Why is UAdvise Needed?
Is your university interested in increasing student retention rates?
If so, you share much in common with universities across the nation who are concerned with increasing the percentage of students who graduate in four to six years. In addition to the financial impacts from lost students, retention rates are often tied to state funding and an important factor in determining rankings of universities and colleges in annual publications.
Do you strive to consistently track the academic advising of thousands of undergraduate students?
USC and Urban Insight have used Microsoft's Application Platform to innovate and simplify the creation of a powerful new system to improve retention and enhance the student experience. UAdvise has the potential to become a centerpiece of efforts for universities and colleges seeking to use Microsoft software to increase retention. 
Jeff Nuckolls
Education Senior Technologist
Microsoft Corporation
You're not alone. Many large universities experience challenges in consistently tracking the academic advising of undergraduate students who switch majors an average of 2.4 times during their undergraduate experience. Most universities continue to rely on paper-based advising forms, which are not easily transferred among different departments, or which cannot be retrieved due to staff transition when a student claims to have been misadvised.
Why is Student Retention Important?
The following summary of this important issue is excerpted from an article presented at AACRAO's 15th Annual Strategic Enrollment Management Conference.
...[A] spate of studies and reports has been published that examines graduation rates of enrolled students and various reasons that campuses should be concerned about why students fail to graduate.
For administrators, the financial ramifications for their campus is an area of obvious concern. Private institutions, whose primary financial support comes from student tuition dollars, have long understood that it was in their best interest to retain matriculated students as a means of helping to assure financial stability...
...Institutional interest in student persistence, however, goes beyond straightforward financial incentives based on the tuition students pay... Public policymakers have also turned their attention to first year to second year persistence rates and to graduation rates. Some states have considered using graduation rates as one measure of institutional effectiveness for determining levels of state support. Perhaps more importantly, proposals have been made as part of the current re-authorization of the federal Higher Education Act to include measures of institutional effectiveness as part of the reporting requirements for colleges and universities. Graduation rates are one of the most often mentioned possible measures.
If all of these were not sufficiently compelling reasons for campus leaders to be concerned about student persistence, the annual arbiter of quality among four-year institutions, U.S. News and World Report's Best Colleges in America, includes a measure of graduation rates as one of the metrics that is included when calculating the quality of a college or university.
Source: "Managing Student Retention: Is the Glass Half Full, Half Empty, or Simply Empty?" [PDF] by Don Hossler, Professor of Educational Leadership & Policy Studies Indiana University Bloomington