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In her article "Losing Sleep over Student SUCCESS?" in the spring 2006 issue of The Presidency, France A. Cordova, then chancellor of the University of California-Riverside and now president of Purdue University, stresses the importance of student success and achievement to all higher education stakeholders-parents, students, educators, as well as the public at large. She also acknowledges the challenges inherent in supporting a concept that is sometimes difficult to articulate. Cordova suggests that a renewed focus on student success could "reinvigorate the public's appreciation" of higher education as a place of opportunity in which to grow, to dream, and to think. In this regard student success is about facilitating curiosity, wonder, and immersion in the college experience and, as Cordova says, institutions should focus their efforts on supporting those college experiences that create, foster, and cultivate student curiosity and engagement in learning-all in service of their achievement or a set of essential outcomes as the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has suggested. While certainly there are many ways to support student immersion and engagement in learning, one strategy that is increasingly being acknowledged for its potential in this regard is academic advising.
ACADEMIC ADVISING AS AN ENGAGING EDUCATIONAL PROCESS
When viewed as an educational process and done well, academic advising plays a critical role in connecting students with learning opportunities to foster and support their engagement, success, and the attainment of key learning outcomes. Viewing academic advising as an educational process moves it from a paradigm of teaching that focuses on information or inputs to a paradigm of learning that focuses on outcomes for student learning. In this way, academic advising supports key institutional conditions that have been identified with promoting student success. Such conditions include setting high expectations, providing support, offering feedback, and facilitating involvement in learning through frequent student contact with faculty and staff (Tinto 2002). As a strategy, academic advising holds the potential to address these key conditions for student success that Tinto notes, particularly when it is approached as a process grounded in teaching and learning. The case for the power of academic advising in supporting student success has been made over and over again in the literature, but perhaps not succinctly or clearly enough, particularly in relationship to...