The Academic Advisor as Fiduciary

Starting last year, meeting with academic advisors is no longer a requirement for students prior to being able to register for class. The advisor flag remains on the system, but it is now meant to signify whether a particular student has met in-person for an advising session or not. This is possible through the university’s implementation of the new Degree Audit tool which allows students to keep better track of their own progress. Individual departments also set up their own streamlined support system. For example, my colleague at the Computer Science department developed a curriculum map, which enables students to study all potential pre-requisite paths for their desired technical electives.

The availability of these new tools has removed a significant burden from advisors. Instead of having to focus on the technicalities of selecting general education, managing prerequisites, or navigating technical electives, advising conversations can now focus more on the bigger academic and post-graduation pictures for the students. This shift reveals what academic advising has always been about.

A fiduciary perspective

Although advising is one of the many responsibilities expected of faculty members, I have come to view it as requiring a distinct professional perspective. More specifically, I think of academic advisors as fiduciaries, not in the legal sense but in the sense that our first obligation is to understand and serve the student’s interests rather than our own assumptions. The greatest danger in advising is assuming that the path which led us to become faculty members is also the path our students should follow. Faculty are particularly vulnerable to this bias because our own careers selected for a very specific type of person. Even when we do not assume all students will become faculty members, we still risk providing advice that mirrors our undergraduate career paths such as taking additional technical electives, pursuing undergraduate research, delaying graduation for another opportunity, or prioritizing graduate school over immediate employment.

Recognizing this bias is precisely why I find the fiduciary analogy useful. Similar to how a fiduciary should not simply advise someone with immediate cash needs to invest into a bullish stock market, we need to be mindful of what is best for our students based on their individual circumstances. A fiduciary would not recommend the same investment to every client because each person’s goals, timeline, and tolerance for risk are different. Academic advising is no different. Good advising begins with understanding what success looks like for a particular student. Until then, it is impossible to know which opportunities are worth encouraging and which tradeoffs are worth accepting. This does not mean agreeing with every decision a student wishes to make. Rather, it means helping students understand the consequences of those decisions so they can choose knowingly.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

We have all had that question: What courses should I take next semester? After many sessions of advising, I have learned to not make immediate assumptions about students who ask this question, or even worse, provide a list-of-courses answer to this question. Rather, I ask them in return, somewhat jokingly, What do you want to be when you grow up? This question often startles the students and breaks them out of the mold of just thinking about the next semester. It is a way to set them back into a big-picture mode regarding their entire academic career. They should understand that their course selections should not be just about that next semester, but rather about what they want to do one or two semesters from now and beyond.

It is interesting to observe students’ responses to this question. Some students looked genuinely surprised. Others were able to vaguely answer the question with a brief answer, web developer or software engineer. A handful were able to articulate their long-term goals and aspirations. In all cases, these answers, or the lack of answers, lead to a sequence of more specific questions that help me better understand the students as individuals.

For those who don’t know what they want to do, the follow-up questions now focus more on the past courses. Regardless of the grades, how did they feel about past topics, and what were their favorite and least favorite parts? This line of questioning yields interesting results. I have had students with high grades in a course but completely hated the technical topics while others struggled yet still wanted to pursue a specific career path. In these cases, I try to distinguish current performance from long-term interest and then explain what technical development would be necessary for the student to pursue that path realistically. For those who know what they want to do, the questions will focus more on their future goals. Do they want to stack on a specific certificate or minor? Have they started the internship or jobs search yet. Are there relevant courses that satisfy the graduation requirement and better fine tune the specific details of their goals. We still don’t have the answers to the students’ original question about what they should take next semester though!

In an ideal world, everyone can follow the optimal set of courses that take them where they want to be. In reality, many students are limited by their own personal and financial constraints. To know what to take next semester means to know how many one can or must take next semester, which means knowing the absolute limit: When do you want to graduate. This is often accompanied with two other questions, one somewhat awkward: is finance a factor to be considered and what is your workload outside of school? The answers to these questions allow the advisor and the student to establish an optimization boundary for the course selection process. Taking a page from algorithm analysis, the boundary helps to design several course progression options: the upper bound, lower bound, and a path in the middle. The upper bound represents the most aggressive course selection option where students would be taking closer to 18 credit hours per semester and front loading many technical electives so that they are ready for job and internship applications as soon as possible. The upper bound is not necessarily the best path. It is the most aggressive feasible path under the student’s stated constraints. The lower bound represents the minimal number of courses that would help students to maintain the minimum academically and administratively viable load while prioritizing their non-academic pressures. The path offers the students with something in between that hopefully resembles a balance between two extremes.

These options can provide an indirect answer to another important question that will remain unasked: how much efforts are you willing or able to put in given your constraints?. It is not easy for students, when sitting across a faculty advisor, to make a choice that would downplay their ability to allocate significant effort to course work. As an advisor, I have always been trying to be sensitive about this fact. I often encourage students to protect the income, health, and stability on which their academic progress depends, even when that means recommending a slower path. Surprisingly, many students would push back and say that they are ready to put in the effort and aim for a more difficult path. The reason for this selection could rise from a variety of factors. Students might not want to disappoint an authority figure or they may overestimate their own future capacity. They may also genuinely value faster progress, and when a conservative option is offered, it may make their own preference clearer. However, an important point is that by giving them permission to choose the slower path, you make the more aggressive choice genuinely theirs rather than something they feel faculty expect. It should be noted that the design of these paths should account not only for courses, but also for the time students may need for internships, research, portfolio development, employment, family responsibilities, and recovery.

At this point, the answer to the original question by the students, which is what to take for the next semester, already appears. Not only that, it is most likely that the students will emerge from the advising meeting with a more detailed plan of action that spans several semesters, even to the end of their undergraduate studies.

It is advising, not lecturing

The advising session, as outlined in the previous section, will be a detailed conversation, containing a lot of information. At the end of the session, the advisor would feel that they have better understood the student’s situation and can provide more accurate guidance. However, it is important to remember that in the end, this is still an advising session and not a lecture. The goal is not to deliver information and expect students to reproduce the advisor’s preferred answer. Rather, the advisor helps students understand their goals and circumstances. Together, they identify several feasible paths and examine the trade-offs attached to each one. In the end, it is the students’ responsibility to make the final decision. They might choose a path that goes against the advisor’ suggestions, or they might even ignore the advice altogether. We should not take that disagreement personally, although we should remain willing to reconsider whether our advice was clear and appropriate.

On that note, I practice creating a new email to the student at the beginning of the advising session and writing down as much information as I can, including their constraints and my recommended paths. The email is sent to the students once the session ended. The reason for this practice is that, first, this is not a lecturing session. There is no book and no lecture note, and it is certainly not reasonable to expect students to remember all the details, even if they were trying to write down everything. The email gives the student a record to revisit after the pressure of the meeting has passed. It also creates continuity when circumstances change or the conversation resumes months later.

Conclusion

In my earlier years as an assistant professor, I had thought that advising students was a simple as find a set of courses that move them closer to graduation. I used to think it was course mapping, now I know it’s understanding constraints and goals. As I grow more experienced, I realize that advising students requires a deep understanding of their constraints and goals. What surprised me is that as my advising sessions become more conversational and focus on students’ goals, they have also become another enjoyable part of my job. These sessions help both me and my students to remember that the courses they were, are, and will be taking are not just about the grades, but another step closer to achieving their individual dreams.