The Professionalization of Academic Advising: A Structured Literature Review – A Professional Advisor's Response

Abstract

Craig M. McGill’s article in Volume 39, Number 1 of the NACADA Journal raises many issues about the status of academic advising as a profession. Despite having origins in the early 19 century, academic advising to many is still not a fully realized profession. Dr. McGill, writing on the literature addressing academic advising as a profession, has done what any professional would do: used a recognized forum in the field to present his research, thus allowing the opportunity for others to respond. Academic advising, like many professions, was a response to a recognized need. In the 1870s, administrators at Johns Hopkins University realized that students should not select electives without required input from faculty members. These administrators believed that advice from knowledgeable persons, in this case faculty members, could help students craft more meaningful and coherent educations for themselves. As curricula evolved to include general education, electives, minors, and the need to go outside the standard course of study with remediation and internships, for example, the demand for academic advisors grew. When World War II veterans joined the student body, it was clear that these heroes deserved special interventions from academic advisors, especially those veterans struggling with their chosen course of study. Adult students and students whose families had not previously accessed higher education were likewise provided with academic advisors. While the bulk of the work performed by academic advisors might seem to have been delivered on demand and without any substantive theoretical underpinnings, this period of academic advising represents the advent of significant antecedents and foundational influences. In 1970, I was hired as a psychological counselor at the small regional campus of a state university. At that time, I had no doubt that I was part of the counseling profession. Then, within a few days of starting, I was informed I had the responsibility to advise undecided students. The goal was to help these students declare majors within a specified time period. My sense of what an academic advisor did was limited to my own undergraduate experience. If I had an advisor, I certainly didn’t know it, although I did have to stand in a line at the end of my sophomore year to have a faculty member (my advisor?) sign me into my chosen major. I made all the decisions on what courses I would take by reading the course catalog, and I do not recall if anyone at the arena registration where I picked up the IBM punch cards for each course even signed off on my choices. Now, three years after earning a master’s degree, I had to advise students who did not know what they wanted to study. But there was help! I had learned from my colleagues that indecision was considered a psychological state ranging from mere indecision to persistent and debilitating indecisiveness. Interventions to help students move from undecided to decided involved talk therapy and administering career inventories and instruments measuring occupational indecision. The basis for much of this theory and practice came from the field of career and vocational guidance but was now being applied to choice of major. It became clear to me that academic advising— at least the kind of advising I was expected to do— did not mean telling a student what courses to take. Such an approach (later labeled prescriptive advising) would have been counterproductive and resulted in either active pushback or passivity on the students’ parts. The next few years saw momentous events and included the publication of the Crookston article in 1972 by the Journal of College Student Personnel. This article proved to be a watershed moment when academic advisors recognized that what they wanted to embrace was something more than the limited vision of advising that Crookston labeled ‘‘prescriptive advising.’’ Suggesting that prescriptive advising ever really existed as the primary advising approach isn’t quite in sync with the history of academic advising. Certainly, the job of Johns Hopkins advisors was to help students select meaningful electives. As the curricula continued to evolve, using a prescriptive approach to advise became an even less viable option. Certainly, my work with undecided students was not prescriptive. Each student took a different set of courses each semester to meet their own educational and career