A Crusade Against Terrible Advising

This article was made possible with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Ned Laff wanted to talk. I had written an article about the complicated relationship between the liberal arts and the job market. A couple of people in the article had said more liberal-arts majors should be directed to the career center.

“The answer is not in career services,” Laff wrote to me, but in “the intersection between students, ‘hidden intellectualism,’ and the ‘hidden job market,’ which career services are not set up to explore.”

“I promise you that I would not be emailing if I had not done this across different campus demographics,” said Laff, a former academic adviser. “I also promise that you will find the conversation well worth your time.”

I made a mental note to call him sometime, set the message aside, and soon forgot about it. Six months later, after I wrote a story about students who flounder after graduation, he sent the same message again. I finally called him. Academic advising as it’s typically done was mostly a waste of time, he told me in our brief exchange. In the months that followed, Laff kept sending me short, plaintive emails, citing articles showing higher education was failing vulnerable students. “I do wish we had time to sit and really talk,” he would say.

I worried I was dealing with a crank. But when we finally met near Laff’s home in Chicago in February, just before Covid-19 shut everything down, we sat together at the Evanston library for four hours, then went to a bar and talked into the evening as Laff laid out his vision.

If advising worked as it should, he said, it could help students find successful careers and fulfilling lives — and save higher education in the process. Colleges should be able to work with students, find their strengths, get them the education and experience they need, then launch them into the world. It’s not rocket science, but colleges fail at it again and again.

Laff, with an expansive mind and a diverse set of interests, might have become a scholar — in our hours of energetic conversation he touched on the religious philosophy of John Donne, baseball statisticians, and the importance of water-rights laws to Colorado breweries. But, after earning a Ph.D. in English education and educational policy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he went into academic advising because he found he could do so much more there to help students.

Indeed, student-success advocates and education experts agree that quality academic advising is key to improving graduation and job-placement rates. The typical advising session is a basic contact point at crucial junctures: the moments students decide on a major, confess confusion or failure, or reveal vulnerabilities. An adviser that hears these cues in a packed day of appointments can turn a mere 30-minute check-in into a transformational experience. Particularly for students from lower-income or first-generation backgrounds, an inquisitive, creative advising session could show them how to tap into their “hidden intellectualism” — their nonacademic talents and interests — to get on the path to the career and life they want.

Instead, most academic advising is a rote, bureaucratic exercise in checking off boxes, where advisers — often young and inexperienced in the world outside academe — are not thinking creatively about how unusual majors could lead to unexpected careers. Advising units are frequently disconnected from career services, which should be a crucial partner. Advisers who know better — and there are many who recognize the shortcomings of their own field — are constrained by the myopia, structures, and inertia of their administrations and institutions, many of which, Laff said, care more about their processes and bottom lines than about their students.

As much as higher-ed leaders talk about “meeting students where they are,” as much as student-success advocates laud the power of deep mentorship, many institutions ignore the potential of those advising units, seeing them as a tool for crisis management among struggling students, rather than something more expansive, more creative, more essential. Yet even as the pandemic increases the need for crisis management, it also means students will need experienced and thoughtful mentors to help them figure out how to put their talents to work in a post-pandemic employment market.

“It would be interesting if we eliminate ‘advising’ from advising centers and call them ‘mentoring centers,’” Laff said. “But I don’t think the administration and faculty realize what a high-impact practice a good interaction in an advising office can be for a student.”

Nima Taradji for The Chronicle

Laff was introduced to advising in the 1960s while at the University of Illinois, when he was part of a program for students who were undecided about a major. His adviser, Roland W. Holmes, an assistant dean at the college, guided Laff through his undergraduate program, then hired him to work with students on independent study when Laff returned to the university to get his doctorate. Working with students who were designing their paths through college, Laff realized that the declared major is just another artificial, bureaucratic structure. Advising students required the sort of deep inquiry that Holmes had brought to Laff in his own undergraduate education.

“If it wasn’t for him, I would have never made it through,” Laff says. “It wasn’t because he was this mystical Dr. Strange. He asked great questions, and then sent me out to find the answers. He taught me how to look.”

