This essay is excerpted from a new Chronicle special report, “The Future of Advising,” available in the Chronicle Store.
I don’t know about you but I’m tired of the same old conversations about student advising. Should we have a decentralized or a centralized model? Faculty advisers or professional staff advisers? A better question: Do we really want to keep recycling those binary conversations?
I’ve been working in and around academic advising for almost 18 years now — first as a faculty adviser in my department and now as an associate provost with institutional responsibility for advising in my portfolio. On countless occasions, I have listened — not always patiently, I admit — as people told me how higher education ought to be doing advising.
Yes, yes, I would nod, I’ve seen all the models.
There’s a wealth of expertise and intellectual work out there on academic advising (see Nacada, EAB, Naspa, and more), and I would encourage you, if you haven’t already, to familiarize yourself with this body of knowledge and the people on your campus who live this work every day. They have much to teach us, and I won’t try to supplant their vital contributions to the larger conversation about the future of academic advising.
What I will say: It’s high time we disrupt the either-or conversations we’ve been having about advising for as long as most of us can remember.
Change and rapid response tend to be anathema to most of us who work in higher education. We’re really good at overthinking/critiquing everything. We’re less good at moving swiftly from idea to prototype. We get bogged down in planning and studying — focusing too much on all the reasons why we can’t do something or why it would take a lot of time, money, etc. to do it right.
I’m not advocating that we swing the pendulum all the way to the other side. After all, advising is a profession about which we know quite a bit. And we do need to be thoughtful stewards of institutional and public resources. But it is time to take a page from the pandemic playbook — the only time in my professional memory when I’ve seen true disruption of the status quo in higher-ed operations — and disrupt our comfortable ways of thinking about academic advising.
The University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley, where I work, is a large regional institution, serving a diverse population of undergraduate and graduate students. More than 90 percent of our students are Hispanic, and most of them are Pell Grant-eligible and first-generation college students. They bring an incredible array of assets, experiences, connections, and aspirations to our institution and have widely diverse needs. Yet they are not the same mix of students that we had even five years ago. Advising must be able to understand the nuances of demographic and enrollment shifts, and adapt accordingly. None of us can afford to expect undergraduates to change for us, nor should we ever have.
The pandemic showed us that we can, indeed, adapt rapidly. Consider how quickly we moved new-student orientation online. That was a radical change for advisers at my university. We moved from group advising sessions to one-on-one virtual appointments in which advisers were responsible not only for guiding students toward which courses to take in their first semester, but also walking them through the logistics of registering for those classes on the spot. The number of logistical changes required to move orientation online was staggering. Staff members from various divisions had to work together to troubleshoot and, most important, to change operations frequently — sometimes from one day to the next — to try to better respond to sweeping changes in student behaviors that could have had devastating effects on our university’s enrollment and financial health.
What we all witnessed in those difficult, uncertain months was the amazing capacity for change among the staff, an agility and responsiveness born of necessity and a tacit shared commitment to do whatever it took to meet our students where they were. It is that spirit we need to carry forward if we want to be able to best serve the undergraduates who are coming to us now, rather than the ones our systems were designed to serve 40 years ago.
At the height of the pandemic, I had a conversation with my advising director that profoundly influenced the way I think about our work and about my responsibility as an institutional leader. We had developed a new advising model (one that differentiated the timing, modality, and purpose of advising sessions, depending on the unique needs of key subpopulations) and I wanted to be able to make quick adjustments to the plan. This was challenging for my director, someone for whom planning and careful implementation, training, and assessment were key values and strengths. She likened advising to a big ship. It’s hard to steer a ship that big; if you’re trying to change its direction, you can do so, but only a little at a time.
Suddenly, it made perfect sense to me what we needed to do: Build a different kind of ship — one that is more agile and nimble, capable of maneuvering and changing direction quickly. The time of the tanker or massive luxury cruise liner is over.
Meeting the advising needs of our students today is a wicked problem. It is not a binary one. There is no “right” model of advising, even at a single institution over time. At my own university, we’ve literally had every model I’ve ever heard or read about operating at one time or another. There have been good and bad things about all of them — a fact that’s easy to overlook, particularly if the current model is your favorite or the one you’re most used to.
My own discontent with these worn-out arguments (centralized versus decentralized, etc.) stems from a deep sense that the old advising models reinforce silos in our institutional structures and practices. And relying on those models has made us complacent.
There’s no question in my mind that students need faculty mentors and professional staff advisers. There’s no question that we need an advising model that has elements of centralization (such as shared training and development standards, shared advising philosophy, and strategic, proactive advising campaigns to deal with common metrics) and elements that are more college- and program-specific. None of this is either/or — it’s both/and.
At our university, we are committed to the idea of shared responsibility for student success. There’s more than enough work for everyone, and we each have perspectives, experience, knowledge, and connections/social capital that students need. One way we’ve tried to enact this is through college-specific, advising-strategy teams. The idea — adapted from a model at California State University at Fullerton — is to create a team dedicated to advising, degree progress, and student retention within each of our institution’s colleges. The teams are made up of staff members, administrators, and professors, who design advising strategies that make sense for their students and share responsibility for putting those strategies in place (some make sense for faculty members to carry out; others are better handled by staff advisers or degree-progress specialists).
What works in one college may or may not in another, and we in advising have to be agile enough — and open enough — to adjust.
In November, I attended EAB’s Connected22 conference on student success, and in his keynote address, Ed Venit, managing director of EAB (formerly known as the Education Advisory Board), spelled out the ripple effects of the pandemic on higher ed and what we can do to deal with staffing turnover and prepare for our students’ elevated needs. Certainly, colleges have been hemorrhaging advisers who left the profession during the pandemic (an exacerbation of the age-old turnover in the field, because of its high stress and low pay). But he reminded us that we have a great opportunity now to build a new advising culture and to recruit the kind of staff and faculty members who will be compatible with it. This new culture can emphasize shared responsibility for student success and can value — and even thrive on — innovation in trying to better understand and aid our students.
