A Closer Look at How and Why College Advising Works — At Scale

UW–Madison Study Elicits New Evidence Showing Benefits of Professional Advisors, Manageable Caseloads, In-Person Support

March 10, 2026   |   By Karen Rivedal, Office of Research & Scholarship

A recent working paper co-authored by UW–Madison School of Education assistant professor Taylor Odle and PhD student Isabel McMullen offers some of the strongest evidence to date on when and why college advising programs for high school students are successful at scale.

Their study, When and Why Does College Advising ‘Work’: Evidence from Advise TN, examines Advise TN, a statewide and state-funded initiative that, since 2017, has placed full‑time, professional college advisors in high schools across Tennessee, serving more than 47,000 students in nearly 50 high schools over multiple graduating cohorts. Findings from the study offer new, causal evidence on the effectiveness of large advising programs and provide actionable insights for policymakers from other states or schools interested in developing similar initiatives.

McMullen and Odle determined that Advise TN increased immediate college enrollment by 3 percentage points, or about 6%, across participating schools. The gains were especially large for Hispanic students (6.3 points), female students (4.5 points), and students in rural communities (6.4 points). As the authors wrote, Advise TN “raised students’ immediate college enrollment rates by 3 percentage points overall,” demonstrating that a well‑designed advising program can move the needle even at a statewide scale.

In the Advise TN program, each participating high school is assigned a college advisor who supports students through the college application, financial aid, and enrollment processes. The program was rolled out across a large and diverse set of schools, including urban, suburban and rural communities, providing rare evidence of how college advising performs at scale, rather than in a small pilot or single district.

“Program design matters,” said Odle, a member of UW–Madison’s Department of Educational Policy Studies whose research is based at the school’s Wisconsin Center for Education Research. “Advising intensity, meeting style and student-to-advisor ratios are all linked to stronger outcomes.”

For the study, Odle and McMullen used statewide data and a rigorous statistical technique known as a difference-in-differences design — an approach involving outcome comparisons between a study group and a control group. The pair estimated the impact of Advise TN by comparing changes over time in student outcomes at 33 high schools that received an Advise TN advisor to changes over the same period at 31 similar schools that applied for the program but were not selected. That approach allowed the researchers to determine whether outcomes improved more after Advise TN began in participating schools than they did in comparable non-participating schools.

“By focusing on differences in trends before versus after implementation, the design accounts for pre-existing differences between schools and isolates the effect of the advising program itself,” the authors wrote in the paper.

The study also shows why the program worked. Advise TN produced substantial improvements in early college‑going tasks: filing the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) increased by 7–8 points, and applications for state financial aid increased by 3–4 points. These early steps are critical predictors of enrollment, and the authors determined those steps were key mechanisms behind the program’s success.

“Increases to college-going are driven by larger improvements to early task completion, including filing the FAFSA and applying for state aid,” McMullen said. “Our findings greatly expand knowledge on advising programs and are among the first to interrogate how programs come to work at scale.” Findings also suggest that advising intensity and modality matter to success, as students with multiple, in-person meetings saw the biggest gains.

However, the program did not produce measurable gains in longer‑run outcomes such as college persistence, degree completion or workforce participation. The authors argued that this is likely due to program design: Advise TN focuses heavily on short‑term information delivery and early- to medium-stage enrollment task completion, rather than on longer-term skill development needed to support students throughout college.

The study also included a collection of broader policy and practice implications in the form of recommendations for successful advising programs. They include:

• Professional, embedded advisors with manageable caseloads (ideally 100:1 or lower) are more effective.
• In‑person advising and multiple touchpoints (such as meetings, texts and phone calls) outperform virtual‑only models.
• Programs seeking long‑term impact must pair task‑based advising with skill‑building supports around topics such as time management and navigating college systems.
• Strong state‑level coordination and consistent training help maintain quality at scale.

The study also noted that Advise TN counselors are older, more experienced and more formally prepared than advisors in many other models. Advise TN counselors receive intensive training, ongoing professional development, and strong centralized support from the Tennessee Higher Education Commission.

The study was funded by UW–Madison’s Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education through the Increasing Social and Economic Inclusion competition. Read the full study in the working paper series compiled by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. The paper was also selected for a comprehensive summary in the institute’s policy and practice series.

The college-advising study is part of Odle’s larger work with WCER, including research on how students decide whether to enroll in college, where to enroll, and how to pay, such as the Debt Plu$ project.

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About the Researchers

Odle, whose work leverages quantitative methods and data science techniques to study issues concerning the economics of education and education policy, examines how data can be used to improve college access and success. McMullen, a PhD candidate in political science and an Institute of Education Sciences pre-doctoral fellow, researches the politics of education, higher education, state and local politics, and public opinion.

About the Wisconsin Center for Education Research

The Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER) at UW–Madison’s #1-ranked School of Education is one of the oldest and most productive education research centers in the world. It has assisted scholars and practitioners in developing, submitting, conducting and sharing grant-funded education research for over 60 years. Learn more at wcer.wisc.edu.