Laff realized that he had encountered Holmes in his own education through serendipity, and the idea that deep advising should not be accidental galvanized him. He went on to work at the University of Northern Colorado, Florida Atlantic University, Weber State University, Mundelein College, Loyola University Chicago, Columbia College in South Carolina, Augustana College, and, toward the end of his career, Governors State University — a range of colleges that tested his theories about student advising. Even in retirement, he continues to encounter students whom colleges have failed, and continues to help them.

When Laff tells stories from the trenches of advising, he expresses deep compassion for his students. But a gruff, no-time-for-BS demeanor lurks just beneath the surface. He readily describes jobs he quit because he felt the administration was screwing over students or erecting unnecessary barriers to graduation and success.

At the same time he was emailing me, he was sending similar arguments to influencers like James Kvaal and Anthony P. Carnevale. His longtime colleagues in advising know Laff well, describing him as combative, a character, a crusader.

“I’d probably get two emails from Ned each year, blessing me out,” said Charles Nutt, the executive director of the National Academic Advising Association. “Then we’d see each other at the conference and go have a drink together.”

Mark Salisbury, who worked with Laff at Augustana College about five years ago, when Salisbury was assistant dean and director of institutional research and assessment there, heard about my many hours of conversation with Laff. “Ned is the anti-Twitter,” he said. “There’s a bit of Don Quixote in there, tilting at windmills.”

But, Salisbury and others acknowledged, Laff is right.

“There’s nothing in the student experience that suffers from a wider range of possible experiences and outcomes than advising,” says Salisbury, who now runs TuitionFit, a company he founded that helps students compare costs between colleges. “It’s entirely dependent on the individual advisers. And advising is all over the map, from utterly procedural to almost too strategic, too intrusive, or too prescriptive.”

And it has been this way for years. Nutt says that academic advising was once the domain of professors, but it was professionalized in the early 20th century when colleges realized that students needed more consistent and grounded guidance. But the field has long suffered from a perception that it is merely a hoop for students to jump through.

In 1992, a story in The Chronicle described the ways that colleges were trying to respond to “complaints about the poor quality of academic advising.” In 2010, The Chronicle ran an essay by a professor who admitted being a terrible adviser, and some readers’ responses to the essay noted how “deeply flawed” advising could be. A 2018 Chronicle article noted that while colleges have changed to accommodate new student populations over the decades, they “haven’t really done anything comparable when it comes to advising.”

More colleges are working to make their advising strategic, Nutt says, pointing to institutions like Florida State University or the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. The University of Oklahoma in the past several years has trained dozens of advisers to act as “life coaches” who help students grapple with a broad spectrum of questions, conundrums, and stresses that might lead them to drop out. But there remain advising offices out there that are merely transactional, that lack a strong sense of mission.

The field has numerous techniques, with names like “intrusive advising” or “holistic advising.” Laff practices a version of “appreciative advising,” which was co-founded by Jennifer L. Bloom, a professor of educational leadership at Florida Atlantic University, inspired by a management style called “appreciative inquiry.” When state funding was tied to student performance in 2014, the university looked to appreciative advising as a key support.

“All of a sudden,” says Joseph Murray, who supervises freshman and sophomore advising at FAU, “this became serious business.”

The style sets up a process for engaging a student with eye contact, an inviting demeanor, and disarming and introspective questions: “Who do you admire as a role model, and why?” or, “What accomplishment are you most proud of?” They encourage that student to dream big about life after college, formulating a plan for achieving those goals, and following up with the student to make sure the plan is followed.

Students aren’t assigned to advisers at FAU; advisers are assigned to students, charged with reaching out to them to make sure they’re on track. And each adviser shares a particular group of students with counterparts in career services, housing, financial aid, and other divisions, so they can collectively manage the range of challenges that students face. The university won attention from The New York Times when it placed advisers in the university parking garages to intercept commuting students. Since the coronavirus lockdown started, advisers at the university have shifted their hours to serve students around the clock — an adjustment, Murray says, likely to continue even after Covid-19 is over.

