The 107-page report looks at how students use their academic advisors, how often and with what result. It also presents data on student evaluation of the overall advising experience and of the experience of online advising sessions. The study also gives specific data on the length of advising sessions, the number of times students have seen their advisors in their college careers and much more. This is a critical resource for academic advising and retention officials in universities and colleges, enabling them to compare their advising efforts with a national representative sample of 1076 full time students from 4-year colleges and universities in the United States.
Just a few of the report’s many findings are that:
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8.92% of students could not identify their academic advisor.
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Male students see their advisors considerably more often than do female students.
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52% of students with a full time job have ever taken an online advising session.
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By school size, students at the smallest colleges had the longest academic advising sessions, those at the largest colleges, the shortest.
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Students studying education or library science were the most likely to think highly of their academic advising experience.
Data in the report is broken out by more than 20 personal and institutional variables, so, for example, readers can get specific data on student evaluations of the quality of advising for first year students vs. sophomores, juniors or seniors, or for students in level 1 research universities vs. doctoral institutions, or for male vs. female or vs. transgender students, or for business/economics majors vs fine arts majors, etc., etc.
Breakouts include personal variables such as age, year of school standing, major or intended major, religion, gender, sexual orientation, income level, SAT/ACT scores, college grades, regional origins, race/ethnicity, as well as institutional variables such as level of school tuition, size of school of institution attended and many other variables.