What is being accomplished through advising? In answering this question, most would include "student success" somewhere in their answer. Without using the word "success" perhaps other words appear: grades, graduate, pass, learning, meaning. The phrase "student success" has become shorthand for a collection of things, each requiring different plans and actions to support. In the higher education literature, success usually means one or more of the following: retention; completion; academic achievement (grades); employment or further educational attainment; holistic individual development, including personal validation, self- efficacy, sense of purpose, active involvement, reflective thinking, social integration, and self-awareness. Student success is all of those things together, in differing amounts for different students. It is our job as academic advisers to get to know the student well enough to help them sort out the relationships between their goals. As my first mentor in academic advising used to say, "We are messing around with people's lives." And so, this work deserves to be taken seriously.
I point this out because what we think academic advising can and should do directly relates to what we consider "student success" and the role of academic advisers in supporting it. The answers to these questions have direct implications for what it takes to do this work well, what resources, skills, and expertise are needed, and what should be measured as indicators of success. Because of that, we have a very serious responsibility to be thoughtful and informed about what we are hoping to do and to have some basis for thinking that the way we are doing it will have the intended outcome. Vaguely referring to "student success" can lead us in directions that may or may not produce the outcomes we want. We must be intentionally precise about what we mean when we say the word "success" and be clear about how we think what we are doing through academic advising relates to those specific goals.
I would propose this as a common starting place for what academic advising should accomplish: Academic advising, regardless of institutional mission, student characteristics, or other practitioner responsibilities, should (1) fundamentally and systematically engage students in reflective conversation about educational goals, (2) teach students about the nature of higher education, academic decisions, and the significance of those decisions, and (3) provoke student change toward greater levels of self-awareness and responsibility.
In doing their work, academic advisers develop a unique expertise that can benefit higher education as a whole. For example, we can see how policies and procedures influence student behaviors—sometimes influencing them to do things that we would not consider good—and identify the root cause of these patterns. We can see how our systems systematically include or exclude certain kinds of students, often along socioeconomic, race, and gender lines. We have an intimate understanding of the various purposes of higher education, cultural values, and economic realities, and we straddle the intersection between them to help students make decisions that mean something to them. Said another way, we see the forest and the trees, and we know how to navigate all of it. We know how to guide students around the washed-out trail and what skills students need to climb over or around the tree fall. We know what mushrooms look alluringly delicious but are definitely not edible.
This holistic expertise is unique in higher education and needs to be leveraged in policy decisions at every level of the institution. But this is not what regularly happens. Although institutions point to academic advising as important to student success, and although that is correct, we have not been able to regularly meet our own potential for very real, very practical reasons. First, academic advising developed as a practice without a commonly shared underlying philosophy. Rather, it was invented multiple times for multiple reasons at multiple institutions and simply delegated to the people who were there. Second, advising practitioners operate out of numerous contexts in higher education, which results in a lack of common identity and a lack of disciplinary community across its practitioners.
To this second point, nobody actually knows how many people serve as academic advisers at higher education institutions in the United States. According to the most recent NACADA National Survey of Academic Advising, the vast majority of individuals who advise students serve in positions where academic advising is just one of several major job responsibilities and usually not the one that can take top priority (Self, 2013). Primary-role academic advisers, whose responsibilities are firstly concerned with academic advising are a minority. For example, at Penn State, an institution with a historical investment in primary-role academic advising, still only 13% of those who serve as assigned advisers to undergraduate students are classified as academic advisers or advising managers.
The history of how academic advising emerged in American higher education has direct relevance to the contemporary division of labor in delivering advising, the different ways it is valued within the university, and the expected role advisers play in "student success." There is so much to say about how this history matters, and so much that connects big things happening at a global scale to local nuances of personalities and organizational power struggles, that I can only convey so much. So, let me summarize the overarching trends.
