The Foundational Role of Academic Advising in General Education
An irreverent Broadway musical (Avenue Q) has been best able to sum up the criticisms of general education with these lyrics from “What Do You Do with a B.A. in English?”—“Four years of college and plenty of knowledge / Have earned me this useless degree,” while at the same time offering us a solution in “I Wish I Could Go Back to College,” with this mournful plea: “I need an academic adviser to point the way.” The criticisms of general education have piled up over the years: irrelevant, costly, time consuming, incoherent. General education committees abound on our campuses. Some are tinkering at the margins. Others are trying, and sometimes succeeding, to implement significant general education curricular reform. Despite the criticism, educators are continuing to work at making general education more relevant, more coherent, and more integrated into the overall undergraduate curriculum.
Despite creative and often positive efforts, the criticisms persist. The toxic exhortation that general education is something that a student “gets out of the way” has tremendous staying power. The cradle of this message is elusive, and whether it begins with students, legislators, parents, administrators, faculty, or advisers is less important than recognizing the criticism for what it is—an indication that some do not understand the purpose or value of a general education and some do not quite know how to marry their good intentions with the real-world dynamics of twenty-first-century colleges and universities.
The ownership of general education on many of our campuses is likewise vague. It belongs to everyone and no one at the same time. How, then, to confront all the issues inherent in delivering an understandable and academically effective general education curriculum to our students? In this focused issue of the Journal of General Education: A Curricular Commons of the Humanities and Sciences, a general theme among the contributors is that academic advisers have an opportunity, and perhaps an obligation, “to point the way.”
Academic advising, in one form or another, has been on our campuses for at least two centuries. At times it was part of the in locus parentis culture. For a while it was defined primarily as a clerical function attached to the student registration process each semester. With the establishment of electives in the curriculum it was quickly realized that giving students free rein of the curriculum without any input from advisers was counterproductive. In the early 1970s when Burns Crookston suggested that academic advising should be developmental in its approach, a new era in academic advising commenced.
Now in the twenty-first century academic advising scholars have definitively left behind the notion of advising as part of registration or the traditional students affairs realm, replacing older paradigms with a new one positioning academic advising as central to the core mission of higher education institutions. In this repositioning, general education can take on added significance as a coherent curriculum that allows and encourages students to take advantage of the opportunity to make discoveries beyond their majors.
Currently academic advising has caught the attention of those who demand that more students be retained in higher education and that they complete their degrees in a reasonable amount of time (a four-year sprint across forty or more courses being the historical expectation). In essence, advising has moved from the mechanics of registration to complete requirements to professional engagement with what students learn.
As a next step, academic advising is ready to be at the core of the educational endeavor, a task that will require all the administration support necessary for it to flourish. This is not as tremendous an effort as might be expected. There already exists an international academic advising organization (nacada: The Global Community for Academic Advising), which provides the raison d'être for academic advising; continuously updated ethics and core values guidelines; standards for practice; professional development activities at the local, regional, national, and international levels; and even opportunities for graduate education.
Thus the synergy between academic advising and general education is especially strong. The goals of advising as articulated by nacada are in sync with the goals of general education. What academic advising is poised to do now is to work with all students as they navigate meaningful education paths. Academic advising can and should go beyond the current rhetoric about the value of a university education: “It is for developing the muscle of thoughtfulness, the use of which will be the greatest pleasure in life and will also show what it means to be fully human” (Bruni, 2015). Academic advising can assist students as they craft individualized educations for themselves that will bring the meaning of such a statement to life.
The authors in this issue of the Journal of General Education provide some of the latest thinking about academic advising, general education, and the practice that brings this new thinking to reality. Lowenstein insists that advising does not just teach curriculum but is actually part of the curriculum, advancing the notion that credits should be offered to students for the advising experience. Kirk-Kuwaye and Sano-Franchini suggest that students can find the meaning and purposes in their lives through a thoughtfully constructed personal general education curriculum. A couple of authors (Guertin and Egan) posit the importance of intentionality as part of the decision-making process of students. Egan, in addition, shows how the individualized majors that exist on some of our campuses are a laboratory for academic advising as the ultimate learning experience where students both construct and ultimately “own” the totality of their educations. In fact, sometimes out of these individualized programs come new majors for universities to offer to all their students.
Most and Wellmon bring Lowenstein's proposal for advising for credit to reality with the example of College Advising Seminar classes at the University of Virginia, where academic advising has been put into the classroom. Sopper wants us to rethink the faculty role in the teaching of general education courses and reminds us that the values of higher education are often articulated through the general education curriculum. Darling places the stress on the adjective in front of advising: academic. She urges that academic advisers must be campus leaders, assigned to curriculum committees, for example, and thus in positions to advocate that the academic needs of students must include the work of a cadre of well-prepared academic advisers.
Some months ago, Journal of General Education editor Jeremy Cohen invited me to serve as guest editor of the special issue you are now reading. “I view this,” Cohen said, “as an opportunity to increase understanding—among our university colleagues on the faculty, in administration, in student affairs, and of course in academic advising—of the bedrock role academic advisers play in fostering undergraduate student success.”
The advising voices represented here in fact do provide valuable perspective. They are not naive. They recognize that academic advising is not a silver bullet for the general education conundrums they identify. Yet their observations do suggest that despite the complexity of curricular and organizational reform at our universities and colleges, the path to meaningful general education transition and improvement has some clear markers.
All, or at least many, of the necessary components are in place to ensure that general education can be fully articulated to students in meaningful ways. Each of the authors writing for “The Foundational Role of Academic Advising in General Education” brings substantial academic advising experience to what this journal envisions as a “curricular commons of the humanities and sciences.” As members of this commons, academic advisers can do more than provide mechanical interpretations of curricular requirements. They can indeed help to point the way.
