Defining Academic Advising: Identity, Practice, and Purpose - Adventures in Advising

What is academic advising and who gets to define it? Kyle Ross, NACADA Executive Director; Janet Schulenberg, Penn State; and Patrick Cate, Lakes Region Community College, explore NACADA’s bold initiative: creating an official definition and scope of practice for academic advising. From institutional leadership to frontline advising, they explore how this effort could reshape professional development, elevate advising’s visibility, and influence external stakeholders. This conversation covers how institutional context and misused terminology muddy the waters, as well as how this definition seeks to clarify the profession’s identity. 

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Transcript

Ryan Scheckel  
Hello there. Welcome to another episode of The Adventures and advising podcast. My name is Ryan Scheckel, and with us, as always, is Matt Markin, Matt, how are you doing?

Matt Markin  
Very well, you know, I'm always excited for every episode, but always excited, or more excited when certain episodes kind of happen from some sort of social media post and kind of sparks organically the topic that we have. So it's nice because I had posted on social media, on LinkedIn, specifically, and it was a meme, and it was the person saying, like me when someone refers to academic advising his course registration. And person was very frustrated, you know, had that frustrated look to it. And the person initially says, I don't even have time to tell you how wrong you are. And then, thinking about it, they then say, actually, it's going to bug me if I don't, and that post kind of had some various types of reactions, a lot of support for it, but also the frustration at the reality of having to correct or defend academic advising. And I do want to shout out Leticia Wilson, she had made a comment that is what sparked this whole conversation that we had, and then who can we have as panelists? And here we are today.

Ryan Scheckel  
Yeah, I everyone who listens the podcast knows I am always going to deep dive it, and I'm a fan, of course, Parks and Rec where the meme came from, Adam Scott's character, Ben Wyatt. But I don't know if you know this, the person he was correcting was getting pop culture references mixed up. And he was, he was, I'm actually some pop culture Game of Thrones misunderstandings. And you know, that's that's deep in my heart, too, when people get the understanding of something not quite right, especially when it comes to academic advising. And it is, it is always interesting when engagement happens. It's so exciting. We love it when people engage with our social media posts. And so, so glad that we have a chance to take what was, you know, just a meme at first, into a broader, bigger conversation.

Matt Markin  
So who do we got today?

Ryan Scheckel  
Well, we got panelists. That's the cool thing. And we're gonna have a chance for our panelists to introduce themselves. We have a bit of mix of perspectives. One of the things that was happening sort of concurrent with this meme discussion was development of a task force with NACADA looking at the definition and scope of academic advising. And so I'm going to let all of our panelists introduce themselves. We'll, we'll have a chance to give everyone a perspective of not only what you're doing right now, as far as your current role at your organization's your institutions, but also sort of, your journey in higher education, sort of what is your your origin story. So we'll start with Janet, Jenny, if you can tell us a little bit about yourself, what you're doing now and your higher ed journey.

Janet Schulenberg  
Hi there right now. I'm Senior Director in the Division of Undergraduate Studies at Penn State, which is an enrollment and advising unit for undecided, exploratory students. I came to academic advising, which is a long time ago now, from a faculty role in archeology, and I got really excited about academic advising because it let me apply some of that systems thinking, cultural relativism, to actually directly helping living people and understanding higher education. And I mean going further back, I got to academic advisor or got to archeology by accident because of a general education course. So being open to discovering something new that I didn't know was a thing but was helping me make sense of the world was really important to me, and having those mentors to help me find that was really important.

Ryan Scheckel  
Excellent. Kyle. You want to introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about what you're doing now and and how you got there. 