With respect to students, the number of people attending college has expanded over time and factors driving enrollment have become more complex (Schaeffer, 2022), but some things have always been true. Throughout the history of American higher education, from its origins in 1636 until now, college in America has always served as a means for both gaining and preserving access to social and political prestige and power. Let me say that another way: Higher education is both an inclusive and an elite enterprise simultaneously. Increasing access to higher education (especially through federal legislative acts), changes in the social needs for an educated citizenry, and changes in credentialing for the professions are all connected to increased curricular complexity and the enrollment of a larger and more diverse student body. Even while more students go to college, we do not offer them all the same chances. Higher education simultaneously creates access and protects the status quo. Not all colleges afford the same access to socioeconomic mobility, and not all students can get into those colleges that provide a strong pathway towards mobility (Labaree, 2017). Even within a single institution, access to high-prestige programs is not evenly distributed, despite our promising all students that they have the chance to enter such programs. There are specific institutional structures that are designed to keep some students out of some programs, and those structures are built along preexisting lines of privilege.
With respect to faculty, their roles have become increasingly specialized, particularly as academic disciplines emerged and the role of knowledge generation became important to the funding model for higher education institutions. The primacy of research, particularly grant-funded research, matters significantly for any faculty member in defining what is important and what needs to take a second or third priority, even for faculty who are not at research-driven universities (Geiger, 2009; Zimmerman, 2020).
With respect to academic advising, it was established at different institutions, at different times, to fill different needs. These needs have always touched on one or more aspects of "student success," even when those words were not used to describe the concept. Depending on the institution's needs and the people who were already there and able to fill those needs, academic advising took different forms. Let's take a look at a few key moments in academic advising's history.
Our first stop is Kenyon College in 1840. What was happening in the 1840s? There was westward expansion, removal of Native Americans, and the founding of European-style cities along with many new colleges that would supply the political, economic, and thought leaders to those communities (Cohen, 2014). These new colleges needed student enrollment and tuition to a much greater extent than the colonial colleges; even then, Harvard and Yale had big endowments (Geiger, 2000). Rutherford B. Hayes, Kenyon student and future 19th president of the United States, wrote home excited about a new ally, called an adviser, in a letter to his mother (Hayes, 1840). While Hayes's adviser was not an academic adviser in the modern sense, this innovation signals the origin of a key aspect of modern advising—the assignment of a person whose specific role is to act as the student's advocate and institutional mediator.
Why was this an innovation? What caused such a thing to be needed? What does it signal about higher education? Until then, students everywhere studied a standard curriculum, focused on rhetoric, mathematics, philosophy, and Latin. A single faculty member taught all of the courses and served in loco parentis for the students (Thelin, 2019). The fundamental idea was to instill discipline in young minds through memorization and recitation (speaking the memorized text out loud in front of others). Students had virtually no choice in their coursework. It was all predefined. Faculty served as the authority in the classroom and also in the residence halls. They were teacher and disciplinarian. Faculty had a huge amount of control over students. And, as can be imagined, that led to a lot of problems. This new "adviser" role was meant to help prevent and mediate conflict and to reduce the likelihood of punishment by disciplinary expulsion. At the same time, there was not such a thing as alternative academic roles at any institution. There were people who did the maintenance, the cleaning, the cooking, and other labor. And then there were the faculty, a few of whom were also the deans or presidents. So, this person who was Hayes's adviser was probably one of the more junior faculty and one who did not exert in-loco-parentis control.
Moving into the post–Civil War era, another very important change impacted academic advising: an intentional and irreversible loosening of the curriculum and the introduction of significant student choice in what to study and which classes to take. Post–Civil War changes in technology, the economy, and politics all changed higher education, especially through disciplinary specialization, the increasing importance of knowledge creation, and subsequently, expansion in the number of topics to teach (Geiger, 2009).
Penn State's founding in 1855 as an agricultural school is directly related to this expansion of higher education into new knowledge fields, especially fields needed for a new demography and economy. The relaxation of strict disciplinary rules, as celebrated by Hayes at Kenyon college, and the expansion of curricular choice were also related to changes in the philosophy of education and ideas about the nature of students. Rather than needing to bludgeon education into students, sometimes quite literally, students were starting to be viewed as individuals who might want to learn things and had freedom of thought to do so (Gilman, 1872; Palmer, 1885). Education was also something that was increasingly seen as important for a growing nation: There were 31 states in 1855, with another 14 added by 1900. There were increasingly complex problems that needed to be solved by people who knew how to learn and how to think.
