Academic Advising Benchmarks 2025

Academic Advising Benchmarks 2025

This study presents data and commentary from 33 college and university academic advising programs, detailing their costs and expenditures, session statistics, technology use, tutor recruitment and retention, fundraising, and other characteristics and policies. The study helps its readers to compare their advising experiences to those of their peers in areas such as use of online advising, use of chatboxes and other applications of artificial intelligence, tutor training, and many other areas. The study provides a map of what kind of advising is being done and by whom. The study describes trends in advisers working remotely, in budgets, in the length of typical advising sessions, use of peer mentors in advising, extent of involvement of faculty in academic advising vs dedicated advising staff, impact of advising on student retention and much more. In open ended questions, survey participants describe their future plans.

Data in the report is broken out by size and type of college, for public and private colleges, and by tuition level, for easier benchmarking.

Just a few of this 130-page report’s many findings are that:

54.55% of the survey respondents required students to see an academic adviser. Only a third or programs charging less than $6,000 per year in annual tuition required students to see an adviser vs. 75% of colleges charging $12,500 to $45,000 in annual tuition.

20.83% of public college academic advising programs had received external grant support in the past year.

Larger colleges and public colleges were more likely than smaller or private colleges to use online peer mentors.

27.27% of programs sampled used Microsoft Teams in academic advising frequently.