Elizabeth “Beth” Wichland tends to draw superlatives like “best friend” and “amazing” from the students she works with, even though she’s never met some of them.
The degree completion advisor at Plymouth State University’s Academic and Career Advising Center, Wichland helps students who have dropped out of PSU and later decide to return get back on track to earn their diplomas.
“It was always a goal of mine to reenroll, to finish school, and I will give Beth credit for it,” says Owen Healey ’21, who started as a first-year student in 2013, dropped out his senior year, and received his bachelor’s in business administration last year. “She was able to communicate with me extremely effectively and timely on what courses I needed to take, how to sign up, how to transfer credits back. She was a major contributor to my success.”
Wichland says returning students are typically referred to her by the Admissions or Registrar’s offices, and she helps them determine how many credits and which classes they need in order to graduate. Often, those credits can be obtained at another school and transferred.
A complicating factor is changing curricula, as the University issues a new academic catalog each year. “When a student leaves and comes back, they’re supposed to follow the curriculum from the newest academic catalog,” Wichland explains. “That’s when they need this help.”
At the beginning of this fall’s semester alone, she received at least 15 requests from former students seeking to re-enroll.
Nationally, nearly a third of college students drop out before graduating, and only 13 percent enroll again during the subsequent five years, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. Reasons for quitting vary, Wichland says, ranging from family obligations to money issues.
Sara Smith ’22 was already a nontraditional student when she started at PSU in 1998 at the age of 27, hoping to become a teacher. The demands of motherhood intervened, and she ended up suspending her studies to home-school her kids. When they grew up, she decided to go back but was uncertain of a field of study.
Earlier this year, Smith started talking by phone regularly to Wichland, whom she has never met. When she would hang up, her husband would ask her to whom she’d been speaking. “I would say, ‘my new best friend, Beth,’” Smith recalls. “She makes you feel like you’re the only one she’s working with at the time,” adds Smith, who will be 51 when she gets her degree in December. “Your needs are at the top of her ‘important list’.”
With Wichland’s help, Smith has been seeking a degree in interdisciplinary studies, with a likely focus on social emotional learning in education—an area that will be helpful both in her role as a longtime foster mother and as a campus minister at Bishop Brady High School in Concord.
Mental health and substance abuse issues led Healey to leave PSU early in his senior year after first receiving help from the University’s Counseling Center. “They saved my life,” he says.
Healey later engaged in in-patient treatment before moving to sober housing, and ultimately deciding to again seek the degree he had always wanted. He is currently a client experience coordinator for an outpatient provider that specializes in mental health and addiction treatment.
Healey says, “Beth Wichland helped me complete a goal that helps me bring back value, to myself and the world.”
