From the Co-Editors
We begin this, our inaugural issue of the Journal as co-editors, with heartfelt acknowledgement and thanks to Drs. Leigh Shaffer and Rich Robbins, who have served the NACADA Journal as co-editors for the past 6 (yes, count them, six) years. During that time, these conscientious colleagues took on the task of expanding the Editorial Board to ensure sufficient reviewers for the continued growth in the number of manuscript submissions, the latter evidence of their success in building the reputation of the Journal as a highly regarded peer-reviewed publication. To them, we tip our proverbial hats for their contributions to the NACADA Journal, and more importantly, their dedication and commitment to academic advising as a profession and as essential to student success in college. We look forward to adding to their legacies and shaping some of our own. We also acknowledge that our ability to further shape the Journal will only be possible with the able assistance of Managing Editor, Marsha Miller, and Copy Editor, Nancy Vesta. They keep us on track—and on point!
This issue represents the wide range of designs and paradigms we have come to expect from our colleagues. An emerging critical theme in higher education is the attention to career readiness and completion, which has implications for both decisions made by students and the role played by academic advisors in their choices. Focusing on the discipline of communications, Hoag, Grant, and Carpenter looked at the role of popular and news media sources in influencing undergraduate major choice through the lens of mediated and unmediated salient referents. McKenzie, Xing Tan, Fletcher, and Jackson-Williams used a quasi-experimental design to examine the effects of advisor interaction (versus no interaction) on GPA following a change of major.
Buzzetta, Lenz, and Kennelly explored the effects of a summer academic support program on the career variables of goal instability, vocational identity, and career decidedness levels in two groups of Division I student-athletes. Also addressing advising of student-athletes but from a different perspective by using the framework of dramaturgy, Rubin explored the state of the profession of academic advisors who work with student-athletes. She explored myriad elements affecting athletic academic advising, including educational and training background, burnout levels, meaning of the profession (as participants describe it), advice for prospective advisors, and the knowledge interviewees wish they had acquired before entering the field.
Academic advising encompasses a truly global community, with a broad range of theoretical frameworks and conceptual models from many disciplines relevant to the contextual explorations of the field. Following the establishment of the Student Academic Advisement and Career Counseling Center at the University of Liberia, Sy's ethnographic case study uncovered shifts toward student centeredness as described through the metaphor of the advising palaver hut. Colgan presented a radical dialogic philosophy of the self as a possible foundation for an overarching theory of advising, particularly related to the immersion of the academic advisor within students' contextual realities.
Using a large descriptive study, Fosnacht, McCormick, Nailos, and Ribera established important baseline data regarding the frequency with which students meet with academic advisors and the way frequency varies by student and institutional characteristics. With a qualitative-research design, Musser, St. Pierre, Wilson, and Schwartz examined the implications for advising interventions for male students who struggle academically.
The topics covered in this issue, as is increasingly the case, reveal a profession with scholars intent on examining the field from multiple perspectives to advance further the theories and practices of academic advising. Cultivating this scholarship is a fundamental task of the new NACADA Center for Research at Kansas State University. The NACADA research agenda is critically important to higher education, institutions and, most important, the success of students. The Journal continues as an indispensable partner in providing guidance to the direction of the scholarship of advising and in disseminating results to colleagues. We look forward to being engaged in that work.
