It depends on how it's implemented. These systems can work, but they require very tight coordination & buy-in from faculty as early as the procurement stage. Sc

It depends on how it's implemented. These systems can work, but they require very tight coordination & buy-in from faculty as early as the procurement stage. Schools that just buy & force them on faculty don't achieve much. The types of messages faculty get like that are usually a check-in where they're asked to give a status report for each student. This can be a quick good/ok/bad type of thing, or it can be something like a brief survey. My personal opinion is that the first option is best: These systems should put as low of a burden on faculty as possible. I really minimalist implementation that is almost as good is to ask faculty to only flag students in trouble. What this should do, if the college has properly implemented it, is trigger the advisor to reach out to students struggling to determine 1) Why and then 2) What can be done to help: tutoring, assessment of whether the course is really required, determination if the course can be withdrawn from if not required or if the student is beyond the point of recover, or should have taken a pre-requisite or lower-level course in the subject first, etc. If your college has not communicated this sort of thing to you, they are doing it wrong. I would still encourage you to do what is asked unless it is a very large burden. If that's the case, reach out to the advising unit overseeing these initiatives to understand how they're using it. But if it's not too much of a burden, even if they've done a poor job communicating with faculty, it may trigger a meaningful intervention with the student. Even if it doesn't, it will still allow collection of data that can be analyzed to determine trends, the significance of whether these activities by faculty correlate with student success, etc. And if they do, that will then be used to feed back into the advising process that these things are actionable to the benefit of students. These systems can work. In my current job, after implementing such a system we saw first-year drop outs decrease by about 6%.