UVA Brings Advising Into the Classroom

The University of Virginia’s College of Arts and Sciences wanted to improve its pre-major advising, which had been inconsistent. While some first-year students received high-quality guidance through optional seminars or highly engaged faculty, others were randomly assigned to advisers with limited familiarity of college curricula, policies and degree pathways.

So, in 2024, the college launched an advising fellows program made up of full-time professional advisers who also teach first-year seminars. The model integrates pre-major advising directly into the classroom so that every arts and sciences student is advised by their seminar instructor, giving advisers academic context and enabling more intentional student relationships.

Christa Acampora, UVA’s dean of arts and sciences, said the shift was designed to make pre-major advising more consistent and student-centered across the college.

“From the outside, our [student] outcomes were really great, but I learned that one of the places where the experience was not so great was with advising,” Acampora said. “I heard it from alumni, I heard it from parents, I heard it from students and I heard it from our Board of Visitors.”

The new program was introduced in the aftermath of UVA’s 2022 Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) survey, which found that 94 percent of students were satisfied with their overall academic experience, while only 64 percent reported satisfaction with their advising experience.

After implementing the advising program, feedback suggests that students value the accessibility of their mentors and the depth of those relationships. A pre-major advising report based on a survey of nearly 1,900 first-year UVA students shows that 84 percent of respondents were satisfied with their advising experience—up from just 55 percent among first-year students in 2024.

In addition, in both the spring and the fall of 2025, 99 percent of first-year students had a preregistration meeting with their academic adviser—up from only 50 percent before the advising transformation.

“We wanted to make sure that students were having meaningful connections with their advisers,” Acampora said. “That really wasn’t happening and we needed to solve that problem.”

UVA isn’t the only institution where students want more from their advisers; Inside Higher Ed’s latest student voice survey of over 5,000 students from 260 two- and four-year institutions found that 19 percent of students said channeling more resources to academic advising would allow them to get more help from their adviser and boost their academic success.

“It’s a common problem in higher education,” Acampora said. “So we decided that it would be advantageous for students and advisers … to have this community of practice and that led to creating a group of advising fellows.”

Revamped model: At UVA’s arts and sciences college, each advising fellow oversees about 70 students through The Engagements curriculum, a required sequence of four first-year seminars with two taken each semester.

All first-year students are advised by their first-year seminar instructor. The advising cohort includes 26 trained advising fellows who support roughly two-thirds of the incoming class, while trained faculty advisers oversee the remainder.

Lucca Matthias Rannigan, a second-year media studies major at UVA, said having a full-time adviser embedded in his first-year seminar course before he declared his major was integral to his college experience.

“I don’t know what I would have done if I didn’t have someone there to help guide me as I figured out what I wanted to do,” Rannigan said, adding that he appreciated how encouraging and well-informed his adviser was.

“I’ve moved on from him now that I’m a media studies major,” he said. “But I don’t think I could have gotten to this point without that support.”

Like Rannigan, students rated both advising fellows and faculty advisers highly. In UVA’s pre-major advising report, nearly 90 percent of students said their advisers were available and supportive, provided meaningful academic planning and demonstrated strong advising knowledge and preparedness.

Acampora says student feedback, as well as inspiration from the University of South Carolina’s “University 101” first-year programming, shaped UVA’s revamped pre-major advising program.

“They’re the pioneers of the first-year seminar,” Acampora said. “And they have a fairly robust professional adviser network.”

She added that adapting a proven first-year model at UVA required careful planning to fit the college’s size and student needs.

“We needed to do this at scale in the context of a large public university—essentially flipping it on a dime,” Acampora said, noting that the college had roughly three months to devise their advising plan and deliver it to students.

“Having [advising fellows] integrated in that first-year academic experience, because it’s required for all first-year students, meant that we could deliver this at full scale right out of the gate instead of trying to develop an incremental solution of scaling up,” she said.

Enthusiastic response: Acampora said she often hosts students at her home as part of a UVA tradition, which allows her to hear richer details about their college experience.

“Two years ago, if I asked students the name of their adviser, most wouldn’t even know they had one,” Acampora said. “This year, when I ask, they can tell me because they’re having a more meaningful connection and relationship with their advisers.”

Ultimately, Acampora said higher education leaders need to design advising models around the student experience they want to create.

“Advising is not just giving students a road map, the rules of the road and pointing out all the potential traps and pitfalls. It’s really about helping students learn how to create a pathway for themselves,” Acampora said. “And that is a form of teaching—one we believe is most meaningfully offered in the classroom.”

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