The National College Attainment Network (NCAN) has used the phrase “high-quality advising” a lot in recent years. Whether it’s sharing the grade 9-12 framework from CARA and Dr. Mandy Savitz-Romer, the excellent three-part series from Ryan Hoch at Overgrad, highlighting district-wide surveys that collect students’ CCR feedback, or most recently lifting up a report with a fieldwide vision, the idea that students deserve advising that meets them where their aspirations and needs intersect has been a common theme.
The case, and need, for high-quality advising on pathways after high school have never been stronger. The harder question is how do we deliver it at scale such that every student, especially first-generation, low-income students, many of them students of color, can benefit? Two NCAN member studies offer two different designs that both resulted in positive postsecondary outcomes for students. The studies are instructive for a wide range of organizations, from community-based organizations (CBOs) to districts to states, that are trying to build or expand a program.
Two Studies Focusing on Delivering High-Quality Advising At Scale
NCAN previously highlighted, “Increasing Degree Attainment among Low-Income Students: The Role of Intensive Advising and College Quality” from Drs. Ben Castleman and Andrew Barr, via a webinar last October (NCAN members can get the recording for free). The study is a randomized controlled trial of Bottom Line's college advising program. Bottom Line operates in Boston, New York City, and other cities, serving low-income students who meet a minimum GPA threshold.
The program has two phases. Access advising begins the summer before senior year and runs through high school graduation. Success advising provides campus-based support for up to six years for students who enroll at Bottom Line's partner institutions. Advisors are full-time, salaried professionals carrying caseloads of roughly 50–60 students. Before working with an advisor, Bottom Line documents students' college preferences, an analytically important detail.
The second study is a working paper by Taylor Odle and Isabel McMullen studying Advise Tennessee (Advise TN), a state-funded program that embeds full-time professional advisors in high schools with historically low college-going rates. Operating since 2017 across 33 communities, Advise TN advisors guide seniors through a structured sequence of tasks (e.g., registering for the ACT, filing the FAFSA, applying for state aid, completing college applications) with particular attention to the procedural barriers that prevent students from crossing the enrollment threshold. Caseloads are intended to stay at or below 350 students per advisor. Want to read more on this study? Odle and McMullen have an excellent writeup at Brookings’ Brown Center Chalkboard blog.
Both programs feature professional advisors, navigational supports that work around the key milestones NCAN members will recognize from their own work, and centralized coordination. But their designs suggest meaningfully different theories of change.
Different Intervention Designs, Different Aims
Bottom Line's model emphasizes college match and choice quality. Advisors help students build and evaluate their college lists, pushing them toward four-year institutions with strong graduation rates and manageable net prices. Students spend an average of 10–15 hours working with their advisor before college entry. The authors note, “effective college advising shifts students’ choices about where to apply and enroll. First, we use these data to document that many low-income students (between a third and two-thirds) are interested in colleges that appear to be objectively suboptimal.” “Suboptimal” in this case means some combination of low graduation rates, high net prices, or poor earnings outcomes relative to students' academic profiles.
Intensive advising changed students’ application decisions, and postsecondary outcomes, substantially. Across the study’s cohorts, “students offered intensive advising were 9.1 percentage points (13%) more likely to attend four-year institutions, with almost all of this marginal enrollment occurring at institutions with high graduation rates.” That shift in college quality accounted for “most (roughly 70%) of the estimated effect of advising on bachelor’s degree attainment.” Students offered Bottom Line advising were 7.6 percentage points more likely to receive a bachelor’s degree within five years of high school graduation, a boost of 16% over the control.
These findings “reinforce the importance of personalized coaching in the college application and choice process over much lower- cost alternatives, like informational or ‘nudge’ interventions.”
Advise TN's model is built around procedural task completion and access. Advisors follow a regimented schedule of specific activities across a student's senior year: registering for the ACT, filing the FAFSA, applying for state financial aid programs, completing college applications, accepting admissions offers, and registering for classes. The program serves students broadly, there are no selectivity requirements to participate, and its explicit goal, as articulated by the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, is to "dramatically increase college-going rates and ensure that more students are ready to access and succeed in higher education." Partner schools were selected specifically because their college-going rates fell below the state average, targeting communities that have historically sent too few students to college at all.
That task-completion focus turns out to be central to how the program works. Odle and McMullen find that Advise TN's impact on college enrollment was preceded by even larger effects on the specific procedural behaviors advisors were targeting. For example, FAFSA filing rates rose by 7–8 percentage points, and applications for the state's free community college program rose by 3–4 points before enrollment gains materialized.
The order of operations here should make sense to anyone in the college access orbit. Students are enrolling at higher rates because advisors helped them complete the specific steps that convert college-going intentions into college-going realities. As Odle and McMullen put it, the mechanism appears to be that "intensive, task-oriented advising must guide students through specific procedural barriers to college entry." Advise TN raised immediate college enrollment by 3–4 percentage points overall (an 8% increase from a baseline enrollment rate of roughly 48%), and there were particularly strong effects for Latino/a students (6.6 percentage points), students in rural communities (6.4), and female students (4.5).
An imperfect but succinct summation of the difference here is that Bottom Line is asking, "where should you go, and how do we get you there?" and Advise TN is asking, "how do we make sure you actually go?"
