Consider a student who enrolls at your institution this fall. During the admissions process, she mentioned an interest in healthcare. At orientation, she was assigned an academic advisor who helped her register for general education courses. Midway through her first semester, she started second-guessing her direction but didn’t know where to go with that uncertainty. Career services existed somewhere on campus, but no one connected her to it. By spring, she had changed her major twice, lost credits in the process, and was questioning whether college was working for her at all.
Three offices touched this student. Admissions knew her initial interests. Academic advising managed her course selections. Career services had resources that could have helped her make sense of her options before she started drifting. But none of them saw the full picture, and none of them knew what the others knew. No single person failed this student. The system did.
This scenario plays out thousands of times a semester at institutions across the country. It is not an advising problem in the traditional sense: it is an infrastructure problem. And solving it requires institutional leaders to think differently about what advising actually is, how it is organized, and what it takes to make it work as a continuous experience from enrollment to graduation.
When conversations about advising challenges come up at the leadership level, two issues tend to dominate: caseloads are too high, and departments don’t communicate well enough. These are usually treated as separate problems with separate solutions: hire more advisors for the first, build cross-functional committees for the second.
But they are not separate problems. They are cause and effect.
When an academic advisor is responsible for 500 or more students, triage is inevitable. The advisor focuses on the most urgent cases: students on academic probation, students who can’t register, students at risk of losing financial aid. Everything else gets pushed to the margins, and “everything else” includes the kind of proactive, exploratory advising that helps students connect their academic choices to their career goals.
Under that kind of pressure, advisors are forced to focus on their immediate responsibilities. Silos are not just an organizational issue. They are also a symptom of overloaded teams. When advisors are overwhelmed, meaningful coordination between offices becomes difficult to sustain.
This is compounded by a trend that should concern every institutional leader: the front door is getting wider while the infrastructure behind it stays the same. Direct admissions programs, dual enrollment pathways, open-access missions, all of which are expanding who gets in. That is a good thing. But access without support is not opportunity. It is a revolving door.
The advising experience, from a student’s perspective, is not one relationship. It is a series of handoffs between offices, systems, and people who often have no visibility into what came before them.
Each of these handoffs represents a moment where continuity either holds or breaks.
Enrollment to first-semester advising. During the admissions and onboarding process, students express goals, interests, and concerns: sometimes in essays, sometimes in conversations with enrollment counselors, sometimes through assessment tools. Almost none of that information follows them into their first advising appointment. The academic advisor starts from scratch, and the student’s initial momentum (the clarity they had when they decided to enroll) begins to dissipate.
Academic advising to career exploration. For most students, academic advising and career exploration happen in entirely separate offices, on entirely separate timelines, with entirely separate data. An academic advisor helps a student choose courses. A career counselor helps a student explore occupations. But the connection between those two activities (the question of why a student is taking the courses they’re taking and where those courses lead) falls into the gap between the two offices. Students are left to make that connection on their own, and many of them don’t.
Career exploration to major or program selection. A student takes a career assessment. She identifies two or three career paths that align with her interests and strengths. She’s energized. Then she goes to her academic advisor to talk about declaring a major, and that advisor has no idea any of this exploration happened. The conversation defaults to degree requirements and course availability, not because the advisor doesn’t care about career alignment, but because they simply don’t have the information.
Mid-program to graduation and placement. Career services often enters the picture late, typically junior or senior year for four-year students, sometimes even later at two-year institutions. By that point, the office is working without context. They don’t know what career paths the student explored early on, what advising conversations shaped their direction, or what questions the student has been wrestling with along the way. The relationship starts cold, at the exact moment it should be building toward a culmination.
Each of these handoffs represents a structural failure, not a personnel failure. The people in each office are doing their jobs. But their jobs were designed in isolation from each other, and the student experience reflects that design.
Closing these gaps requires three things, and the sequence matters.
The first question is not, “How many advisors do we need?” It is, “What are we asking advisors to do?” If advising is defined primarily as course selection and degree auditing, advisors will spend most of their time managing schedules and requirements. If advising is defined as helping students connect who they are, what they are studying, and where they hope to go, the role looks fundamentally different.