Kyle Ross  
I'm Kyle Ross. He him, and I'm the Executive Director of NACADA. Been in this role for coming up on two years in a few weeks, if you can believe it, although my team will probably be like Kyle, it's been it's been 80 years. It's been a while. Time flies. But also, there's been a lot going on higher ed, both exciting and also a little daunting. So been really enjoying the role. Before this, I was in academic advising for almost 12 years. I had primarily been in the Pacific Northwest in a variety of roles at Washington State University, Eastern Washington University and Oregon State University. My roles included working with undecided and exploratory students, to working with first generation students, to working with students pursuing various health professions. And before I transitioned to supervising and advising team at Oregon State University for the College of Business, I was also along. Long time volunteer leader in NACADA, and had served in a variety of roles, including Chair of the undecided exploratory students advising community, and then eventually served on the board of directors and as board president a couple of years back as well. And then this has been the dream job of a lifetime, so couldn't pass it up when it was offered to me and made the transition to Manhattan, Kansas, and have been loving it ever since. Thanks for having me.

Ryan Scheckel  
Sure, Patrick, you want to tell us a little about yourself.

Patrick Cate  
Sure. I'm honored that you've you've asked me to be on here. I'm Patrick Cate. I am currently the president at Lakes Region Community College in central New Hampshire. We're located right between the White Mountains in the lakes region, so it's absolutely gorgeous place to be. I've done most of my career in the northeast, in New Hampshire, specifically, for a very long time, I was at various roles at Plymouth State University, starting as a residence director, and I got put on a committee to worry about this thing called the First Year Experience. And that kind of hooked me into working with students in a more advising capacity, rather than watching them sleep. So I had the opportunity to go ahead and learn more about advising, and Nakata was one of those things that really helped me become a professional, as opposed to somebody who dabbled into it. Got involved, I think, with NACADA, and sometimes in 2006 or 2007 and working through my career at Plymouth state and doing some work with NACADA, from doing some publishing for some books, and being a lot of presenter and all of that really helped me develop my career, and really helped me get better at working with specifically undeclared students, but students in an advising capacity, as I said earlier, I made the transition to the dark stride and became an administrator about eight years ago, starting as an associate vice President here and now I have now. I've been the president here since 22 and this is my first time at community college, and I love what we're at, what we're about and what we do. And as I was saying earlier, the advising experience has really helped shaped my presidency and how I act in view what we do as an institution. So thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Matt Markin  
Yeah, thank you all. And I think this can be a fantastic conversation. And I think this next question will kind of throw to both Janet and Kyle, maybe to kind of get us started off here. Ryan was talking about a task force through NACADA, so I was wondering if you can share what prompted the formation of this task force, and what were the goals, you know, for this task force, and where are we at with crafting a definition of academic advising?

Kyle Ross  
Sure I can get us started. And Janet, please jump in. So when I was coming into this role, people asked me, what's your vision for being the executive director? What would you like to accomplish? And one of the things I knew early on was that I'd like to see that academic advising continues to professionalize. Academic Advising has always been a profession, in my opinion, but various authors have always stated different perspectives on whether it really is a profession where it is in the professionalization process. So my personal stance on it is that academic advising is a profession, but still has different ways that it can continue to professionalize, and one of those areas was we don't even have an answer for what is academic advising officially from the cottage position. And reason for that was a while ago folks got together to establish a definition, and they arrived at the concept of advising. Part of that was because they were like, there's no way we can write a definition that captures what advising looks like across the whole world, given various contexts, populations, different structures, policies and procedures that academic advising is situated in and I've long time wanted to challenge that and say, I do think there are common threads of what academic advising looks like and should be doing at an institution and for students, regardless of those different contextual pieces. So floated it to the board of directors. Why don't we take the opportunity now to establish a formal definition of academic advising, which they were very supportive, enthusiastic for, because their thoughts were, if we do not, as an organization, establish a formal definition and a position on what is academic advising, someone else will do it for us, and that should not be the case. And so we need to leverage the opportunity to do so. But we wanted to go beyond just what is academic advising, but what do academic advisors specifically do in their role as well within the profession, and hence, the scope of practice as well establishing the this is what they do, and maybe help will clarify and inform what others can and can't do within the scope of their roles when they're tangential to supporters of advocates for academic advising, but maybe not necessarily the practitioners themselves. So then the Board of Directors launched a task force to establish the formal definition of academic advising and scope of practice. We're very. Grateful for Janet Schulenburg for saying yes to chairing said Task Foce.

