Navigating college is no easy task. Every academic decision will impact a student’s time on campus and help carve their future path. Between the pressure of selecting an academic major, knowing how much to take on, planning for careers and adding in extracurriculars and clubs, college students stand eye-to-eye with daunting waves of decision at every turn.
But they don’t face it by themselves.
Academic advisors serve as lifelines for students, especially those who are drowning in the sea of demands of college life. According to the National Library of Medicine, these advisors offer guidance, a sense of direction, stability and encouragement. Or at least, that’s what they’re supposed to do.
Benjamin Gathje, a junior majoring in business administration, was once a freshman primed for advising.
“When I first came to Wayne, I was nervous and a little terrified of what was to come,” Gathje said. “I was also excited for a fresh start and to meet new people.”
Gathje was looking forward to his advising appointment to help calm his nerves. However, this service doesn’t come without challenges, and it doesn’t always go as it should.
“My first advising appointment was interesting,” Gathje said. “If I’m being honest, it was stressful, and I had no idea what order I needed to take classes in. The process was quite uninformative.”
He recognizes that advisors face a lot of challenges.
“Advisors have to juggle growing student population, keeping up with changing class schedules, knowing their students and the pressure to get students into all the classes they need before graduation,” Gathje said. “That’s a lot already, even before adding in the jobs of a professor.”
Similarly, he said professors also already have so much going on. With his advisor serving as both an advisor and professor, he took a lot of the workload of academic advising up himself.
“It was up to me to determine what classes I needed to take, and I had to create my own schedule.” Gathje said. “My advisor only signed off on the classes I wanted to take.”
According to a study done by the National Academic Advising Association (NACADA), frequent positive advising meetings directly lead to a higher sense of belonging and validation in college students. Results from the study also show that these heightened favorable feelings directly cause a positive impact on GPA.
Therefore, NACADA reported that “satisfaction with academic advising has a positive, indirect impact on college GPA via validation and belonging.”
Gathje agrees that academic advising is indispensable in ensuring the success of college students.
“Academic advising is vital because it helps students better navigate the transition from high school to college,” Gathje said. “Not only that, but it gives students a support system that they can rely on during the year as well.”
Gathje said at Wayne State, a majority of students are given one advisor for their freshman year and then switched to a major-specific one once they have enough credits. The major-specific academic advisors are none other than the professors who teach in that academic area.
This system leaves ample room for improvement and positive change to take some pressure off the advisors so they are more available to their students.
“Having a professor as an advisor is not the most effective way of doing advising,” Gathje said. “It gets it done, but it’s just like ‘meh.’”
Advisors, like Gathje said, have so much on their plates. Between guiding students academically and supporting them emotionally, he said it’s already a full-time job.
Colin Hough, a sophomore criminal justice major, thinks that some professors should be advisors, but some shouldn’t be. He recognizes that many are overworked.
“Professors have responsibilities they have to tend to, like grading and classes, so that takes up a lot of time in the first place,” Hough said. “Advising isn’t their first priority.”
This time constraint is not a unique problem. Most students run into scheduling conflicts for that exact reason. Gathje reminisced on one of these experiences.
“I have to work around their class schedule to schedule appointments, which is challenging,” Gathje said. “There was one year where they rescheduled on me two or three times because of their class schedule and other meetings they had.”
Even the professors themselves feel the pressure of time. Stephanie Marcellus, a professor within the Department of Language and Literature, keeps very busy on campus.
“It’s always kind of tricky to find the time to fit in advising appointments on top of the regular schedule of teaching classes, grading papers, committee work, and all of those things,” Marcellus said.
But there are still bright sides to having professors serve as academic advisors once the scheduling is figured out.
“I think it’s important that students have the opportunity to work with their actual professors within their field for advising because not only do they have that insight about when classes are offered and what the classes expect, but it’s also a chance for students to network with people in their area,” Marcellus said.
Most students don’t work with a professor advisor right away, though. Ryan Rohr, a sophomore criminal justice major who still works with his freshman academic advisor, has not found his time with that advisor overly useful.
“I ended up not getting classes I needed and took a lot of filler classes that were kind of annoying,” Rohr said.
Rohr has very high hopes to start his journey anew with a professor advisor.
“I feel like it will be good to have a professor as an advisor because they will know me, know where I’m at, and how I am in class, so they can give me better information and a better plan,” he said.
