Abstract
Anyone working within or connected to community colleges today will recognize that the institutions are experiencing one of the most transformational periods of change in their 100-year history: a shift away from the open-access, serve yourself from our “à-la carte menu of programmatic offerings” (Kisker, 2021, p. 35) mentality that was characteristic of the colleges throughout the 20th century toward a more structured approach to helping learners transfer or learn the skills and credentials needed to secure and progress in a job that pays a living wage (Waiwaiole & Adkins, 2020). Terry O’Banion's Academic Advising in the Community College is a practical primer for how academic advising is evolving, and must continue to evolve, within the context of the guided pathways movement and in order to meet the needs of 21st-century students.
After a Foreword by Walter Bumphus from the American Association of Community Colleges, the book begins with a short preface by the editor, as well as an updated version of O’Banion's seminal academic advising model first published in 1972, which to this day provides a conceptual basis for collegiate advising programs across the country. The two chapters that follow—written respectively by scholars from the Center for Community College Student Engagement and the Community College Research Center—ground 21st-century academic advising in the guided pathways movement and provide a framework for advising reform. Attention to the attitudes and processes necessary for organizational transformation in Chapter Three will be particularly helpful to college faculty and administrators embarking upon advising redesigns at their own institutions. The final four chapters of the book illustrate reimagined advising processes at Valencia College in Florida, William Rainey Harper College in Illinois, the Community College of Baltimore County Maryland, and West Kentucky Community and Technical College.
The great strength of Academic Advising in the Community College is its unflappable assertion that while the student success and completion agendas share the same end goal, the latter is wholly dependent upon the efficacy of the former. Chapter authors position academic advising as key to helping more learners fulfill their academic and career potential and recognize the roles that both faculty and professional advisors play in the process. As such, O’Banion's book is a hugely important text for current and aspiring community college leaders, adult educators, and those interested in redesigning America's community colleges with student success as the guiding principle.
Taken together, the chapters in this volume offer several themes common to effective 21st-century advising practices. First is the consensus that academic advising can no longer be reserved for students in certain programs or limited to those who have the cultural capital to know such resources exist and to actively seek assistance. Advising must be, as the authors of Chapter Two write, “inescapable,” and built into every learner's admissions, enrollment, program choice, and course selection processes (p. 21). Second, advising must be relational instead of transactional. The institutions highlighted in Academic Advising have all adopted a case management approach in which learners are assigned to advisors early on, either in their first term or, in some cases, upon completion of a First-Year Experience, and who will stay with them through completion. As these colleges have learned, relationships matter; the better an advisor understands the human being sitting across from them, with all their attendant strengths, interests, motivations, and life circumstances, the more adeptly they can help the student identify and progress toward their education and career goals. Third, academic advising must be a shared responsibility among advisors, faculty, and staff. Communication with and about students must be frequent, advising platforms must be integrated into learning management and other technological systems, and clear processes must be put into place for who will follow up with a learner when such action is warranted (e.g., when an assignment is missed, a basic need identified, or if a student elects to deviate from their chosen academic plan). Frequent and ongoing professional development for faculty and advisors alike is crucial to ensuring the success of these processes.
These themes are enormously instructive—indeed, a short concluding chapter summarizing them would have been a welcome addition to the book—but also useful are examples in the final four chapters of how a 21st-century approach to advising can be adapted to specific populations, including learners in accelerated developmental pathways, those in AAS programs, students with disabilities, first-generation students, and non-native speakers. One segment of the community college population was largely ignored in this text, however, and that is the growing number of learners—frequently returning adults—enrolled in short-term training and other nondegree career pathways. Although a thorough discussion of advising in this context may have been outside the scope of the book, given the efforts community colleges are making to build stackable credentials and articulate noncredit training and certificates to AAS degrees, it is clear that academic advising reforms must continue to evolve so that these learners receive the same guidance, mentorship, and support as students enrolled in more traditional academic pathways. Nonetheless, O’Banion's book is a must-read for anyone interested in improving education and training for adult (and younger) learners, as it brings us one very large step closer to an academic advising model worthy of the 21st-century community college student.