Cooling Out in the Community College: What is the Effect of Academic Advising on Students’ Chances of Success?

Abstract

Burton Clark's proposition concerning the cooling out of underprepared students in community colleges has a controversial history and remains a point of contention. Central to Clark's description of the cooling out process is the academic counselor, whose job it is to dissuade underprepared students from goals perceived to be overambitious and ease these students into lesser, presumably better-fitting academic trajectories. In this study, I test a number of hypotheses concerning the effect of advising on students' chances of attaining their goals. I seek to determine what effect advising has on students' attainment, and whether this effect is dependent upon students' academic preparation, students' race/ethnicity, the racial/ethnic composition of the college, or the representation of underprepared students in the college. I use hierarchical discrete-time event history analysis to analyze data that address two subsets of the Fall 1995 cohort of first-time freshmen who enrolled in any of California's 107 semester-based community colleges. I find that advising is actively beneficial to students' chances of success, and all the more so for students who face academic deficiencies, which contradicts deductions drawn from Clark's description of the active role of counselors in the cooling out process.

Academic Advising and the Persistence Intentions of Community College Students in their First Weeks in College

“…Seidman (1991) used a rare random-assignment experiment of the impact of a pre-and post-admissions/counseling process at a community college to find that whereas there was no significant relationship between participation and second semester registration, participants were more likely to register for a third semester. Bahr (2008) used a sophisticated event history analysis of a very large, longitudinal data set to test the controversial hypothesis that advising has a "cooling out" effect of discouraging students to pursue their academic ambitions. He presents compelling evidence that advising in fact is beneficial to students' chance of successful remediation completion and transfer, two outcomes that necessitate persistence.…”

A major choice: exploring the factors influencing undergraduate choices of Communication major

“…Several studies have stressed the importance of advisors in shaping the career choices of students (Bahr, 2008;Damen & Sulaiman, 2004;Young-Jones, Burt, Dixon, & Hawthorne, 2013), but their low degree of influence on college major decisions in our context indicates a fault line that must be taken into consideration.…”

Nourishing STEM Student Success via a TEAM-Based Advisement Model

“…Since academic advising is intimately connected to student's educational experiences -from program of study to general education to experiential learning -advisors have the opportunity to help students connect diverse learning experiences (White & Schulenberg, 2012). Advisement buttresses community college students' achievement (Bahr, 2008). However, advisement must be timely, targeted, and consistent.…”