A Student-Centered Approach to Advising Study

This study provides a blueprint for a student-centered academic advising model through two critical imperatives.

Pressure on campus leaders to demonstrate improvement in student success continues to mount, but the question of accountability on campus remains unclear. As central retention offices and shared responsibility campaigns fall short of expectations, many campus leaders are turning to academic advising as the unit or activity best-positioned to inflect student outcomes.

Shifting the emphasis of advising from basic transactions toward activities that significantly impact retention and timely completion, however, remains a nontrivial pursuit.

Structuring advising to enable consistency and accountability

Advisor training and organizational academic advising models should enable students to remain with one dedicated contact throughout their academic career. Advisors with consistent caseloads are better able to leverage both data and time with individual students to assist those in need with the right advice.

A disproportionate share of advisor training and effort is devoted to the course catalog, and keeping up with offerings and program requirements certainly requires a great deal of attention.

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Targeting intervention strategies based on student risk

Progressive institutions incorporate a wide variety of demographic, financial, and behavioral information into their analyses of student attrition to uncover the variables most closely correlated with student success and identify the best support strategy for each student.

Too often, students who do not proactively seek out mentors and counseling are left with a very limited advising experience, far short of the “success coach” paradigm that has been shown to impact retention and graduation rates among more nontraditional student populations.

Advising leaders and administrators find themselves stuck between the utopian ideal of personalized attention for every student at the moment they need it (whether they know it or not) and the practical, financial, and logistical impossibility of providing that attention.

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