On April 21, 2026, nearly 100 individuals from across the CSU came together virtually to learn about holistic advising reforms at two system campuses. Participants first heard a brief framing conversation describing a framework for quality holistic advising support (SSIPP) and the positive impact holistic advising has on student success. Then, Dr. Sarah Ellison, Associate Vice President of Student Affairs, and Alvin Nguyen, Director of Student Success, Retention, and University Advising, shared Sonoma State’s efforts, and Dr. Lori Beth Way, Vice Provost of Academic Planning and Dean of Undergraduate Education, and Kimberley Altura, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education, from San Francisco State described reforms at that campus. The panelists engaged in Q&A with session participants.
This interview provides insight into the key questions that were covered during the session. Answers have been condensed and streamlined for clarity and length.
Can you tell us the key features of your advising model?
Dr. Sarah Ellison, Sonoma State University: It’s important to know that our campus is navigating over a decade of enrollment and retention challenges, as well as pandemic aftereffects and leadership turnover. We used these challenges as a way to think about how we could reshape our structure to move away from transactional and siloed advising.
Alvin Nguyen, Sonoma State University: Advising now sits under Student Success and Retention. We moved to a caseload model; we have what we call “College Success Teams.” Those teams all use the same outward-facing materials. That makes it very clear who students’ primary advisors are. The teams also include special populations advisors and career advisors. When a student pulls up their college success team, they’re able to see that advising happens across multiple areas, not just with academic advising.
Dr. Ellison: Another key feature of Sonoma State’s model is the use of data on the college success team caseload. We’re proactive in our outreach. We provide teams with on-the-spot data that helps the teams think about what students need in the moment, so they can be more proactive.
Dr. Lori Beth Way, SFSU: We have made a series of incremental changes at San Francisco State over the past decade or so to get to the model we have today. Initially, students could get general education advising from multiple different offices and it was very confusing; they also could only get major advising from faculty. Over time and with support from the provost, we created some standardization around things like the college-based advising centers’ hours, but, ultimately, maintaining consistent high quality advising without unifying central oversight was not a goal that was being reached.
Kim Altura, SFSU: It was previously a complex flow chart to figure out where to send students for advising, and we also were duplicating a lot of services while introducing inconsistency across different advising offices in different colleges. So we initially created a caseload model for our freshmen; our goal was to try to get to a 300:1 ratio and we got pretty close. All of the first-time freshmen were assigned to an advisor in our Undergraduate Advising Center, which only worked at the time with first-time freshmen and undeclared students. We saw that retention improved, and so we moved to the model we have now.
We closed the college advising centers and moved all advisors to the Division of Undergraduate Education Academic Planning. First and second year students are on an assigned advisor caseload in our division, unless they are in Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) in which case they are singularly assigned to the EOP advisor. College advising teams advise students from the third year through graduation. Advisors took on whole-degree advising, so we advise on majors, minors, certificates, and general education.
We have different advising positions. We have academic advisors, graduation specialists, and academic counselors. If we’re in our peak advising time, academic advisors and graduation specialists are advising similarly to the academic counselors. It’s all hands on deck. But once we get beyond peak advising time, then our advisors have a campaign calendar that they’re running; the graduation specialist’s focus is more on students who are close to graduation. The academic counselors might be doing holistic advising things like reaching out to students with academic challenges.
Faculty are still involved, but they work on more complex advising questions, like substitutions and exceptions, as well as research, mentorship, and so on.
We also have a renovated space that serves as a one-stop shop for advising. It’s located at the center of campus. Advisors share offices, but they are on a rotating schedule where they work remotely some of the time so they can alternate who is in the space.
What impacts have you seen from your holistic advising reforms?
Mr. Nguyen: In just our first year of making changes towards a centralized, holistic system, we saw our first-time first year retention increase from 75.2% to 79.3%.
Ms. Altura: Our first year full-time retention rates have been up between 83% and 85% for the last 5 years, so that’s been an improvement for us, which is really great. We always survey our students who come to advising, and 92% of the students say that their advisor is knowledgeable.
How has your approach influenced hiring and staffing?
Mr. Nguyen: We made sure that we did cross-training. We offered NACE training to our academic advisors, and now they are able to do career advising, as well. This means that they can incorporate career conversations into academic advising interactions.
