What You Need to Know About College Academic Advising

College Academic Advising Sucks. Period. End of Discussion. This is the resounding statement by college students across the nation who is fed up with their University's poor advising departments which are supposed to help them with graduate school, a job or what they would like to do with their future.

This unfortunate occurrence has college students out in the cold...literally as they struggle to find jobs coming out of college. Unless students are coming from the top tier Ivy level schools where jobs are handed out on a silver platter to them, the majority of college students feel neglected by their school for a lack of help.

This major problem stems from school's being overwhelmed by their student body population in relation to the amount of faculty they have working at academic advising. In some schools, there are hired faculty members who only work in academic advising and help students when they need advice. In other schools, the people who work in academic advising also work as professors which mean the time that they have to work with students is limited and not their full time job. In addition, working as a professor requires office hours for students which further decrease the amount of time that students can seek academic advice from a faulty member in the academic advising department. In most schools, the academic advisers are simply too few and overworked.

Big schools of 30,000 or more students as well as medium schools of 10,000- 15,000 students also face this same problem because the ratio of faculty to student in academic advising is atrocious.

Academic advising usually makes up the different academic departments including pre-law, pre-med, business, engineering, etc. Sometimes these academic fields are split up if a school has different schools for each professional program. Some schools have better advising in that field than others but the general consensus is that academic advising needs to be fixed. The only way of doing this is to hire more staff members. Another idea is for Universities to hire more part time professors to act as part time academic advisers. With a bigger staff and more advisers on hand to speak to students, students can get the advice they need in order to make decisions about graduate school, jobs and applications.

In many schools, the major problem has been the confusion that students have complained about because students are getting wrong answers or different answers from multiple advisers on what to do concerning a certain deadline or application. This problem is an internal organization matter that needs to be addressed on college campuses. Faculty need to all be working together to make sure that everyone is aware of what is going on and if they don't know the answer to a student question, they should ask one of their fellow faculty members instead of making up an answer or giving an answer they aren't certain about. An additional problem has been the lack of knowledge that advisers have. In some instances, academic advisers have not even known common information posted on their academic advising website. This is a huge problem because students turn to academic advising for help. This major problem needs to be addressed on college campuses so students can succeed in their future endeavors.