At many colleges, new areas of study were offered, and students were given choice, sometimes a lot of choice, in deciding what to learn. A famous example is Harvard's elective system, which gave students complete freedom to construct their own curricula. That was pretty quickly tempered into general education requirements, something that we now think of as foundational to any university education (Thelin, 2019). Another significant example was the development of topical areas of focus at Johns Hopkins, essentially creating majors (White and Khakpour, 2006). Giving some control to students did not come without serious debate. But when academic leaders defended their determination to give students the choice of what to learn, they did so on the basis of their belief that students making a choice in and of itself was an act of learning (Geiger, 2015).
There was definitely recognition that these choices should be made with guidance from an academic adviser. Again, this was by definition a member of the faculty because that is who was there. It is not clear how formalized this role as adviser was for faculty at most institutions. However, it was quickly clear that doing this well required dedicated time, skills, and knowledge. Harvard, for instance, recognized that since there was no preexisting model of what a nurturing relationship between faculty and students would look like, they needed to create a structure by formalizing the role. In reality, though, these turned into perfunctory interactions of signing registration cards. Those who did the actual work of advising were individuals who were just more naturally interested in students; the rest just went through the motions (Morrison, 1936).
At Ohio State there is record of advising specialists by 1906 (Gordon, 2004). Those specialists did work that looks like ours today. They helped students navigate their educational choices where those were available. They helped students navigate relationships with their faculty. And they started to take on a new role: keeping track of students' progress through degree requirements. When curricula were standardized and students moved in lockstep with their cohort, there was not much need for complicated record keeping. Formal processes of matriculation and graduation were fairly new on the scene, so new records needed to be kept and students needed help in navigating those more complicated curricular requirements.
In the period between 1900 and 1940 many events were incredibly important in shaping the way higher education in America looks today. I am going to skip over a lot of things that matter—compulsory education, legalization of racial segregation, world war, and women's suffrage—and pause in the 1920s. These were the high times of college going. Most colleges were still open enrollment or just beginning selective admissions. The number of students going to college increased, and among them, there was a wider range of readiness for college-level learning and new needs for support (Geiger, 2015). This is when we see the formalization of many of the roles played today in student affairs units: career assessment and job placement, health services (both psychological and physical), residential life, co-curricular activities (like clubs and sports), spiritual life, financial aid, admissions, and orientation (American Council on Education, 1983). All of these activities relate to "student success" now, although at the time, that is not how they were framed.
In many ways, these innovations sometimes had more to do with the practicalities of maintaining peaceful social order among students and within the community. For instance, at Penn State in the 1910s and 1920s, hazing of first-year students was real and destructive to students and the town alike. Freshmen were forced to paste posters all over the buildings downtown on "Poster Night" or find all the buggies and pile them up on the corner of College and Allen in the "Pajama Parade." The first "Freshman Week," a Penn State–organized, formal orientation program, was instituted in 1925 in an attempt to interrupt these traditions (Bezilla, 1985).
The new roles in student affairs were also heavily influenced by World War I innovations in aptitude and personality testing. It was believed that student personnel in higher education could carefully measure student skills and aptitudes, match students with an area of study and career role, and place them into that role on graduation (Yoakum, 1983). By the 1930s, there were calls among student personnel to ensure that there was always an overarching prioritization of individual students as whole human beings (Clothier, 1983). Many of these emerging student support areas, like health services, job placement, and financial services were recognized as areas of specialization, each requiring a different depth of knowledge and expertise. While academic advising was not explicitly part of student personnel work, elements of it certainly were. In particular, guidance in academic decision making and navigation of university relationships was a recognized need.
A multi-institution study of student-personnel work conducted in 1924 by L.B. Hopkins, director of personnel at Northwestern, gives a snapshot of academic advising as it existed at the time, and it still looks familiar today (Hopkins, 1926). The quality of advising depended heavily on the skills and inclinations of those who were delegated the responsibility. The Hopkins report found that successful advisers needed a specific set of skills and knowledge including (1) a real and sincere interest in students, (2) the ability to see situations from the students' points of view, (3) mastery of the technical requirements of courses, degree requirements, and entrance requirements, (4) familiarity with possible careers, and (5) knowledge about the individual student. The Hopkins report suggested that academic advising was best practiced by specialists who have these skills and knowledge. Over the next several decades, especially at larger institutions, that is what started to happen. Certain individuals were tapped to take on advising responsibilities to a greater extent. They were often people embedded in departments and the only person in the role. They carried titles that included the words "guidance" or "counseling," and they were often doing psychological counseling, vocational guidance, and academic advising simultaneously.
