Advising and the Consumption Metaphor in Higher Education

Abstract

This essay discusses the rhetorical impacts of the consumption metaphor on how advisors think about their work using student responses to the COVID-19 pandemic to highlight the problematic nature of the consumption metaphor for higher education. Academic advisors should reconsider how they think about their work and their messages to students, as they are paramount to the process of student identification with academic institutions. Considerations of language choice can build certain student identities and encourage student (dis)engagement with their education in particular ways. Strategies for discussing skills learned, framing higher education for students, and discussing majors based on the realities of the economy, not the rhetoric of “crisis” in one area or another, are also discussed.