are English learners or struggle with math.
One of the biggest reasons, though, is preventable and needs to be addressed immediately. Southwestern College does not have enough counselors. Not even close to enough.
Data from the American School Counselor Association indicates that in 2022 the average counselor-to-student ratio in higher education is 1 to 250.
Southwestern’s ratios are dreadful. Special population programs like First Year Experience, Puente, Bayan, Restorative Justice, Athletics and Umoja have ratios of 1 counselor per 437 students. SC’s ratio in general counseling is an abysmal 1 counselor to 1,700 students.
That is not a typo. 1 to 1,700.
Counselors cannot keep up. There is a waitlist that ranges from 800 to 1,200 with an erratic waiting period that can bounce between one week to six weeks. Three is the average.
It is easier to see the mayor, DMV or Taylor Swift than a Southwestern College counselor.
We need access to counselors. A lot of us, frankly, have no clue what to do. Southwestern College students are primary pioneering teenagers whose parents did not engage in higher education. Even if our parents did attend college mom and dad cannot tell us what classes to take to meet our goals. Most of our professors cannot either. The honest ones will not even try.
So, SC students take classes they do not need for transfer or certificates. They take too many units. Most transfer programs require 60 units. Too many Jaguars have more than 100 and still are not eligible to transfer.
This problem is fixable. Southwestern College needs to hire more counselors. Administrators will act sympathetic then say “Yes, but that is expensive.”
Yes, it is. It is also a matter of priorities.
Now comes the sad part of this saga.
Our college spends millions upon millions of our taxpayer dollars on other things. We have too many administrators already and our college president is trying to create four more administrative positions, each of which costs more than $1 million a year for salaries, staffing, offices, creating a new division, benefits and other costs. That would buy 80 counselors.
We have bureaucratized and ballooned IT, Admissions and several other programs we will not name so as not to hurt people’s feelings. Maybe these new bureaucracies help the college, may not, but can it be argued that they are more important than counselors? Absolutely not.
Southwestern administrators and governing board members mindlessly drone on about how students are their #1 priority, but their actions do not match the rhetoric. Diverting money into empire building and making employees’ jobs easier does not help students.
Steven Baissa, dean of the School of Counseling and Student Support Programs, agrees that our college needs more counselors. Right now, SC has 24 full-time counselors, 17 of whom are for general counseling, providing guidance to all 22,000 students. The remaining seven counselors work for special programs.
“We are not looking too good,” he said. “Our ratio is one to 1,240. Best practice is to have one counselor for 350 students.”
We appreciate Dean Baissa’s candor and wish him all the best in his efforts to expand the counseling staff. He is already behind thanks to six retirements last year.
“We’re trying to figure out how we can get more hires,” he said. “I’m pushing on that with the vice president of student affairs, with my faculty, and with the department chair. Just two years ago, the state gave us a lot of money to hire more faculty. We hired almost 40 faculty. Out of that we got around five counselors.”
Since the pandemic SC has experienced steady enrollment growth which further dilutes the lopsided counseling ratio.
The status quo is simply not acceptable. Dr. Sanchez needs to cool his jets on hiring more administrators and reinvest in the foundation of this pyramid which is the students. We need our elected governing board members to steer this ship in a different direction, one that really does put students first.
Let us know when this happens. In the meantime, we will be waiting to see a counselor.
