Holistic advising has never been easy to resource. But in this moment of tightening budgets, lost program funding, and growing uncertainty, the challenge has taken on new urgency. The question that’s front of mind for just about everyone in higher education right now: how do you sustain holistic advising when resources keep shrinking?
Holistic advising is the effort to rebuild systems so that students experience support as seamless—across academic planning, career goals, basic needs, and personal challenges—without bouncing between offices or retelling their stories. The call to serve students in this way demands that our institutions rethink how we structure and conduct advising work.
Dr. Melinda Mechur Karp, founder of Phase Two Advisory and a researcher who has spent more than two decades studying what makes student support effective, argues that this moment calls for a different response. Not more work, but different work. In a recent Complete College America webinar, Dr. Karp shared a framework and a set of practical strategies for sustaining holistic advising—even when resources are scarce—by rethinking how institutions leverage the time, people, and tools already at their disposal.
The Community College Research Center’s (CCRC) SSIPP framework—Strategic, Sustained, Integrated, Proactive, and Personalized—synthesizes 25 years of research into a clear finding: when institutions ensure that every student has someone who knows them, who can connect them to the right support at the right time across their entire learning journey, persistence and completion rates improve. The specifics of how an institution implements this matter less than whether the system delivers on those principles.
Three Ways to Think Differently
The challenge, of course, is doing this at scale when budgets are tight and programs are being cut. Melinda’s answer to that challenge was refreshingly practical. She walked through three areas where institutions can think differently.
1. Time. Not every student needs to see an advisor every semester, or in person, but every student needs to see someone sometimes. Instead of relying on blunt instruments like mandatory first-year appointments and uniform 30-minute slots, institutions can build what Dr. Karp calls a “cadence”: a data-informed rhythm of outreach that identifies which students need support, when they need it, and what mode of engagement fits. Procedural information can go out by email or text. Decision-making conversations—the ones where students need a human—get the face time. One institution built its entire cadence and communication plan in Excel; no new technology, no purchase required.
2. People. Most campuses have more advising capacity than they realize—it is simply distributed across offices that do not communicate with one another. Academic advisors are already having career conversations; career advisors are already touching on academic planning. Combining these functions so one advisor holds a conversation that previously required two saves institutional time and creates a more seamless experience for students. This integration requires professional learning, and Dr. Karp highlighted institutions that have found no- or low-cost ways to achieve it: shutting down the advising office for one hour biweekly for dedicated learning, hosting cross-functional lunches, and tapping Centers for Teaching and Learning to support advisor skill-building.
3. Resources (Broadly Defined). We’ve been trained to hear “resources” and think “money.” Yet, in advising conversations with students, we ask them to take a broad, asset-based approach to the way they think about themselves. What if we did the same with our institutions? Dr. Karp highlighted an institution that couldn’t afford a dedicated advising technology platform, so it built advisor caseloads inside its LMS. Each advisor’s students were set up as a class shell in Canvas, giving them a built-in way to message, share forms, and monitor their cohort. No additional spending, no procurement process, and no new product. The best part? Students were already in the LMS anyway and knew how to use it.
When Cuts Are Unavoidable
For institutions facing actual cuts, Dr. Karp offers two prioritization frameworks. The first is a logic model to map advising activities to outputs and outcomes, then identify activities that are valuable but do not logically connect to the metrics the institution is accountable for. Those become candidates for pausing. The second is a rank-ordering exercise: list every activity within each functional area, prioritize them, and identify where cuts would do the least damage to the integrity of holistic advising.
Everybody Wins
Dr. Karp closed with a point that often goes unspoken: holistic advising is not only better for students—it is better for the people who do the work. When advising is reduced to registration, every appointment looks the same. When it is holistic, advisors build real relationships over time. It brings the work closer to the reason most people entered this field in the first place, and that realignment enables both the continued positive impact on the lives of students and the people who do that work every day.
Dr. Melinda Mechur Karp is the founder of Phase Two Advisory, a consulting firm that helps higher education institutions translate research into practice. She presented these strategies as part of Complete College America’s Accelerator webinar series.
