Background reading for college advising (and summaries because they are definitely not "light reading")

Many of these articles are from The Mentor which is an online academic journal focused solely on advising in higher education.

Here's a link!
http://dus.psu.edu/mentor/

One article from The Mentor called "Academic Advising at the University of Utopia" by Mark Lowenstein brought up an alternative take on college advising than is traditionally instituted. Lowenstein creates a fictional university (University of Utopia) and explains how this new, progressive form of advising becomes implimented. He makes the case that advising should be as much about teaching the concepts of connective learning as preparing a student for graduating or picking a specific major.


 This appears to be a simple change but, as Lowenstein describes, it leads to a fundamental shift in the focus of liberal arts education. It goes from creating a well-rounded but subject-oriented graduate to a student who is primarily focused on the cross-disciplinary apllications and connections of any given subject. Lowenstein's eventual point emphasizes this change as a way to prepare students to apply the subjects they've grasped AND their understanding of the broad principles of education to further academic pursuits and employment options; the point being that these two fields benefit equally from the new system.

Overall, this was fairly interesting but long winded and poorly set up. The whole "University of Utopia" idea was almost completely useless. He could have nullifed the entire thing by adding the sentence "in a perfect world....blah blah blah...but we all know this is purely hypothetical."
http://dus.psu.edu/mentor/2011/09/university-of-utopia/

In Mark Lowenstein's article, he mentions Liberal Education and America's Promise or LEAP. LEAP is essentially a program that attempts to categorize and emphasize specific goals for liberal arts-style education. Schools that adopt LEAP goals end up looking at advising as a pathway to achieve these goals. LEAP also functions as a way to bind diverse colleges and institutions into a framework that includes standardized principles and rubriks to evaluate those principles.

LEAP link: http://www.aacu.org/leap/


Another article from The Mentor tackles the more recent movement of students towards technological resources in advising, largely separate from their personal college advisor.

This article, http://dus.psu.edu/mentor/2011/09/internet-course-selection-resources/ is written by

Mary M. Livingston, Louisiana Tech University
Jerome J. Tobacyk, Louisiana Tech University
Margaret L. Hindman, Louisiana State University.

It talks about the complexities of advising a student who is using information available online, such as professor ratings, grade distributions,and scheduling aggragates. The article focuses most specifically on the fact that advisors need to be aware that students may be using these resources. It gives a compelling picture of how technology can work both with and against the goals of advisors.

Along with The Mentor, http://www.nacada.ksu.edu/AboutNACADA/index.htm which is the National Academic Advising Association has a good deal of information of advising in terms of advisors' goals and how to improve the system through top down, standardized objectives.

Joe Cuseo of Marymount College wrote an article entitled,

ACADEMIC ADVISEMENT AND STUDENT RETENTION: 

EMPIRICAL CONNECTIONS & SYSTEMIC INTERVENTIONS

This was incredibly dense and I have not in fact worked through it completely, though it is definitely dealing with the same ideas as the other resources I've discovered, though with a little more emphasis on student perspectives.