The first year of college is exciting—new friends, new place, new food, new social opportunities, new classes, new perspectives, and a future that suddenly (and hopefully!) feels wide open. But it can also be sensory overload, overwhelming students with too many options, limited structure and too little guidance.
When it comes to college, the assumption is often getting in is the hard part. It isn’t. For many students, the most difficult part of college begins after enrollment—when they are expected to make decisions that will shape their futures with limited information, uneven support, zero parents on site, and a good deal of anxiety and worry. They hear: “Pick 4 classes, select your top 3 clubs out of 800 options, choose a major, study abroad —or not, plan your summer, apply for internships.” Then they must translate their coursework and how much they love or hate it, into potential career paths, all while making sense of today’s unpredictable, unforgiving labor market.
The Myth of “Figure It Out”: Why College Students Need Real Guidance
This is exactly why strong college advising isn’t a “nice-to-have” for college students—it’s a necessity.
At many colleges and universities, advising has unfortunately been reduced to a transactional function: register for the right classes, meet the requirements, and graduate on time. Those tasks are necessary—but they are insufficient. Students don’t just need help completing a degree. They need help understanding how to take full advantage of their time on campus and determine what that degree can become.
The myth at the heart of weak college advising is that students arrive fully formed—with clear goals, stable interests, and an understanding of how college connects to life after graduation. In reality, most students are still figuring out who they are. Developmentally, that is okay and perfectly normal. Institutionally, it’s often ignored.
What Happens When Students Don’t Receive Strong College Advising
This disconnect has consequences. As we have seen here at Top Tier Admissions, students often choose majors without understanding career pathways. They might select a minor based on initial (or even outdated) interests. They might choose their course load based on class times or anecdotal professor testimonials. Many miss internship opportunities because no one helped them recognize their relevance early enough. Others lose out on faculty mentorship and research opportunities because they didn’t know how to search or what to ask.
They leave with a transcript and diploma, but without a coherent story about their skills, interests, or next steps.
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The Internship Crunch and the Changing Nature of Work
The urgency is now compounded by the changing nature of work. Today’s graduates are entering careers that likely don’t have clear ladders or predictable timelines. They are told to “follow their passion” while rightfully worrying about employability, economic instability, and AI. Without guidance, those messages collide.
Some institutions are beginning to recognize this. UVA conducted a ‘2022 Student Experience in the Research University Survey’ where they found that 94% of students were satisfied with their overall academic experience, but only 64% reported satisfaction with their advising experience. In 2024, they worked to address this by placing full-time professional advisors in the role of professors in their first-year seminars. UVA students gained immediate access to their advisors in the classroom. Pre-major advising is woven into the classroom with a “seminar instructor,” where they aim to focus on “enabling more intentional student relationships,” as Inside Higher Ed reported last week. Even better, in spring 2025 and fall 2025, 99% of students had a pre-registration meeting with their academic advisor, up from 50% in years prior.
The good news is that UVA recognized there was a problem with a lack of college advising negatively impacting their students. The bad news is that it’s still typically just one advising meeting per term (before course registration) and this program focuses on first year students only. What about sophomores, juniors and seniors?
The broader advising gap is particularly concerning in today’s job and internship market.
In our Career Planning and Academic Advising Program, we work with students who are rising college freshmen about to move onto campus at their new college, but also students who have wrapped freshman year and are deeper into their college careers. This is particularly important today, given the concerning job and internship market.
As noted in New York Magazine last month, there were 15% fewer entry-level and internship job postings in 2025 than the year before, according to Handshake, a job-search platform popular with college students; meanwhile, applications per posting rose 26%.
Students are feeling this pressure. A current TTA client shared that her professor urged students to plan their summer 2026 by “blanket-applying” to 50 internships as step one. That is simply too many and it’s not helpful advice for busy college students trying to earn A grades this spring.
What Effective College Advising Actually Looks Like
Effective college advising teaches students how to think and how to plan in adaptable ways. It reframes decisions as new opportunities rather than irreversible commitments. I help students build standout portfolios of skills, experiences, accomplishments and relationships that evolve over time.
Most importantly, strong advising is relational, and that’s why I love it.
It creates space for reflection, not compliance. It asks stronger questions: Why this path? What does success mean to you—and who defined it?
Colleges that pour resources into heavy marketing and recruitment but neglect advising once a student arrives on campus suggest that access to that college is enough. But students don’t just need access. They need direction, context, and support to turn that opportunity into outcomes and a strong path.
For more information on what that could look like, I hope you’ll join my March 4th webinar at 12pm ET: Get Your Money’s Worth: How To Make the Most of Your College Experience Before You Graduate.
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