When Program Outcomes Reflect Program Design
As noted above, Bottom Line's RCT found a substantial boost to bachelor’s degree attainment. The effect is, by the authors' own accounting, as large as any rigorously estimated impact in the economics of education literature. Again: about 70% of that effect is explained not by the ongoing in-college support, but by where students enrolled in the first place. Getting a student into a four-year institution with a high graduation rate is doing most of the heavy lifting.
Advise TN raised immediate college enrollment rates as well as some leading indicators of enrollment (e.g., FAFSA, TN Promise applications), but what the program did not move, at least detectably, was longer-run persistence, degree completion, or labor market outcomes; these were null findings in this study. We shouldn’t read that null finding as any kind of knock on Advise TN. Odle and McMullen are clear-eyed about it: “The absence of longer-term effects on persistence or completion aligns with most prior evaluations of pre-college advising…Advising is inherently front-loaded, addressing informational and procedural barriers to college entry but not the academic, social, or financial frictions that students encounter up through and after enrollment.”
The Bottom Line results from Barr and Castleman, meanwhile, suggest that longer-run gains are achievable, but they flow from an intervention specifically designed to shape enrollment quality, not just enrollment rates, and one that extends advising support well into college. This is a place of clear distinction between the two interventions. Bottom Line is relentless about improving the quality of the application and matriculation choice set for students. Advise TN is much more inclusive of a wider variety of pathways following high school: “Advisors provide information and guidance for all postsecondary options, including both two- and four-year colleges and universities, as well as for less-than-two-year Tennessee Colleges of Applied Technology (TCATs) and some non-college workforce options, including military service, apprenticeships, and on-the-job training opportunities.” A wider variety of options also, unfortunately, offers a wider variety of roadblocks and pipeline leaks for students to encounter.
Lessons for Scale
Both studies also offer practical guidance about what "at scale" actually requires, and the findings converge in useful ways.
Advise TN's data on student-advisor interactions is particularly instructive. Students who met with an advisor four or more times during their senior year were 19 percentage points more likely to enroll in college than peers without advising services, more than double the rate for students who met just once. Students who received hybrid advising (in-person contact plus virtual follow-up, calls, and texts) saw substantially better outcomes than students who only received virtual support. Phone calls, texts, and emails alone had essentially no effect. This aligns with a now-robust literature on nudges: information without relationship doesn't move the needle.
Both studies also point to advisor professionalization as a load-bearing feature. Both Bottom Line and Advise TN employ full-time, experienced advisors. Pointedly these are not near-peers, not volunteers, and not school staff with advising as a secondary responsibility. It’s worth highlighting the authors’ descriptions of the professionals that drive advising in these programs:
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Castleman and Barr: “A key feature of the BL model is its professionalism, intensity, and duration. Unlike programs relying on part-time staff or volunteers, BL employs salaried advisors, with students spending an average of 10–15 hours working with their advisor before transitioning to college…It is also noteworthy how consistent advisors are at improving student outcomes. Indeed…even the bottom two-thirds of advisors are more cost- effective in increasing degree attainment than alternative options. From a scalability perspective, this is important, since it suggests that a combination of coherent organizational leadership, successful staff recruitment and training, and effective curriculum are driving the results we observe rather than a handful of particularly strong advisors who may be hard to identify and recruit in other contexts.”
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Odle and McMullen: “Advisors undergo an intensive initial training followed by annual professional development activities. Advisors also participate in regular virtual and in-person convenings that facilitate a collaborative network among advisors and propel the sharing of knowledge and best practices…Advise TN advisors are considered ‘professional’ by multiple metrics: The average advisor brings several years of experience to their role, with many being former college counselors, admissions office professionals, or financial aid advisors. Many hold advanced degrees in counseling, higher education, social work, or other related fields. The median age is 40 (ranging from 24 to 60), and the state provides robust compensation for these roles, with a minimum salary of $50,000 per advisor—well above median household income in most parts of the state.”
Every program can’t provide the above, admittedly, but it is worth including for transparency about the infrastructure that is contributing to student outcomes in these evaluations.
What's related, and harder to adopt or adapt elsewhere, is the infrastructure that makes these programs function: centralized coordination, robust data systems, and sustained funding commitments. Advise TN costs roughly $2.4 million annually to serve students across 33 communities. Bottom Line's cost per student, including in-college support, runs to roughly $4,000, which is expensive in absolute terms, but more cost-effective per degree generated than any financial aid program in the comparison literature.
Closing Questions and Thoughts for the Field
These two studies together don't, let me reiterate DO NOT, tell us there's one right model of high-quality advising at scale. What they do remind us is something more nuanced and ultimately more useful: that program design determines what outcomes are achievable, that professionalized advisors in sustained relationships with students are an effective worth building, and that expanding access and improving completion are related but distinct goals that require related but distinct interventions.
For districts, states, and organizations considering what to build or expand, these studies demand asking what are we trying to accomplish, with which students, over what timeframe, and does our program design actually match that goal?
NCAN will be here to work alongside our members to help you answer that question, but my hope is that these studies offer two distinct approaches to get to a successful outcome.