Curricular Commons

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...