What Academic Advising Is Supposed To Mean

When I worked at a university in New Jersey we tried to improve our student service experience by developing what we called “decision trees,” essentially a software program that would allow us to ask students a short series of questions so we could refer them to services easily and quickly. We developed these decision trees because every profession, every occupation and every workplace has its own language, and adjusting to the language of higher education is difficult for students and their parents.

That’s certainly true in the case of academic advising. Many students and parents believe that academic advisors “tell students what to take.” Hey, we’re here to give you the advice on what to take, and we’ll give you a four year path if you want it, but that’s not the real point of academic advising. Academic Advising should help students determine their career focus and advisors help students select the courses they should take to move them toward their goals and help them graduate on time.

Let me give you an example: at the college where I started in 2014, there are six courses that are absolutely required for Psychology majors. Three of those courses are Introduction to Psychology, Psychological Statistics, and Writing and Research Methods, since they are important foundations for the study of psychology. There are three other courses that are required as well, so academic advisors will suggest that students take all of these required courses early, probably in the first three or four semesters.  Sure, I’ll tell students to take the course entitled “Learning and Cognition” early on, but whether a student takes it in semester three or four is really his or her choice. What advisors do is make sure that students are making informed choices.

Essentially, advisors are teaching students to advise themselves. We are teaching them how to read the course catalog, understand degree requirements, and understand how courses are sequenced. Using my Psychology example, one of the requirements at our college is that students must complete those six foundational courses before taking any other courses at the 300 or 400 levels, and certainly before any upper level courses that have a laboratory attached to them. Delaying taking one of those six makes the course load in the junior and senior much harder that it needs to be, so advisors suggest strongly that students space their courses throughout their four years so they don’t hit a wall that makes it hard to finish on time.

Another challenge for advisors is that every student is different in terms of their career goals and how they might reach those careers using courses at their college. So for every Psychology major who wants to become a therapist, there are those who take the major to go into research, or to enter medical school. The courses either in Psychology or in other departments that I would suggest for each of these careers are very different, and to suggest or demand that students take the same courses regardless of their goals doesn’t make sense. The only way to determine which course to recommend in Psychology or other departments is to ask the students about their goals.

So rather than focusing on telling students what to do, good advisors spends much of their time asking students where they want to go, and how the advisor can help them get there. Listening is a much more important skill in advising than telling, as sometimes frustrating as that can be for students who want someone to just tell them.

Ultimately, advisors do just that: advise and let the student make the final decisions. However, no responsible academic advisor would let students delay taking a required foundation course for too long. And responsible advisors will also make it clear to students when they are making serious mistakes, and some of us pull out all the stops when doing so.

Every student experience is different because every student is different. Tailoring the academic advising experience to every student takes skill, training and a lot of practice. If your student tells you that his or her advisor is asking a lot of questions and giving the student a lot of options, that’s actually a good thing. Over time, that will be less frustrating for your student and actually become empowering. And I bet if you ask, your student will tell you the same thing.