Ryan Scheckel  
Cool. So Janet, do you want to follow up on your thoughts? You were sort of tracing the timeline and the process a little bit of going from the charge to a draft and that sort of stuff, and we might walk all the way up to the when the email started going out about listening sessions and that sort of stuff might get to the point where, I guess you'd say NACADA members became aware that this task force was in operation and that this stuff was happening. And so if you could continue that thread as well? 

Janet Schulenberg  
So we were charged right before the annual conference in October, and we started our work by trying to listen for, what are the opportunities, what are the needs? One of the things we heard from the annual conference is people being frustrated. They with being presented with the higher purposes of academic advising, some of the meaning making purposes, and feeling like they weren't supported by their institutions to accomplish those goals? So you also heard a lot about some of the scopes, scope creep, some of the caseload, size problems, and we saw the definition of academic advising and establishing a scope of practice as being able to directly address some of those challenges that our colleagues are feeling. So we reviewed all of the prior output from previous Nakata task forces. We set a goal for ourselves that we were not going to fall into the same trap of defining academic advising as everything. It is painful to draw a circle around something, because it does mean something is going to be left out. We're an inclusive field. We want people to see themselves here. We want people to feel empowered, but in making this definition, something's probably going to be outside of that circle, and somebody might not see themselves in that definition. That's a hard thing to grapple with. That being said, the field really is the practitioners, and it's super important that we find a way to create something that supports and empowers their work and contributes to establishing like, a cohesive professional identity for us. That was the need that we were hearing really coming loud and clear from the annual conference. So we reviewed that prior output from NACADA. We reviewed published scholarship about the definition and purposes of academic advising. There was some really spectacular conference papers Ryan only knew is one of those, CJ Venable, Erin Donahoe-Rankin, Mark Lowenstein, talking about this very topic at that annual conference. Those all mattered. We also did a landscape of analysis of how related organizations and institutions define academic advising. And we also looked at how fields that are kind of like academic advising fields with a really strong practitioner focus, like nursing and social work and even student affairs, how they're defining their field. And then we consulted with select advising scholars that was again part of our charge in looking at these drafts of the definition. We also use a little bit of AI to help us synthesize some things, see what it was taking out of this, and then kept iterating. And then finally, that brings us up to some Oh, and then we submitted that to the board of directors, who came back with a couple of additional suggestions for us to consider. We revised, resubmitted to them, and then it's been out at listening sessions at regional conferences, and we're gathering some of the input from other voices from the field. And this summer, we're running some virtual listening sessions as well. Got really thoughtful people coming to those sessions and critiquing and supporting different parts of the definition.

Matt Markin  
Awesome. So it's in the works, and looking forward to seeing how things progress from here. But I think this could be a great opportunity to bring Patrick into this conversation. You know, hearing this from Kyle and Janet. You know, you've have many years in higher ed within academic advising, campus president, in what ways do you feel like academic advising maybe has evolved at your institution, and now kind of hearing that there's this definition in progress, how do you feel that might maybe accelerate or reshape that evolution of advising?