However, Rohr already considered the flaws in the system and would make some changes.
“I don’t like how we have two different advisors, one for freshman year and one for our major. I think we should just have one for the entire time in college,” Rohr said.
Hough also identified some flaws and came up with a few solution routes.
“We could either hire more professors so they’re not on overload or have dedicated advisors,” he said.
Gathje, when pondering the changes he’d implement, said something similar.
“We should have a separate department for just advising students. Like, a set group of people that aren’t teaching,” Gathje said. “I feel like they’d be able to help students more because they’d have more advising experience. They’d be better at knowing what classes people actually need to take.”
These ideas, of course, would come with drawbacks.
“Not having a professor as an advisor would limit students’ chances to interact with their professor outside of the classroom, which limits the chance of having a close support system with someone who understands the stresses of the class,” Gathje said. “I like seeing my professors outside of class.”
The feeling is mutual for professors as well.
“I always enjoy it because I get to know my students a little bit more,” Marcellus said.
At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, advising is set up differently. Charlee Salinas, a junior majoring in advertising and public relations at UNL, said that they are “paired with an academic advisor before [they] arrive on campus and are with them the entire time [they] are there.” However, she also said they can talk to a different advisor if they want to or if their advisor is unavailable.
Salinas said she enjoys meeting with her academic advisor and feels as though they have a solid relationship.
“The dynamic between my advisor and I is very friendly and open,” Salinas said. “I’m never scared or intimidated to reach out to her because she always made things really easy to understand.”
Many people on the Wayne State campus were worried that separating advising from the professors would take away some of the warmth of the process, as the student would get lost in a large sea of advisees. However, Salinas said that this isn’t the case.
“I don’t think that the size contributes to any problems,” Salinas said. “I’m graduating early, have two minors outside the College of Journalism and Mass Communications, in the honors program, and on an accelerated master’s track. That being said, I have a lot of moving parts and every time I have gone in to talk to my advisor, she remembers who I am and what I need.”
Salinas has experienced exactly what she had hoped academic advising would be.
“I feel like my academic advisor takes some stress off of me,” Salinas said. “She is very good at knowing when classes will be offered, as well as when classes will be able to count for multiple things within my degree plan.”
However, having academic advisors be in a separate department does result in the loss of the insight that only professors can give.
“The biggest problem that I have run into is that sometimes they don’t actually know the classes themselves,” Salinas said. “Sometimes it’s frustrating that she doesn’t know everything about a class or the industry.”
A good academic advisor can easily solve these issues, though.
“When she doesn’t know the answer to one of my questions, she very quickly reaches out to someone who can answer it,” Salinas said. “It’s okay because I have more than a couple of professors who would be willing to help me navigate that.”
According to Wayne State’s 2024 National Survey of Student Engagement, only 48% of seniors talk about their career plans with a faculty member on campus. That number only decreases for younger students, with a mere 34% of freshmen reporting that same thing.
Gathje experiences a lack of that holistic support on campus.
“I think that I would receive more support if I had a professional advisor,” Gathje said. “Since they’re professionals, they could help me find connections for my future career, be someone to check in with for how job searches are going and help me build my online professional profile. My advisor and I have not really ever talked about my career plans. I don’t get that kind of support from them.”
Many colleges try to meet in the middle and bridge the advising gap while maintaining the strong professor-student relationship. One way they do this is by offering the choice to both the professors and students. According to a 2011 NACADA survey, 56.2% of colleges in the U.S. use this hybrid form of advising.
If professors are allowed to choose whether or not to be advisors, Gathje said that they would be able to make the choice that best suits them and their constraints.
“Giving the professor the choice also lets them opt out of it if they don’t feel equipped to help students in that way,” Gathje said. “Most are really stressed during academic advising time, so if they knew they wouldn’t be able to fit it in their schedule, they wouldn’t have to.”
Students would also be positively impacted by being given the choice of who their advisor is.
“I think it would be helpful to give students the option to choose between having a professional advisor and a professor advisor,” Gathje said. “It would help students because it gives them more satisfaction in the way that they’re advised.”
Since advising plays such a pivotal role in shaping a student’s educational journey and long-term success, continual research, improvement and collaboration are important to ensure that students have what they need to thrive academically, professionally and personally.
