Most people can agree that switching between doing five things at once can be stressful and lead to feeling like nothing is being done to its fullest ability. Well as it would happen to be, Winona State University’s tutoring services is facing similar problems.
This semester there are fewer tutors when compared to previous semesters which means that there is less overall support for other students. There has also been an increase in attendance to tutoring services “Our numbers are up so I checked the other day and compared to this time last year, we’re up 32%,” Jillian Quandt, head of tutoring services, shared.
Since there is less supply than there is demand, tutors have to split their time between multiple people at once, “when I come in for a 2–3-hour shift of drop-in hours, I will work with 5-8 different students throughout that time,” math tutor, Elly Hovde stated in regards to the increasing numbers. While that might not sound like much when compared to say, a classroom of students learning under an educator, tutors are usually providing much more personalized help.
“[Tutoring right now is] challenging, because I have less time to work individually with each student and can be moving between 8 different subjects at once,” Hovde said. Switching between several subjects for several different students is a quick path to burnout for many.
Less tutors leads to more situations like Hovde’s, so the real question comes back to why there are less tutors. While there hasn’t been an official budget cut to tutoring services base budget in many years, there has been a decrease in overall funding.
“In the past, for those funds, the discussion was that as we needed to increase student salaries in order to keep the same level of service; if I was going over, those funds were available and so I would be able to staff the program at the level I felt was the right fit,” Quandt explained. However, the funding that has usually been helpfully provided from other departments throughout the years has gone down due to the overall decrease in university and department budgets.
The decrease has lessened the ability of tutors to provide individualized support for students, dampening the overwhelming benefits that tutoring services has been providing in past years.
There is value in going to tutoring services whether you need it for every class or just one stubborn class that just doesn’t make sense. “Tutoring is a part of their academic support system,” Hovde describes. But even more than that, tutoring services is a place that can provide more than just academic support.
Quandt shared an anecdote of a time that a group of students who all separately came in for tutoring, “one of the students had a bit of an issue with a roommate,” and the other students and tutor were “super invested in it. And they were helping kind of script, assertive messages to talk about the roommate. It was amazing. And we hear that stuff all the time.” The fact that these students felt comfortable to share and help is a testament to how committed tutoring services is to helping the student population at Winona State.
Quandt has hope for the future of tutoring services, even if changes have to be made. They might have to lean more towards “students who need it the most,” as opposed to as many students as possible. While that’s certainly not the most ideal situation, the most we can do is follow Quandt’s lead and “do what we can with what we have.” Tutoring might be experiencing some difficulties, but even still they strive to make student success their priority.