Patrick Cate  
You know, it's funny when folks were talking, I haven't been involved in the committee, but Kyle's statement about that, we want to make sure that advising is a profession. And I think for those of us who have been doing this a long time, it feels like, Well, yeah, and so really, what it is is, how do we get outside stakeholders to understand better of what's going on in those individual meetings or group meetings, and what is the total mean? Of this type of work in higher education. And so from from my perspective, that experience has been more influential on me as a president than probably I am as a president influential on the academic advisors directly here, because it is a profession, and they do have different ways to approach things. So the institution that I came to was a lot smaller than it is now, to be very frank with you, and we were working through what advising really meant. And it really was advising as a as a registration and making sure students were enrolled. And you know, I will tell you, as somebody in the leadership or campus leadership role, it's hard to see the other parts, because what is being pressed upon us a lot of times is some quantitative data about enrollment that drives decision makers above us, whether it be state legislatures or whether it be a board of trustees or board of directors. And so when we look at the problem we're trying to solve, it is sometimes easy, although I encourage my fellow campus leaders to not to look at those metrics, just like when you're in advising you in retention is an outcome, not the goal, right? And so in the same respect, campus leaders really need to remember that enrollment is an outcome, not the end all and be all that happens when you have good practice, and so that's what I mean by having advising influence what I do now as a profession. You know, when I look at the challenge of drawing a circle, and it's a really great analogy around what advising is in my own career, even though it's been in the Northeast, and none of them have been large. Are one institutions. They've been regional universities, small, privates for profits, or now at a community, public community college, the advising needs of the student is so different that sometimes it does require you to either blend and be a lot more interdisciplinary for what the advisor does, as opposed to a larger system that can build a robust system of individuals with specialties. You have a tendency at the small campuses to have to just and do some more. And so I think really getting at what the core of academic advising is not only should speak to campus leaders, but perhaps more importantly, it should speak to accreditors. And so the accreditors, you know, have had a lot of change in their industry in the last few years, from having to go with your regional ones, and now you can go across the country. And so people are finding the accreditors, but being able to say that this institution is providing a quality education absolutely involves a professionalized academic advising structure. It doesn't have to look identical, but it needs to be intentional, and it needs to have those key critical aspects of what good advising is. So I think the external audience of this is almost more important than the advisors talking to advisors. I think a lot of us can understand where the nuance comes because we see it every day. But what I hope this does for the for advising in general, is it speaks to the outside observer in a way that allows them to engage with the good work that advisors do every day.

Ryan Scheckel  
So Patrick's comments reflect a couple of, I guess you would say, the dynamics that might influence the shape of such a circle. You know, institution differences, role differences, student need and that kind of stuff. I'm curious, from from Janet and Kyle's point of view, what have been some of the more challenging conversations around the task force and this idea of a definition and a scope for advising?

Kyle Ross  
I can start and Janet, please do jump in and add to list, because you've been more involved with this. But I think the biggest challenge is capturing everyone's wants and desires with what that definition and scope of practice should look like, and that is impossible. So to Janet's point before, we can't have a definition be everything for everyone all at once, but so some things will not be included in that, as long as that's intentional and thoughtful, that's great, but people have been really passionate about it. So when I've been attending the region conference feedback sessions or hearing from folks on social media, there's been I don't feel like this part of my work is seen in there, and so folks definitely want to see it be inclusive of their work. And so I think part of this will be challenging people to think through that there are things about your work that may not necessarily be situated perfectly in the circle of what is academic advising and how do you advocate for yourself? What that means for for your work moving forward, if you want to keep those things great, maybe that means that this just falls out of your typical scope and is in kind of an extra responsibility to your workload, or if it is something that maybe you can advocate to say, look, this falls outside of my scope or practice, and these are the things I need to be doing with students, with my colleagues, with administrators, to advocate for student success at a holistic lens. So I think that that's been one of the major challenges, and being able to synthesize a boatload of research and literature on this where people have already wanted to establish definitions and how to do so in a way that's inclusive of those great voices, but not necessarily picking one and saying we're going to pick that author's definition specifically.

Janet Schulenberg  
Yeah, another challenge has been around some of the relationships between similar kinds of fields that support students, or similar, similar areas of practice within higher education. So one of the things we spent a lot of time talking about is that we kind of get really good as academic advisors, at recognizing where we're starting to get into somebody else's scope of practice, right? We can tell those where those lines are with financial aid pretty quickly, for example, or mental health counseling, right? So we know when to connect students, this is to other resources, right? That's one of the distinctive things that is part of academic advising. It's also part of lots of other people's roles in higher education and other places. But there are other areas that are a lot more closely connected to academic advising that we still need to differentiate. So career counseling is one. There's a there's a there's a strong relationship between these two different fields. But they're different. They they grade into each other. Success Coaching is another one of those areas that is some you know, I think a new new challenge and a new opportunity for us to think through. Where do we draw the line around that? And I think we have partly a language problem too, where at some institutions, success coaching is being used synonymously with academic advising, or to define like the relational part of academic advising rather than the transactional. And at other institutions, it's serving a very different kind of focused role for students. So we've got some language problems as well. So I think having this scope of practice and a definition helps to better clarify what do we mean when we're talking about student success, what part of the success, what role someone is playing within that? So that's been hard, but it's also really important that we do it.