The first dedicated advising units could be found during the 1950s, and Penn State is one of the places where such units emerged. Why? In the 1940s, we had World War II, Brown v. Board of Education, the atomic bomb, and the major expansion of military-funded research at universities, in which Penn State was a major player. In the 1950s, the Cold War and the Space Race made engineering increasingly dominant and popular as a field of study (Heineman, 1993). Over this period, a college degree became firmly important as an entry-level credential into white-collar jobs of all sorts (Labaree, 2017). The Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, otherwise known as the G.I. Bill, meant that new kinds of students had access to college. In general, beginning since the 1940s, access to college increased for populations that had previously been excluded, especially for African American and women students. And many more students were ending up in academic difficulty because they were not coming with the same privileged educations as prior student populations.
At that time, any undergraduate with failing grades was automatically dismissed. For most institutions, this was just the way of things, and students who, colloquially speaking, "couldn't hack it" could be replaced by another student. The focus of Penn State, like most institutions, was on admitting more students, and what happened from there was on the student. Many of those students who were being dismissed were veterans who were here on G.I. Bill funding. Bob Bernreuter, a senior Penn State psychology professor, thought it might not need to be this way, and convinced the Faculty Senate to give these students a chance to academically recover (Backer, 2012).
Penn State's faculty senate created the Division of Intermediate Registration in 1948. Its charge was to work with students who were not academically prepared on improving study habits, backfilling academic deficiencies, and making decisions when their future goals were uncertain or changed unexpectedly ("Students Take Academic Woes to DIR Office," 1955; Wall, 1987). In the oral history of the DIR, the story is that it enrolled a lot of students who were asked to leave the College of Engineering, who could be successful if they switched to a different disciplinary track. The DIR was staffed by people with educational backgrounds in psychology who applied methods from psychology and student personnel fields. It is important to note a subtlety about this: If a student was not successful, it was believed that changing something about the student would be enough to solve the problem. For example, administering IQ tests and finding a better match between the student's existing skills (or lack thereof) and their choice of major was one way they did this (Wall, 1987).
The program demonstrated success, and specific individuals were instrumental in advocating for an expansion of this experiment to a wider range of students. Bob Bernreuter is one of those individuals at Penn State, who argued convincingly that the institution could create a program that did not just mitigate academic failure but could also attempt to prevent it from happening at all. Bernreuter's advocacy and Penn State President Milton Einsenhower's work to gain support from Faculty Senate made this kind of investment possible (Backer, 2012). At other institutions, where there were not change agents who could articulate a specific vision, the development of student support programs and philosophies probably looked different.
In 1955, the DIR was restructured as the Division of Counseling to work with all new students, with a goal of preventing academic distress in the first place (Wall, 1988). The role of engaging with students in academic recovery continued, but now the majority of the students enrolled in the DOC were students who were experiencing some degree of indecision about their academic direction. Exploratory academic advising was a major role for DOC counselors. It was also the DOC's role to help students learn how to adjust to college learning, navigate academic requirements, and provide mental health counseling. At this point, indecision about academic direction was being treated nationally as a type of psychological disorder, so it was logical at the time that academic decision making be treated with psychological counseling techniques. But, by the late 1960s, students and DOC counselors alike recognized that this negative association was unfair and untrue. A growing body of scholarship, largely conducted at Penn State, demonstrated that uncertainty about major choice was developmentally normal and needed to be treated differently (e.g., Zeigler et al., 1958).
What else was happening in and around the 1960s? In 1958, the National Defense Education Act encouraged more college-going so America could compete with the Soviet Union in science and technology. Just after the end of the decade, in 1972, Title IX legislation prohibited limitation of education for female students. During this century, we had the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, and the Vietnam War, with significant student activism around all three (Heineman, 1993). With the dramatic increase in college-going with the Boomer population surge, students were crammed into large lecture classes and often felt treated as a number. In student activism nationally, there was an undercurrent of desire among students to have institutions of higher education better understand them as individuals, rather than subjects who could be measured and slotted as cogs into the machinery (Hurst & Ivey, 1983; Williamson, 1983). This is why, reading the advising literature, pieces from 1972 that call for "developmental" advising are so important.