Ms. Altura: It’s definitely allowed us to be more flexible with hiring. Now whenever we have an opening that comes up in advising, we always are looking at our ratios across our college advising teams and thinking about, do we really need the advisor in, for instance, the College of Liberal and Creative Arts, or do we need an additional advisor in our College of Science and Engineering team? So it’s allowed us to be a little bit more flexible in thinking about where we need our advising staff. We also have opportunities for staff to stick around and move up when someone leaves, because we have SSP II and SSP III positions. It’s created less turnover than in the past.
How do you use data in your advising approach?
Mr. Nguyen: In addition to informing caseload management like I mentioned earlier, The Office of Student Success and Retention runs re-enrollment reports and makes sure that that was available across campus to our advisors, our associate deans, and campus leadership. We also have what we call our “Data to Doing Retention Collaborative,” which is a biweekly meeting that is open to the entire campus for folks to come in and learn more about what our re-enrollment efforts entail. Our goal is to make data as accessible and available as possible so that people can use it in their respective areas. We’ve partnered carefully with our Institutional Effectiveness department to make this happen.
Do you use advising tools and technology?
Mr. Nguyen: We use the EAB Navigate platform. We also have access to Tableau, our data management system, and we heavily rely on Grad 365. Using different systems actually helps us tell better data-informed stories since we can connect the dots and get a more complete picture.
Dr. Way: We implemented EAB Navigate to try to improve communication. We have a campaign calendar. The advisors aren’t just reaching out about things like helping with class registration. They’re also nudging students in other ways, as well, and really serve as kind of a concierge for the students in their first two years to make sure they get connected to resources and support and get engaged on campus. We’re piloting AI assistance in EAB to see how it’s working for the advising summaries.
Ms. Altura: We’re also using a chatbot for outreach. We can take the data we get from the chatbot and dump that back into an advising campaign that’s run through our EAB Navigate system. So if we find out from students, “Oh yeah, I’m still planning on registering, but I need help from an academic advisor,” then we might have advising reaching out to those students–as opposed to just doing that full-scale outreach to all students using EAB.
What strategies or practices have you implemented that you think other campuses should consider adopting?
Dr. Way: I think that the move to centralization is actually really important. We tried really hard for a long time to do decentralization, and I just don’t think that you can get to where you need to be with so many different bosses having so many different priorities.
Ms. Altura: Don’t be afraid of making big changes. I’ve been at SF State for a really long time, 25 years, and started as an academic advisor, so I’m pretty steeped in the SF State system. Sometimes I think it feels a little scary. We did all these iterative, small changes over time, and we just weren’t seeing the results, and it was quite frustrating for those of us who were coordinating advising, but also for the advisors and for the students. There were some tough moments [centralizing advising], but it was not as difficult as I thought it was going to be.
Dr. Ellison: I’m a huge proponent of the data piece, and so any way that you can incorporate that [is beneficial]. The data has allowed us to think about change and impact in different ways.
Mr. Nguyen: I think a lot of times we come in armed with data to hopefully execute a decision change or to persuade someone into doing something. But in our case, we try to be more collaborative with the data, and so we work with the schools and colleges where they request certain data, and we’re able to provide it and collaborate on initiatives and interventions together so that we can build that trust that we are using the data reliably and ethically.
How do you integrate career advising into academic advising?
Dr. Ellison: We’re building that out and still conceptualizing it ourselves. The first step for us is allowing cross-training and cross-conversation. We’re really trying to build behind the philosophy that if you’re serving the student holistically, their plans after graduation are just as important when they’re in there having the advising conversation. So we’re really trying to think about what competencies do advisors need to have to have those conversations outside of just the Career Center. We are investing in our advisors. They are doing the NACADA Career Foundation Certificate. We’re also starting to think about, what does it look like at different points across campus? Because our offices are distinct, and I imagine that we’ll keep them distinct, but the career conversations are happening across the student’s life cycle in different spaces.
Ms. Altura: We have two separate offices at San Francisco State. We have our Undergraduate Advising Center, and then we have our Career and Leadership Development office. We partner a lot with them, and we do workshops where we offer connections with the Career Center. We collaboratively worked on a huge, large-scale project called Major Maps. They show, in your first year, your middle years, and your final years, the academic learning, the engagement on campus, and the career planning things that a student should be doing. It kind of infused together our advising and career syllabi. We have one for every academic program and we vetted them with the faculty.
Mr. Nguyen: Our new career advisors actually go through our professional academic advisor training course so that they are cross-trained. And one of the things that we did, which was really difficult for me but I think it’s the right decision, is that we actually moved the undeclared student caseload over to the Career Center. So those career advisors are actually specialized advisors to help with the undeclared student population. That way we can integrate more of that career education piece in those interactions.