Matt Markin  
And so I guess I'm curious too, like, you know, let's say the task force does have this definition of academic advising. I think a lot of you kind of alluded to there are differences. But how do you get people to understand those differences, even with those that are academic advisors or work within academic advising sometimes say different thing. So I was kind of wondering, once there is a definition or something that's more straightforward or whatnot, how do you ensure that you know? Not only stakeholders know, but those within Academic Advising can have that same understanding and you know, they can talk to someone to know this is what academic advising is. Because let's just say NACADA. You know, lot of people aren't. Some people still say Nakata is the National Academic Advising Association, or that instead of it being an annual conference, it's still the National Conference, and those are still people that have been in advising for a whole number of years. So even those that are within Academic Advising might still have that confusion. So is there a kind of a rollout or plan to ensure that that information everyone comes to that same understanding?

Kyle Ross  
Search engine optimization will be hugely important to this work. So part of Matt to your point on people saying National Academic Advising Association still is, if you look it up, it still shows up in a search result, just fine. So part of that is what the search engines are telling you to see. Are they showing you nicara, the global community for advising, or are they showing you global community for academic advising? Or are they showing you? The National Academic Advising Association recently had a conversation with someone who was like, well, your association is 4000 people big. And I was like, it's actually close to 14,000 let's try again. But turns out, if you search for it, it will show you 4000 numbers on one search result, because it's pulling data from a long time ago. So search engine optimization will be huge, but then just really intentional socialization, beyond just at conferences, certainly conferences being a great place to do so, but that socialization process, of what this definition is, with scope practices, will take a while, and will need to be pretty far reaching through web events, through in person events, through our different materials we have for promoting the profession, it will need to be as ubiquitous in all of our things and resources as as possible. So where can we leverage it in our publications? Where can we put it on? Website front and foremost. So that way, when an institutional administrator is coming in and now has academic advising in their portfolio never has before, they can do a quick search and find that definition faster than they've maybe have been able to find other things that Mika has promoted before. 

Ryan Scheckel  
So Patrick, I'm kind of curious from from your point of view as an institutional administrator, what sort of changes do you think might be necessary at an institutional level? Should this definition and scope of practice become a kind of findable feature of our understanding of the work that we do just from your role, how do you see things needing to change in an institutional capacity?

Patrick Cate  
I think that is so individualized. I can tell you what I can see on my own institution, how I can do a lenses. But if there's anything that I've learned in this role and being able to to, you know, be part of a community of other campus leaders and university leaders is that we all have our own origin story, not just advisors, but so does the institution. And so when you look at our own community college system in New Hampshire, for example, it's only been about 15 or 20 years that we weren't a direct state agency as opposed to an independent college system. They separated out as a pseudo college a little while ago that came with a structure that was much more identical to what a state HR structure looks like, and what you do and the tasks you perform, and so, so that origin of that institution, as opposed to a religiously affiliated institution that was mostly staffed by religious folks that's going to have an influence on what each campus is going to need to do with this information. And for me, when I look at this, what it does is it gives that frame of reference of, how do I do this best? I have not met anybody at a campus leadership level that has said, you know, I'm wondering how I can make the advisors day worse and make sure that they're not successful, right? Nobody ever says that. But you know, those who come into the role without having that experience may not know how, and so guidelines like definitions, guidelines like the ethical considerations for academic advising, all those things, not one of them is going to necessarily move the needle for every institution, but the conglomerate of those influencing the industry as a whole is how you move it. It is a snail's pace. But as we've all, you know, we've all been in higher ed as we joke. You know, you can change the course of history faster. You change a history course. We have a tendency to move a little slow, and so it takes so much inertia to change to be able to do this. So I think that's why I'm excited to see. I think Kyle is spot on in even expanding out that search engine is, how do we make sure that key stakeholders in leadership positions at the federal level, in those accreditation bodies, in organizations that aren't NACADA. How do you get it to the AACC? You know, for American Association of Community Colleges, I think that's where this can have the biggest impact. To get to those campus leaders, is by having those 1000 nudges from 18 different spots all at once. 

