The number of students with disabilities accessing higher education has risen dramatically in recent years. Academic advisors are concerned about the role they can or should play in working with students with disabilities. Advice and cautions for the academic advisor working with such students is presented. Included is specific discussion of the dangers of stereotyping people or professions, a reminder to view this population as students—with their disabilities secondary to student status, and a final caution against overprotection and paternalism.

The need persists for a model that adequately addresses faculty motivations and concerns about involvement in student academic advisement. Recently, some researchers have suggested that a version of expectancy theory may be the necessary model. Expectancy theory states that people are purposeful beings who behave in accordance with their expectations and who believe that their efforts will result in outcomes they value. According to the theory, the amount of effort an individual will exert ultimately depends on three factors: a) expectancy—a person's estimation of the likelihood of successfully performing a particular behavior; b) instrumentality—a person's estimation of the likelihood that a particular behavior will result in certain outcomes; and c) valence—the positive or negative value that a person places on each of those outcomes. Attempts to identify the educational environments conducive to the use of expectancy theory to address faculty motivation in academic advisement are presented.

American higher education and its academic advisement practices are founded on the modernist notions of rationality, prediction, and control. The postmodern perspective, which has evolved in the last three decades, suggests that the modernist perspective has become too limiting. This article briefly reviews the modern-postmodern debate and introduces the postmodern concept of chaos theory. Characteristics of chaos theories are used to evaluate contemporary academic advisement from the theoretical perspectives of modernist and postmodernist advisement.

This article examines advising undecided students in today's information age. Long established cultural paradigms associated with decision making are presented and challenged. A new model which advocates a less rational approach is advocated.

Data from the 1992 membership survey were analyzed based on two ideas: advisors can report their perceptions of their work environments, and these perceptions vary across the NACADA membership. First, a perceptual “space” was defined. Second, in the context of this perceptual space, respondents to the 1992 membership survey were empirically grouped based upon their reported perceptions. We described the “perceptual space” of advisors and profiled the “types” of groups statistically identified. The relevance of these groupings toward the programming and delivery of advising services was considered and is presented below.

In recent years, medical schools have experienced a dramatic increase in student applications for admission. The increase comes at a time of great change in the medical profession resulting from the effects of health care reform and the expansion of biomedical knowledge and applied technologies. Students making applications to medical school should know how these changes will impact the practice of medicine as well as how medical schools are revising their medical curricula to meet the challenges of a 21st century medical practice. Prospective applicants should adapt their undergraduate preparations for medical school and the medical profession accordingly.

A comprehensive policy for monitoring students' progress into appropriate majors, the Monitoring Academic Progress Policy (MAPP) charts students using a combination of degree auditing and academic policies. Results of the last three years of this program are discussed. In addition, recommendations are made for those institutions considering implementing similar systems.