Advising is human work, and our systems should reflect that
Advisors are among the most consequential professionals on a college campus. But often the systems in place around them don’t reflect that reality.
They wait in line at food pantry distributions to pick up groceries for student parents who take evening classes and can’t make it during distribution hours. They walk students to the financial aid office and stay until they’re seen, because an unanswered question at the wrong moment can cost a student their eligibility for next semester. They toggle through six or more tabs to complete a single advising appointment—documenting, cross-referencing, and copy-pasting across systems that were never designed to talk to each other.
They show up at classroom doors to make sure a student made it to class. They attend games and performances. They cheer from the bleachers. They contribute to GoFundMes.
They do this because they understand something the system hasn’t fully caught up to: for many students, an advisor is the institution.
And yet, a significant chunk of their time is spent on registration logistics instead of advising students.
A new brief from Persistence Plus—based on 10 months of action research at Queensborough and Quinsigamond Community Colleges—puts a name to the problem. Current enrollment systems default to withdrawal: do nothing, and you’re out. That’s not a neutral design choice. It’s a structural barrier that falls hardest on students with the least bandwidth to fight it, and it pulls advisors away from the work that actually moves the needle.
The brief argues for Continuous Enrollment—automatically placing students in the courses they need each term and shifting the default from “prove you want to come back” to “we expect you to succeed.” Reducing registration friction frees advisors to focus on students’ goals instead of navigating bureaucracy.
That’s also the thinking behind Lumina’s advising investments. Across our partnerships, we’re working to remove administrative barriers so advisors can spend more time doing the work only humans can do, like building relationships, helping students plan for the future, and connecting them with support.
With NASPA, we’re elevating advisors as campus leaders, identifying practitioners already driving change, and giving them a platform to shape the field. Jobs for the Future’s Educational Plans at the Center of Holistic Advising is helping institutions redesign advising around students’ goals instead of administrative checklists. And with One Million Degrees, we’re investing in holistic coaching while helping colleges build sustainable financial models and thoughtfully integrate AI in strategies that strengthen the advisor-student relationship.
At Lumina, we’re betting on advisors because these investments share a common premise: when we reduce friction for students, we expand capacity for advisors. A system that assumes students intend to persist—rather than requiring them to prove it every semester—allows advisors to do the job they were trained to do.
The Persistence Plus brief shows that if the only reason students see an advisor is because registration forces them to, that’s a design problem worth solving, not a feature worth protecting.
We agree. Let advisors do what they do best: advise.