Matt Markin  
I guess, Janet and Kyle, the next steps for this, like you talked about some of the listening sessions that'll be happening. But is there a timeframe in terms of when you're like, we want to have this definition and the scope of practice set by a certain time.

Kyle Ross  
Janet, you start, since you have a better sense of where all the feedback is kind of going. If you are at a point where you're like, wait, we still need to work on a lot of this, but if you're like, we're pretty close.

Janet Schulenberg  
I think what we're hearing is quite a bit of support for the direction we've taken, and there's definitely some room for fine tuning, clarifying, taking out some of the jargon, things like that. But I do think we're pretty close. I guess I was looking for you, Kyle, because this is on your watch, right? What is your goal for us?

Kyle Ross  
I agree. I think we're pretty close, based on the feedback I've heard as well. There's a lot of excitement, enthusiasm for it, certainly some concerns and some finessing. But you know, ideally, it would be wonderful to be able to roll this out and really announce it at the annual conference coming up in Las Vegas in October. So that'd be a nice place to immediately begin the socialization process, educating people about it and getting it out into the universe. So that's timeline. Certainly told the board, hey, hopefully we can improve this by then, but at this point, as long as the task force feels really confident and we synthesize as much feedback as possible, here's where we're at then, that we're going to listen to that pretty strong. With the board. So if the task force comes back and says, we need more time because we got this piece of feedback and need to figure out where that fits in, the board's going to say, Absolutely, you do what you need to do. Because Janet and the whole task force have shown that they're being really thoughtful and careful in their approach, and we certainly don't want to push them into a timeline that may not work for them as they continue refine and finalize, but I think we're on the same page that we should be able to get this announced and launched in October.

Ryan Scheckel  
Well, I'm kind of curious, you know, I know that Nakata members received an email with a link to the draft where it stood, and also ways to sign up for these listening sessions. But for our listeners, I'm kind of curious if you could share a little bit about the shape of this document, like the components and its reflection on just what advising is becoming and what it isn't, and those sorts of things, structurally, in a sense, can you tell us a little bit more about the definition and the scope of practice?

