The Professionalization of Academic Advising: Where Are We in 2010?

In the last year, three respected leaders in academic advising, Wes Habley, Terry Kuhn, and Gary Padak, published articles suggesting that academic advising has not met the standards of scholarship to be considered a field of inquiry, an academic discipline, or a profession. In this article, we examine academic advising history from the perspective of the discipline of sociology, through which scholars systematically study the processes whereby activities are transformed from occupations into professions. Indeed, we agree that academic advising has not met the typical sociological standards that accompany societal recognition for a profession, and we suggest that strengthened advisor education and credentialing are the steps necessary to secure public recognition of academic advising as a profession.