This is not about adding responsibilities to an already overloaded job. It is about repositioning advising as a holistic function and then building the support systems, including technology, that make that redefined role sustainable. Advisors cannot be expected to think holistically about students if the tools and processes around them are fragmented.
The most consequential process question in advising is deceptively simple: does every advisor who touches a student have access to what the others have learned?
At most institutions, the answer is no. Enrollment data lives in the SIS. Career assessment results live in a separate platform, if they’re captured at all. Academic advising notes live in a system that career services may not have access to. Career services notes may not exist in any system at all.
Redesigning these processes means creating shared workflows across offices (not shared meetings, but shared information). When an enrollment counselor captures a student’s career interests, that information should be visible to the academic advisor at the first appointment. When a student completes a career assessment and selects a career path, the academic advisor should see that before the next registration conversation. When an academic advisor notes that a student is uncertain about their major, career services should know about it before the student shows up—or, more likely, doesn’t show up—at their door.
Warm handoffs, coordinated outreach, and shared notes are not revolutionary concepts. But without the right infrastructure, they are operationally impossible at the scale most institutions operate.
This is where the conversation must be practical. The people and process changes described above are necessary. But with caseloads of 500, 700, or even 900 students per advisor, those changes are difficult to sustain without better support. An advisor cannot manually review career assessment results for hundreds of students or consistently examine every question students ask outside of appointments.
AI does not replace the advisor. It changes what is possible for the advisor to do. Specifically, it addresses the volume problem that makes everything else (the holistic role, the shared visibility, the coordinated handoffs) practically unachievable.
When AI helps answer routine degree-audit questions, advisors can spend more time on the career-connected conversations that shape student decisions. When it brings together patterns from across offices, advisors can notice signals that fragmented systems often hide. When it identifies a student who completed a career assessment but has not taken a next step, it gives an advisor an earlier opportunity to reach out.
The technology does not make advising better by automating it. It makes advising better by giving advisors the capacity and the information to do the work they were trained to do.
Imagine the same student from the opening of this article, but in a different system.
She enrolls with an interest in healthcare. During onboarding, she completes a career assessment that identifies her strengths, values, and career matches. She explores several healthcare-related career paths within the platform and selects two that interest her most.
When her academic advisor sits down for their first appointment, all of that is already visible, not buried in a separate system, but right on the student’s dashboard. The advisor sees her career assessment results, the career paths she’s exploring, and the major or program of study she’s considering. The conversation starts with “I can see you’ve been looking at health sciences and public health. Let’s talk about which path fits best” instead of “so, what are you thinking about studying?”
Over the course of the semester, the student uses an AI-powered chatbot to ask questions about course prerequisites, internship timelines, and the difference between two programs. Those questions are visible to her advisors as engagement data, signaling where she is in her thinking and what she might need next.
When career services reaches out to her in her second year, they don’t start cold. They see the full arc: her initial assessment, her evolving interests, the notes from academic advising, and the questions she’s been exploring on her own. The conversation picks up where the last one left off, not from the beginning.
This is what becomes possible when enrollment, academic advising, and career services share relevant information and every advisor can see more of the student’s journey, not just the chapter connected to one office.
The Infrastructure Question
Every institution’s strategic plan includes language about student success, completion, and career readiness. The question is whether the advising infrastructure behind those commitments matches the ambition.
For most institutions, it does not, and not because of indifference, but because the systems, processes, and tools were built for a different era. They were designed when advising meant course selection, when career services was a senior-year function, and when the expectation was that students would figure out the connection between their education and their career on their own.
That expectation no longer holds. Students need, and increasingly expect, a connected experience from enrollment to graduation. They need advisors who see them as whole people, not as course schedules. They need career exploration that informs their academic decisions from the start, not as an afterthought at the end. And they need an institution that remembers their journey across every office and every interaction, rather than asking them to start over each time they walk through a new door.
Building that experience requires people who are positioned to advise holistically, processes that create visibility across departments, and technology that makes both of those things possible at scale. None of the three works in isolation. All three, working together, change what advising can be.
Institutions that create this continuity will do more than improve advising. They will give students a clearer, more connected experience from enrollment to graduation, with stronger opportunities to make informed decisions along the way.