At Penn State, in 1973, a major reorganization of the DOC was enacted through Faculty Senate legislation (Wall, 1988). This was a key moment in the history of academic advising at Penn State and elsewhere. The DOC was split into specialized units with particular roles: Counseling and Psychological Services, Career Services, and the Division of Undergraduate Studies (DUS). DUS represents one of the nation's first enrollment units whose mission was focused on academic advising. DUS enrolled (and continues to enroll) first- and second-year students who were deciding what to choose as a major and had the primary responsibility to advise these students as they made educational decisions. This means their primary responsibility was to get to know students well enough to understand their strengths and goals, to help them navigate academic life at Penn State in a way that would allow them to reach those goals, and to be a sounding board and advocate when needed. Current advising practices in DUS, such as reviewing student records each semester and providing individualized feedback, are part of this prioritization of advising that goes back to the founding of DUS.
It was also part of DUS's charge to lead the practice of academic advising for Penn State in two major ways. One was through the generation and dissemination of knowledge about academic advising: DUS hosting The Mentor and an annual conference is not a coincidence. The other way DUS was charged with leading advising was through the creation of an advising information network, with information centers at each campus and in each college. Once again, though, things did not stay the same. College- and campus-level politics and personalities impacted how advising played out over time.
Moving into the 1980s, there were major societal changes: economic policies emphasizing free markets and reduced government regulation, the AIDS epidemic, a very real threat of nuclear war. There were more money, more science, and more people. Computers were becoming smaller and more affordable, and they could talk to each other. During the 1980s at Penn State, there was a heavy emphasis by President Bryce Jordan on growing Penn State's reputation through investment in graduate education and research (Bezilla, 1985). The result was increased pressures on faculty for knowledge creation, with promotion and tenure criteria emphasizing its primacy. This further challenged faculty who were expected to advise undergraduate students (Himes, 2023).
In K-12 education, the Standards Movement began, which defined what students learned and how they demonstrated their learning. These students got to college in the 1990s and early 2000s. In higher education nationally, there was an increasing focus on the study of student retention and investigating why students drop out. There were fewer people of college-going age, so preventing dropping out became fiscally important at many institutions. At that time, how socially connected and integrated students were on campus was considered the main issue influencing retention and completion, and investments were made in student organizations and quality of social life (Berger et al., 2012; Tinto, 1990). In some colleges, these multiple factors led to an investment in academic advising through specialists, but there was also worry about moving advising too far away from the kind of expertise faculty offer (Kramer et al., 1985). This national trend played out differently at each Penn State campus and college. As a result, virtually every possible model of academic advising delivery exists within Penn State.
Moving into the 1990s and 2000s, children who were taught to test started coming to college and their skill sets were different. Students' costs for going to college increased dramatically (Hanson, 2023). Costs were higher for running a college in the first place, and there were fewer students to recruit. Students attending college during this period graduated into an economic decline. The stakes were higher for everyone. Higher education research investigating factors influencing whether a student would stay at a particular college, or stay in college at all, and complete a degree developed and coalesced into a collection of topics labeled "student success."
Moving into the present, academic advising plays the same roles it always did, for many of the same reasons, but with higher stakes and more complications. And it also plays an increasingly important role: demonstrating to students that they do belong. Sense of belonging, both socially and academically, has been identified as a key factor in "student success" (Strayhorn, 2012). When academic advisers get know a student as an individual, help them think through their aspirations and interests, help them make learning choices that matter, and demonstrate that they are trustworthy partners in navigating challenges, we are making a powerful act of inclusion. This role of connecting with students to make sense of their educations is the point of academic advising.
But let us also think about the message sent to students when we fail to do this good advising. As we continue to admit a greater diversity of students, and the nation's changing demography will require this of us, we need to grapple with higher education's role in helping the students we admit to learn in ways that are more inclusive. Things that chip away at or invalidate students, like stereotype threats and microaggressions, courses with high drop-fail-withdraw rates or that are graded on a curve, assigned advisers who are not available (either because they do not prioritize advising or because their rosters are too large) lead students to conclusions and outcomes we might not have intended but that we have not intentionally prevented. These all send the message to students that they might not belong here, that it is not important enough to us that they are here. These threats are even more pronounced for students who are the first in their families to go to college, who are from families with low socioeconomic status, or who are from racial groups that have been historically denied access to education.
