For decades, advising practitioners and scholars have worked toward developing an identity for advising as a unique field of scholarly inquiry and practice. To date, the identity crisis in advising remains. This study presents an examination and description of the function, purpose, and identity of a university advising system through comparisons…

Recent developments in the knowledge-driven, postindustrial economy have radically affected college students' prospects for entering and completing successful careers. In this volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment, fewer organizations find profitability in hiring, training, and retaining workers. Over the last 20 years,…

We began this series by addressing the challenges of career advising in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment. In this article, we define human capital and suggest that advisors encourage students to utilize the principle of maximizing human capital when making decisions. We describe the personal traits and attitudes needed to…

Liberal education remains a mystery to many of the students enrolled in colleges and universities. Academic advisors, standing at the crossroads of the various curricular and cocurricular experiences that make up a student's liberal education, should be prepared to help students recognize the coherence of their education. This article provides…

A shared perspective on the extant and ideal organizing principles for an institution's advising system is important to the overall effectiveness of advising. In this essay, I develop a vision of advising as educating, and from that vision, derive some higher order principles for an institutional advising system that will accommodate the wide…

We present a theoretical basis for engaging in academic advising as friendship and offer examples of the applicability of friendship in advising. We begin with interconnections between civic friendship and personal friendship in the context of academic advising. Next we overview theoretical work on communication and friendship that offers…

John Holland's typological theory of persons and environments is regarded as the most influential in the field of career counseling (Brown, 2002), but few have carried the theory over to the field of higher education and academic advising (Smart, Feldman, & Ethington, 2000). Therefore, Holland's theory and the subsequent research on it were…

A philosophy of advising referred to as the learning-centered paradigm is described and compared to the dominant developmental paradigm. Through the learning-centered paradigm, one can explain, better than through the developmental theory, how advising is, or can be, similar to teaching. Under the learning-centered approach, the excellent advisor…