Since the university adopted appreciative advising in 2014, the four-year graduation rate has risen nearly 20 percent, and Black and Hispanic students’ graduation rates have outpaced those of the overall population.

“An adviser’s job is to ask really good questions,” Bloom says. “We’ve been able to curate a number of questions that advisers can use. I mean, that sounds basic. But as you know, it’s not. There’s actually an art to it.”

That’s the problem, Salisbury and others point out: Effective advising depends on the adviser’s focus, curiosity, and creativity. As such, advising is black box — a series of contact points between individuals, rarely seen by outsiders, with its quality difficult to assess.

In talking to Laff, I realized I’d worked 20 years at The Chronicle, had written extensively about college to career, the value of a degree, and the path of impoverished students, and I had never seen an advising session. Laff encouraged me to call some colleges and sit in on some.

“It could be interesting,” he said.

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One day in late February, I arrived at a small public college and was ushered into the first advising session of the day: A 19-year-old female student came to see her adviser, a woman slightly older than her, to get help choosing a minor: African studies or African American studies? As a young woman of mixed race, she thought either minor would help her connect to her Black heritage, from which she had felt alienated. But she also wanted the minor to complement her political-science major — a major she chose, she said, to fulfill her goal to become president of the United States.

“I just want to do whatever helps me more,” she says. So, which minor should she choose?

I expected the question to elicit a conversation: Why do you want to be president? What are you planning to do before running for the nation’s highest office? Is poli-sci really the right path to get there?

The adviser asked no such questions. She told the student she had helped students pick minors in the past, and those students hadn’t liked her choices, so now she wouldn’t offer her opinion on which minor might help this student win the presidency. “You have to decide for yourself,” she said.

The student leaned back in her chair to think it through out loud, looking to the adviser for cues: When she ran for president of the United States, the student reasoned, surely she would need to know something about the Black experience in America, so that pointed to African American studies. But then again, as president, she would have to deal with African countries and speak to the United Nations.

“So, African studies?” the adviser asked, ready to mark it down.

The student nodded. Then she had to pick a language that satisfied both major and minor requirements, with the choices: French, Spanish, Arabic, or Swahili. “Swahili — is that derived from French?” the student asked. Would it help the poli-sci major? “I’m a freshman, I don’t know!”

It doesn’t really matter, you just need a language, the adviser said. The student wound up with Swahili, figuring this matched her African-studies minor.

Then the adviser told the student she needed to take economics. “Take it online,” the adviser said.

“I don’t want to take it online,” the student said.

“All the students tell me that if you take econ, you take it online,” the adviser replied. “I just listen to you guys.”

I left that appointment stunned. What had just happened? Or rather, what hadn’t happened? Certainly not listening.

Although I saw some really wonderful, inquisitive moments between advisers and students as I made my tours through colleges, more of the sessions I saw were a standard running through of forms and checking off of requirements. In others, advisers asked surface-level questions about how a student was doing in class or what they might like to major in. They didn’t probe deeply for the answers.

At a community college, I watched a session with a student who had taken her first shot at college in 2014, but failed all of her developmental courses in math and English in her first semester. Then she re-enrolled but dropped out again in 2017 because she got pregnant midway through the term. Now, with a baby and a job to support them both, she was going back to college with a plan: She wanted to take all the courses she needed to transfer to a local state school to become a pediatrician.

The adviser offered an understated warning: This meant the student would have to retake the developmental courses she had failed, along with tough classes like anatomy and biology, OK? Sure, the student said. She didn’t seem to grasp the steep climb ahead. The adviser listed the courses she would have to start with, then left the office to get a printout.

I turned to the student: “What made you want to be a pediatrician?”

“I took my baby to the doctor a few weeks ago, and as I was watching the doctor work, I thought, I could see myself doing that,” she replied. “I had never thought that about a job before.” The adviser returned with the printout, handed it to the student, and the young woman left.

When was someone going to get real with that student, I asked the adviser, tell her how hard it would be to become a pediatrician, given her academic history, and help her explore other options?

