By Jeanine Cunningham, Network Research & Evaluation Manager
In April 2026, the California State University (CSU) Student Success Network (Network) hosted a convening on strengthening and enhancing student advising in the CSU. Attendees from 20 CSUs and the Chancellor’s Office gathered to hear speakers from Sonoma State and San Francisco State discuss their experiences with overhauling and revitalizing their campus’s student advising practices.
A theme woven throughout the convening was the relationship between advising and the student success metrics of retention and completion. The link between student advising and student success may seem obvious, but evidence-based practice supported by a large body of literature suggests that the style and approach of student advising—particularly holistic advising practices—are the most important factors in advising that fosters student success. To complement information provided in the convening, this short blog provides resources on holistic advising practices and encourages middle leaders to reflect upon the conditions at their own campus.
What is Holistic Advising?
As a student-ready practice, holistic advising requires institutional emphasis on student-centeredness, relationship-building, and intrusive support. Put into practice, the principles of holistic advising mean being proactive as an institution: prioritizing early and frequent student outreach, sustained relationships between students and advisors, and coordination across academic and student services before students are even involved. A more in-depth type of student support structure, known as the wraparound approach, acknowledges the needs and challenges of the whole person beyond the individual who comes to campus to sit in the classroom. The wraparound approach takes the proactive and intrusive support principles of holistic advising and adds access to services and opportunities beyond the institution (e.g., transportation, housing, food). Wraparound services are shown to be a high-impact practice for retention and completion.
Transactional, prescriptive, or self-serve advising practices expect the student to know how to navigate challenges, both personal (e.g., basic needs, finances, family, health) and institutional (e.g., confusing requirements, funding shortages, limited hours to access resources), all the while navigating their education. When asked about the challenges her campus faced before moving toward a more holistic approach to advising, one speaker at the April convening noted that her campus took for granted students’ ability to understand how to navigate the duplication of services across the institution (i.e., multiple offices providing similar but different advising information). The situation was ultimately reframed as an institutional issue with the campus adopting a case-load advising model that does not expect students to determine which competing advice to trust. For optimal student support, the approach to advising must be a concerted and intentional effort across the institution. Individual middle leaders can value and practice the principles of holistic advising but without an institutional commitment to consistency, students are still left filling in the blanks from one office, advisor, or department to another.
As many CSUs look to overhaul their own campus advising structures it is useful to consider how to put holistic advising into practice. Fostering long-term relationships, maintaining frequent outreach, and ensuring the coordination of services are not simple practices to implement, and the characteristics and conditions of an institution will impact the way these actions can be carried out. It is therefore fundamentally important for any institution looking to redesign its advising structures to first evaluate the landscape of existing services and practices alongside its institutional challenges and opportunities.
Retention, Completion, and Persistence in the CSU
Among all first-year-college-student cohorts entering the CSU from fall 2011 through fall 2021, within four years about 30% of students in each cohort, on average, left their university without graduating. Across each of those years, analyses show statistically significant differences in the completion rates of traditionally underrepresented minority (URM) students, with URM students leaving the CSU at a higher rate.
Considering that the CSU enrolled an average of about 61,100 students each fall from 2011 to 2021, an attrition rate of about 30% means that around 200,000 students slipped away from the university in which they were originally enrolled during that period. Related to student persistence, based upon the most current data, we know that about one-quarter to one-third of the students who left their fall 2011 through fall 2019 cohorts ultimately ended up re-enrolling at a different 4-year university in the years that followed. Data related to the fall 2020 cohort and beyond are still evolving.
Who’s to say whether the widespread practice of holistic student advising would have kept those 200,000 students at their campuses? What we do know is that institutions that prioritize proactive student-centered support and belongingness efforts foster a more equitable and inclusive environment, which is shown to contribute to retention and completion.
A final disclaimer and a note about the importance of understanding the disaggregated data for your institution: just as campuses must evaluate their own landscape of services, challenges, and opportunities in order to implement institution-appropriate holistic advising strategies, student success metrics must be understood at the campus level in order to inform evidence-based, equitable approaches to student support. From fall 2011 to fall 2021, individual CSU campuses varied widely in their retention and completion rates. For example, in 2019 alone the percentage of students who left their university within four years without graduating ranged from 10% to 48% across the 23 CSU campuses. To drill down even further, retention and completion rates vary greatly by college and degree program.
If you are interested in learning more about the nuances of your own campus’s patterns of retention, attrition, and completion, by year, college, major, and demographic information (e.g. gender, first-generation college student status, Pell grant recipient status, traditionally underrepresented minority identity), log into the CSU Student Success Dashboard provided by the Office of the Chancellor and look around.