Janet Schulenberg  
Sure, and I think we all recognize that this is a starting place, and 10 years ago, we couldn't have said what we're what we're trying to say right now. So we expect 10 years from now, it might also look different. We might be able to put different language around this. So we're only just now starting to develop the language, but I think the key things that people would want to know is that we're really trying to lay claim to what is the essential core of academic advising, which, as we see it, from what's been published in the literature, and what we're hearing from membership is that it is about how we facilitate the development of individual students intellectual identities as they navigate their educational journey and make sense and meaning of it that it's intensely personal as to about how students make their educations, what their choices are, what they mean to them as individuals, and then all that other stuff then falls underneath it, of how they navigate the university, how they make their own decisions within it, how they navigate the policies and procedures, how they overcome challenges, etc. So the definition really is trying to say academic advising is a thing, not what academic advising does, or why it does it, per se. So one of the things that we have one of the words we've used in this definition is the word profession, academic advising is a higher education profession. Is how this definition is beginning, and we think it's really important, and it's time that we assert this about ourselves. I think those of us who are in the field, as Patrick said, already feel this way. Some may argue that it's still aspirational, but until we acknowledge this and assert it, we're always going to be in that swirl. So it's time to really claim that we have distinctive purpose, we have distinctive knowledge, we have distinctive skills. Another thing that we're you'll see in this definition is then a scope of practice for academic advising that lays out the essential responsibilities of academic advisors, but also the responsibilities of institutions in creating the conditions for advisors to meet those responsibilities. So in essence, we want to be saying that everyone who an institution is giving responsibility for academic advising should be supported in doing it well and completely, period right, regardless of what their other responsibilities are to the institution, they have these responsibilities to academic advising and then again, To define some of the boundaries around that and to elevate the non transactional parts of academic advising that it's really about collaborate. Our responsibility first and foremost, is to collaborate with students to help them plan out their educations. Problem solve their educations, right? Make sense of their educations over overcome challenges around their education. So this is the essential part of it. And then to do that, we help them navigate structures and policy. We do to do that, we connect them to additional resources. To do that, we communicate and explain and interpret policies to them. That's one of the essential human parts of this work. It's not just about conveying it some information. It's about contextualizing that for individuals, you know, recognizing when a student needs additional support, helping to helping to connect them to those additional supports. So in this structure, you'll see a definition of academic advising, and then this what we've presented so far, at least, the scope of practice that lays out the individual, the advisors, responsibilities, and then higher education responsibilities. One of the things we're hearing from the field is that they would like to also see, what are the students responsibilities within that? I think that's a great suggestion. You'll probably see that in fine version. 

Matt Markin  
Definitely looking forward to. That. And all of you have mentioned support, and let's say you do have these conditions, you do have the structure, you do have this definition of advising. And I think this question go to all of you from your different perspectives and different roles, but professional development of advisors. How would this potentially help support the professional development of advisors from an institution standpoint, especially with budget constraints, but also from NACADA as an organization, whoever wants to go first.

Kyle Ross  
So I'll jump in and start. So part of what I was truly impressed with the original draft of this definition scope practice was to Janet's point that there's a symptom here on what higher education institutions become responsible for that wasn't in the original ask and it emerged from the task force's discussions, and they put some pretty strong claims in there. A great example is that group advising cannot be the replacement for the individual interactions that need to take place between an advisor and a student, but can certainly supplement. So as long as institutions aren't using it as replacement, we're using it as a supplement complement, great. But another example is that institutions become responsible for supporting the professional development of academic advisors, and that could still be leveraged through having them engage with NACADA programs, resources and services. But one thing I've noticed from institutions, as I've been engaging with different leaders and hearing from different folks, is that institutions themselves do a really great job with the initial onboarding process of new academic advisors that first 3060, 90 days in the role. But once you get that initial training once you've learned the basics of how to navigate that new degree audit system that you're navigating at that institution, understanding catalog, general education requirements, more of the transactional pieces. There's not a whole lot of intentionality of what continued training and development looks like. And I do think that this is going to be a good call to action for institutions to think about not just the onboarding process, but what does continued, sustained and ongoing training and development look like for their entire academic advising community at their institutions.

Patrick Cate  
I think there's something that I greatly miss from being an academic advisor, and I don't think I realized I had it when I was an academic advisor, is that the professional development opportunities for academic advising feels so much more robust than many of the other roles that happen at a college campus. NACADA has them out and ready to go the networking that happens online, the amount of groups I hear in advising. There's even this podcast that people can listen to every once in a while about some of the Adventures in Advising. I can't say that that's true for a lot of the other professions on the college campus, it was not easy to figure out what an associate vice president should join to figure out what they're supposed to do. There's a couple of organizations, but they're not nearly as robust. So simply and Kyle is not paying the extra to promote this. But really the opportunity that people have to engage, both intentionally with NACADA, but also as a passive observer of all this work going on, really is quite I don't know that it's as common as people may think. In other areas, Student Affairs has a tendency to do a little bit more, but I know Jen and you were a faculty member at best. It's discipline based. It's not necessarily beyond that. And so the opportunity here is, how do we help link up the right professional advising development to the need of the advisor, just like we want to make sure that an advisor is working with the student in front of them that needs help in multiple different ways, institutions really need to look at what does my advisor need to be better at? Some some advisors are are really great at that. And sometimes it's a lot of fun to go to professional development that you already know, because it doesn't necessarily challenge you. But I think challenge you, but I think as institutions, we want to make sure we're helping our advising staff develop in the same way that an advisor wants to see a student develop, to become better, to be better engaged, to engage with their own process at a deeper level than the transactional aspects that, frankly, sometimes leaders have to keep asking for because they have a report to their board they need to do. And so it needs to be an intentional act on campus leadership, to work with the advisors, to have a general understanding of where their strengths weaknesses are, to be able to help those leaders provide the provide the best development possible out there. And again, the good news is in academic advising. It's out there. It is not incredibly difficult to find, and so expensive that you can't believe that you would spend that much for an hour and a half conversation. It's available all the time.

