The most common curriculum at SCCC is General Studies, and students often need assistance deciding which courses are best to fulfill the requirements and electives.

Priority registration kicks off this week—and we really need an all hands on deck kind of effort to help stem the enrollment decline that has steadily but surely been chipping away at the number of courses and assignments that the college is able to offer.

This hurts students when they cannot find enough classes in the modalities they prefer, and quite frankly it's hurting our members too as more and more are losing on-load and overload sections.

Failing to help students register is a lose-lose proposition. That's why we're encouraging everyone to actively promote priority registration, which goes from April 4 to April 10 this year.

Please encourage all of the students you see in your offices, work areas and/or in your classrooms—on campus, remote or online—to take advantage of priority registration to get the classes they need for summer and fall 2022.

Let them know that the sooner they enroll, the more likely they will get the sections they need and the schedule that best fits their school, work and family obligations. Current students can log in to MySCCC and find their designated registration dates.

Remind students to check MySCCC for academic alerts and to review their degree audit in Degree Works. To better help students get the advisement they need, students enrolled in Liberal Arts & Sciences: General Studies should contact their campus counseling center or campus Academic Advising and Mentoring Center (AAMC), while students in all other majors should contact a faculty member in their department (or visit counseling or the AAMC if needed).

We also encourage members to sign up for your eight hours of contractual advisement at your campus AAMC. As Dante notes in his cover story for this issue of The WORD, students have been increasingly vocal in their concerns about faculty that they perceive to be unhelpful or uncaring. Of all the factors impacting why so many students are choosing not to return to SCCC for another semester, this is the one we can actually do something about. We all need to work together to change these perceptions.

You can also let students who are unable to come to campus know that we have online registration available to them as well.

Although we find DegreeWorks to be far more accessible and understandable for students than our previous system, we know students still have questions about which courses to take and even about how to read the symbols indicating what they've successfully completed, which courses are currently in progress and what options they have to fulfill remaining requirements and electives.

We hope faculty will be as generous as possible with the amount of time spent in the AAMCs (rather than their individual offices) to maximize how many students we're able to help enroll for the summer and fall. If you do hold your eight contractual advisement hours in your office, post a sign on your door announcing those hours and be sure to contact the appropriate administrator on your campus.

It's the right thing to do, not only for our students but also for ourselves.