Best Academic Advising Software
Academic advising software helps counselors at higher education institutions and K–12 schools plan academic programs for students and guide students toward their postsecondary goals. School counselors use academic advising software to develop personalized degree plans and track how students progress toward graduation requirements. College and university advisors use academic advising software to boost student retention by determining which students need additional support.
Academic advising software products typically contain features that streamline the many tasks an advisor has to juggle, including meeting scheduling, course plan creation, dashboards for monitoring a student’s academic performance, and notifications that proactively flag at-risk students. Advising tools also have note-taking functions that allow advisors to keep records of meetings, make notes on a student’s progress, and schedule follow-ups. Besides planning academic programs, counselors can use academic advising software to help students tackle long-term pursuits, with career-planning tools that allow students to connect their strengths with potential career pathways and college-planning features that match high school students with best-fit colleges and universities.
Institutions often implement academic advising software alongside other systems that organize student data, such as student information systems, and software that integrates with course material, like learning management systems.
To qualify for inclusion in the Academic Advising Software category, a product must:
Best Academic Advising Software At A Glance
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- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Ellucian CRM Advise Unites departments with a comprehensive view of student performance and provide tools to effectively engage at every stage of the student's journey.
- Higher Education
- 60% Mid-Market
- 27% Small-Business
6,148 Twitter followers
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Jenzabar One gives institutions the freedom to choose a solution that meets their needs today and tomorrow. Jenzabar One gives you the ability to adapt as your institution changes and technology evolv
- Higher Education
- Education Management
- 91% Mid-Market
- 8% Small-Business
1,848 Twitter followers
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Achieve - Student Success and Retention Platform. An end-to-end student service advising platform for higher education to recruit, retain, and graduate more students on time. Achieve offers a real-t
- Higher Education
- Education Management
- 52% Mid-Market
- 30% Enterprise
30 Twitter followers
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Your institution’s success depends on recruiting, retaining and developing lifelong relationships with key constituents. Ellucian CRM solutions offer a fully integrated relationship management platfor
- Higher Education
- 46% Mid-Market
- 38% Enterprise
6,148 Twitter followers
- Overview
- Pros and Cons
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Education Cloud is a CRM platform that powers connected constituent experiences. Manage engagements with students, alumni, faculty & staff in one place. With products and solutions for recruitment
- Higher Education
- Education Management
- 49% Mid-Market
- 37% Enterprise
578,113 Twitter followers
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Watermark gives higher education institutions the tools they need to easily track, manage, and examine their data. For over twenty years, colleges and universities have used Watermark solutions to com
- Higher Education
- 100% Mid-Market
496 Twitter followers
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Workday Student is an end-to-end student and faculty lifecycle information system that is designed to work seamlessly with Workday Financial Management, Workday Human Capital Management, Workday Payro
- Higher Education
- Education Management
- 46% Enterprise
- 43% Mid-Market
52,222 Twitter followers
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
uConnect's marketing platform helps schools embed their unique career content into program exploration, academic advising, & career planning
- 57% Mid-Market
- 36% Small-Business
927 Twitter followers
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
The patented Starfish Enterprise Success Platform can help your institution scale its student support initiatives in a way that enables students to engage more effectively with the campus community an
- Higher Education
- Education Management
- 54% Enterprise
- 39% Mid-Market
4,064 Twitter followers
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
The Campus Labs platform provides a centralized hub for a holistic view of your campus, so you can collect and connect your data and then explore the right questions.
- Higher Education
- Education Management
- 57% Enterprise
- 30% Mid-Market
1,260 Twitter followers
- Overview
- Pros and Cons
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Ellucian is the leading provider of higher education technology with a singular focus on the unique needs of colleges and universities. Their comprehensive, integrated ecosystem includes purpose-built
- Higher Education
- Education Management
- 48% Mid-Market
- 47% Enterprise
6,148 Twitter followers
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
Panorama Education is a leading education technology company that partners with K-12 schools and districts to help students succeed in the classroom and beyond. Founded in 2012, Panorama is the partne
- Education Management
- Primary/Secondary Education
- 44% Small-Business
- 31% Enterprise
4,829 Twitter followers
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
- Overview
- User Satisfaction
- Seller Details
VisitDays helps helps K-12 districts and private schools connect their students with our network of over 1,800 colleges and universities. Finding and communicating with the right college has never bee
- Higher Education
- 50% Small-Business
- 23% Mid-Market
435 Twitter followers
Learn More About Academic Advising Software
What is Academic Advising Software?
Academic advisors at any school want to provide the best service to students. However, this can be difficult when the number of students in an advisor’s caseload increases. Academic advising software empowers advisors to provide personalized support to students and allows them to monitor the progress of multiple advisees. Advisors can create comprehensive course plans for students and track their progress. When students fall behind, advisors can receive alerts that let them intervene and provide extra support to help students get back on track.