Janet Schulenberg  
Think another area where we need to grow, I don't think we pay as much attention to this, is we haven't it. We should right where we have lots of resources for figuring out how to be a better advisor when you're working individually with a student, what we have are missing the opportunity for is how the insights from academic advising could make our institutions better, institutions where we could be contributing to curricular conversations where we could help our institutional mission become more clear to students, right? Why are you even in higher education? How does that connect to who they are as individual people and what difference they want to make in the world? How do we weave together these different pieces of who a person is as a whole person, from their their decision making about a Gen Ed, to their decision making about a major to their decision about their co-curriculars. And what do we know about that that would then help us in higher education do better in higher education.

Patrick Cate  
Janet, spot on. I just want to add to that, because that is exactly the way that we help change the way advising is looked at depression. It's not something a college campus does. It's a strategy for success for a college campus, and there's so much that you can gain by having the input of your academic advisors in those other decision making roles that you know, I can absolutely without question, say that my experience as an advisor has undoubtedly helped me as it be a better administrator, not because I have the specific skill set of an advisor, but the ethos of what you need to do to be an advisor allows you to see things almost like when we describe liberal arts or general education right the act of learning and doing this makes you better at a whole lot more than the thing right in front of you. And so I can't, I can't agree with you more, and the more campuses take a look at advising as an overall success strategy to help go through the low amount of funding we're seeing to be able to help more robust, for lack of a better term business model of whatever college you're trying to run, a strategy to consider is strong academic advising.

Kyle Ross  
And I'll jump in on that too and say absolutely, now more than ever. And I I'm sure other folks have said this before in prior years, but now more than ever, academic advising is going to be essential to the success of an institution, as institutions are looking at being held accountable for timeliness to degree completion, to help offset rising college costs of attendance, to things like access to the workforce. At the end of the day, an academic advisor is the one person at an institution that can help build students navigational capital through helping them facilitate their meaning making of their educational experience. And that navigational capital is huge for figuring out things like what policies I need to adhere to to be able to expedite or make efficient my timeliness to degree completion, or things like navigating the complexity of access to the workforce that folks are hoping they have more privileged access to as a result of completing a college credential. So I'm really optimistic for specifically academic advising this time, because one, we're defining it, we're establishing this bold position, but because also now more than ever, advising is critical to the success of an institution. I think folks are starting to see that right now too.

Matt Markin  
Yeah, well, Kyle, I think that's a great way to wrap up this episode. Ryan, you started us out. Any final words to end?

Ryan Scheckel  
Well, I'll just say, as this conversation has shown, there's so many ways to look at this, this dynamic. Call it a profession, call it a field, call it a practice. But academic advising, it has so many ways that it connects with institutional purpose and institutional mission, but also the individuals that are involved in it. And so if you're one of those individuals, we really want to encourage you to make your voice heard and to share your perspectives, to contribute to this process. And I can't wait to see what happens after it's out there in the world and influencing conversations

Matt Markin  
So Janet Kyle and Patrick, thank you so much for being on the podcast with us today.