Career Preparation and Faculty Advising: How Faculty Advising Can Improve Student Outcomes and Prepare Them for Life After Graduation

Abstract

Can faculty advising ease the postgraduation stress for political science majors and help them pick a career after graduation? Faculty advisors have increasingly become the norm, yet Collins et al. find that there is wide disparity on career preparation offered to political science students across institutions in the United States. In this paper, we seek to answer how faculty advising can impact student confidence in their options after graduation. We examine the student perception of faculty advising at a large, public university. Participants in the study were recruited from the political science program with an approximate enrollment of 400 majors. Using data from 167 students, we found not only that the number of meetings with a faculty advisor improves the student’s level of knowledge about possible jobs after their graduation but also that they improve the student’s level of knowledge about graduate school, be it a master’s degree program, PhD program, or law school. More importantly, however, we found that the quality of advising mattered more in how students viewed these options.