The study looks closely at how much and when college students interact with their academic advisors and how satisfied they are with them. The report presents detailed data from a survey of 1,065 participants on the percentage of students who know their advisor, how many times they see their advisor, whether they see their advisor when they are not required to do so, and how they view advisor effectiveness. The report also gives extensive information on how students contact their advisors, by phone, email, chat, through a website form, or in-person – giving specific data and commentary for each communication vehicle. It also gives data on how students think of their academic advisor and the extent to which students go to their advisors for various reasons, including non-strictly-academic ones such as for help with career planning or financial aid.
Data in the report is presented in the aggregate and then broken out separately for eighteen different variables including but not limited to: college grades, gender, income level, year of college standing, SAT/ACT scores, regional origin, age, sexual orientation, race & ethnicity, college major and other personal variables, and by Carnegie class, enrollment size and public/private status of the survey participants institutions of higher education.
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Just a few of this 108 -page report’s many findings are that:Students in the C average grade range (or less) were less likely than those with higher grades to know who their advisor was and nearly 14% of them did not know.
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The more religious a student, the more likely they were to have contacted an advisor by phone. A third of the most religious students had contacted an advisor by phone vs. only 18.04% of the most secular students.
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Students at public colleges were somewhat more likely than those at private colleges to say that they were highly likely to see an advisor over the issue of course availability, 40.2% to 34.5%.