Why Use Academic Advising Software?
Advisors at colleges and universities use academic advising software to promote student success and increase retention rates. Course-planning tools embedded in advising software allow advisors to collaborate with students. This encourages students and advisors to design a clear plan so students understand which courses they must complete to graduate on time. Students struggling with academics or finances might need to leave school; identifying those students early on is crucial to ensure they receive prompt support. Many academic advising software have analytics functions and online alerts built in. These functions enable counselors to automate some monitoring responsibilities necessary for their job.
At the high school level, academic advising software helps counselors guide students toward college or career paths that match their interests and strengths. Assessment tools within advising software can generate suggested majors or industries that might interest a student. Matching features provide a list of best-fit colleges for students, based on an individual’s academic record, location preferences, potential college majors, and other data points.
Who Uses Academic Advising Software?
The primary users of academic advising technology are K-12 schools and higher education institutions.
Advisors at colleges and universities — Higher education institutions use academic advising software to offer guidance to students throughout their college careers and assist students who are falling behind.
Advisors at K-12 schools — Counseling at the high school level tends to focus on helping students explore their postsecondary options, including attending college or going into the workforce or other alternative training program.
Students — Students at all levels use tools in advising software to help them plan for their future goals. A student might use a degree-planning tool to lay out a long-term course sequence or take a quiz that indicates which colleges or careers would be a good fit.
Faculty — Some advising tools allow teachers and professors to have direct involvement in the advising process. High school teachers can use software to organize and submit letters of recommendation for students. College professors can leave notes about students they are concerned about or connect with advisors to coordinate support across departments.
Academic Advising Software Features
Many academic advising software products contain some or all of the following features:
Appointment scheduling — Most advising software products contain an online scheduling tool that allows students to book appointments with their advisors. University staff members help set up appointments with students. Some tools sync these appointments to a student or advisor’s personal calendar.
Course planning — Students can build customized degree plans that align with their goals and schedule, with the assistance of their advisor. Administrators can define university requirements for each program within the software so students know if their plan leaves out any essential courses.
Schedule simulators — Students considering changing their major can use what if functions in academic advising tools to visualize the impacts of a potential change before making any final decisions.
Advisor dashboard — Academic advising software typically offers dynamic dashboards that show updated information about a student’s progress. Advisors using these online portals can see notes from students, academic progress reports, contacts the student has had with different departments, and other information on a single screen.
Note-taking — Collaborative note-taking tools allow advisors, faculty, tutors and other staff members to record notes about interactions with students or log concerns about a student’s progress and view notes that others have left.
Predictive analytics — Computer modeling built into some academic advising software can leverage data from different campus departments to identify at-risk students—both individuals and groups—so counselors know which students need additional support. This predictive modeling technology is often custom-built for each college or university, based on factors unique to each campus.
Automated alerts — Advisors can configure software tools to automatically notify them about concerning developments for students on their caseload, such as a student repeatedly missing classes or getting poor grades in a given academic term. These alerts can be sent to students directly, letting them know they’re off track and connecting them with resources for extra help.
Messaging — Both individual and group messaging functions allow advisors to reach out to students between meetings. Messaging features in mobile apps allow students to easily contact their counselors.
Assessments — Some advising tools have integrated tests for students to help them explore which major to pursue, which careers might be right for them, what their strengths are, or which colleges could be a good fit.
College matching — Advising tools for high school guidance counselors can combine multiple student data points such as GPA, test scores, college major preferences, and personal interests, to generate a list of schools for a student to consider.
Potential Issues with Academic Advising Software
Student profiling — While predictive modeling is a powerful tool, it also has the potential to have negative impacts on certain student demographic groups if not implemented carefully. A computer algorithm that takes demographic data into account might consider students from historically underrepresented groups to be more “at risk" than other students. Consequently, this system might discourage, for example, a student of color from pursuing a more challenging college major, or may be more sensitive if they are doing poorly in a class. Advisors must be cognizant of the potential for bias in predictive analytics and should use these tools thoughtfully to avoid unintentionally discouraging students and limiting their potential.
Data privacy — Colleges and universities must properly secure the sensitive data that academic advising software relies upon, such as students’ academic records and students’ demographic information. This becomes more important when institutions share this data with third-party software companies. Students should be well-informed about what data their school is collecting and how it is used. Handling student data improperly could put institutions at risk of violating federal student privacy laws.
Adequate staffing — Despite the potential of academic advising software to streamline advising operations, these tools are not a substitute for human advisors. Advisors are often responsible for hundreds of students. Educational institutions must prioritize staffing so advisors have the capacity to meet one-on-one with students and the bandwidth to respond promptly to student needs.