The adviser grimaced and acknowledged the long odds. But she didn’t want to “crush” the young woman’s dream, which might dissuade her from re-enrolling. So, she said, “I signed her up for the same classes I would have if she wanted to be a psych major.”

Confusion on the path from college to career is common among students rich and poor. But students from wealthy backgrounds more often have family and friends who can stress-test a college plan and career aspiration, provide connections and resources that can make meaning out of an ill-conceived major, and tell a kid when to pull out and try something else. In a sense, wealthier families know how to play the game of college to get the desired outcome in life. They can identify students’ passions — their “hidden intellectualism” — and tie them to the “hidden job market,” the range of jobs available if you know the right people.

If students from less affluent backgrounds don’t get that perspective and those resources from a college, they might not get them at all. They need advisers who will show them their hidden intellectualism, connect them to the hidden job market, and teach them how to win the game.

Isaiah Moore was one of those kids. A driven academic performer from South Chicago, he had long had an interest in community organizing and politics when he went to the advisers at Governors State University, where he was a political-science major, to ask about an internship with Bobby Rush, the U.S. congressman representing his district. His adviser flatly told him that was impossible: Rush’s office didn’t offer internships.

Nima Taradji for The Chronicle

For help, he went to Laff, whom he had seen speak in 2017 about designing an educational experience around dreams and interests. Laff told him to contact Rush’s office, coached Moore on how to display interest in Rush’s work, and told him to end the conversation with a question: “How can I get involved in your work?”

Rush’s staff made him an offer on the spot. That’s playing on the hidden job market.

“Essentially, I piloted the internship program for his district office,” says Moore. Now in a graduate program in urban planning and policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Moore says he is laying the groundwork to run for Rush’s seat within 10 years.

Some students require a more drastic intervention.

Ju’Juan Day was in his junior year at Governors State University and a reluctant major in media-studies before he saw Laff speaking about student success and career paths at a campus event. Day approached Laff after the talk. “What are you really interested in?” Laff asked him, before peppering Day with other questions about his strategy for getting there: What did he want to do with that interest? Did he have internships or jobs lined up? What was the path after graduation?

“Honestly, nobody at the college had asked me that — ever,” Day says. He went to a friend of his at the college and asked her the same questions, and she broke down in tears; she loved fashion, but an adviser had heard “fashion business” and guided her to the business program, which she had no interest in. She would graduate soon and had no idea what she would do.

Day was lost too. He’d discovered that media-studies major was more about news and journalism, not creative writing or entertainment. He had long wanted to pursue music, creative writing, and television comedy and drama. He had briefly been an information-technology major after an adviser signed him up for the program because he’d listed “technology” (as in iPhones and entertainment apps) among his interests.

“They told me about programs that they offered at the school, not really acknowledging the things that I wanted to do, and they didn’t really supply any information about resources outside of the school,” Day says. Job boards at the college listed either highly specialized opportunities for students in programs like nursing, or menial work, like babysitting or food service. “I’m creative. So where are jobs for creatives?”

Laff counseled Day to leave Governors State and enroll at Roosevelt University. There, Day could study under a vocal coach who worked on the television show Empire and take courses in a writing program more attuned to his interests.

Counseling a student to leave the institution could get an adviser in hot water. After all, colleges need to keep their enrollments up, to hang on to every tuition-paying student. Most colleges count their successes by the number of students they enroll and how many they push through to graduation, regardless of how happy those students are with the outcome. But what if the best path for a students lies outside of the college? Is it ethical to pretend it doesn’t?

Laff was in the final years of his last academic job, and he’s not the type to care about college bureaucracy anyway.

Day, for his part, thrived at Roosevelt, went on to get his master’s degree in writing at Columbia College Chicago, where he taught classes in writing, and has finished a manuscript for his first book, which he is showing to publishers now. If he hadn’t met Laff, he would have stayed at Governors State. But the adviser pushed him to think about what he really wanted and to trust that process.

Until then, Day says, “my mind-set was so limited.”