Our structures and traditions were established during times that excluded students, and they still do. For instance, think about how we protect entry to high- prestige majors or about how common procedures, like placing registration holds, force students with financial gaps or academic difficulties to the back of the line. An important growing edge in the conversation about student success is the recognition that it is not a one-way street, where the student is the only one needing to change. We are increasingly seeing institutions being held accountable by outside forces, through college rankings and other metrics, for the patterns in student outcomes. If we do not choose to make equitable outcomes matter, others will require us to do so and on their terms.
So, what is student success and who is responsible? We have identified various elements that describe and measure "student success." Let us add this last piece, that students from all socioeconomic backgrounds, races, genders, and life experiences deserve all of these types of success. And we already know the answer to the question of who is responsible: We all are. At least we're supposed to be. The reality is, we have not accepted the responsibility yet. We are still putting most of this on the student.
As people who practice academic advising, we can do our individual parts by advising with care, by recognizing how advising matters differently to different students, and by developing the expertise it takes to do all the parts of academic advising. The full advising goals of helping students to find meaning and grow in maturity of thought often fall by the wayside in favor of the more immediate tasks of course selection and maintaining of degree requirements, either because advisers lack the knowledge for how to do this relational work or lack the space to do it (Himes, 2023; Wei, 2022). This is not new, but the stakes are higher. We must make a promise to ourselves and to our students that we will do the bigger things with intention. If we cannot do it for every student on our rosters, then for those who need it most—who most need to be shown that they belong.
Beyond us as individuals, our institutions need to make some changes. Even though every institution recognizes that academic advising matters, it has never been systematically resourced in a way that allows it to be done consistently well. Because of the way it developed historically, academic advising is variously implemented, variously prioritized, and practiced with various amounts of expertise and accountability, even within a single institution. We also know that for a variety of reasons academic advising has been practiced as a reactive enterprise, rather than one that is systematically structured and staffed to do the holistic, preventative, relational, meaning-making work it should do.
If we want to fully support each of these goals for success, we need to get clearer on what we are doing, for whom, and with what resources and expertise. We need to prioritize advising work to become less reactive and more intentional in seeking to prevent problems. We need to help others recognize and solve the root causes of systemic problems. For instance, instead of creating new specializations that treat symptoms, how could we change the system to solve the cause of the problems in the first place? If a person cannot carry their bike over the tree fall, do they need to quit the ride? How can our institutions change to root out the inherent inequity in our processes, policies, and practices? How can we meet the learning needs of the students we admit in a way that allows all students to have a chance to be successful in all of those dimensions of success, even if they have been systematically disadvantaged by the preceding systems they encountered?
We are at another point of inflection in American history, where there are enough disruptors that the system of higher education will change. What role can we play in leading the direction of that response? First, when the word "success" is used, we need to pause and clarify. What kind of success? For whom? What is needed to achieve it? We need to get clear on what kind of successes we are striving for, with which students, for what larger goal. Second, we need to develop our distinctive expertise in seeing the whole for all its parts. In this dense forest, we need to make sure all students have access to an adviser who is willing to teach them how to navigate the hazards.
Instead of accepting the systemic hazards as immutable and insurmountable, we need to help our institutions to fix them. We should be rebuilding the trails and removing the hazards, and that will take more than just those who care about academic advising. Let's work toward creating an environment where learning is possible for every student, even if they did not start from the same place or come with the same skills. Let's use our expertise to help others get clear on what is preventing students from achieving success, insist that our expertise is recognized, keep practicing our advising with the thoughtfulness and pride it deserves, and prioritize our advising where it will matter most to the student. Let's work with students to change the things within their control and, more importantly, work to influence the institution to change the things that are not.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks the Penn State Conference on Academic Advising committee for inviting this opening keynote and editor Junhow Wei for inviting this written version of that talk. She is indebted to Marie Lindhorst, Eric White, and other thought leaders in advising for showing her this is a field worth deep examination. She extends special thanks to Kathleen Landy and David Smith for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this work.