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In this second of our two part series exploring advising practices on five CSU campuses, we expand on the previous study by bringing in the voices of advisors and students at these five campuses, and summarizing the perspectives of faculty advisors, professional staff advisors, and students in the context of campus efforts to improve advising. Through this research advisors and students brought to light several areas that may need more attention and targeted improvement efforts as campuses move forward to improve the integration and efficiency of advising.
Across administrators, advisors, and students, we learned that advising on these campuses is largely focused on course selection and program planning. While many administrators and advisors expressed a goal of providing a more holistic and cohesive experience for students by integrating academic advising with other services, students confirm more holistic services are primarily experienced by students in special programs for underserved populations.
Students largely concurred with administrators’ descriptions of the major challenges facing advising. They cited issues with limited access to advising, fragmentation of advising, and a lack of communication across different advisors and advising offices.
Through this research advisors and students brought to light several areas that may need more attention and targeted improvement efforts as campuses move forward to improve the integration and efficiency of advising.
Drawing on information from both reports, we recommend that campuses consider:
As campuses continue to pursue improvement strategies, we urge them to move beyond a narrow focus on coordinating academic planning and to consider how to integrate the full range of academic planning and services available to students to realize the vision of holistic advising.
Technical Appendices
The full set of survey results from Destination Integration: Perspectives of Students and Advisors about Improving Academic Advising can be found in the Technical Appendices. CSU campuses interested in replicating the study can find the survey and focus group protocols in the Technical Appendices. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.