Academic Advising and Maintaining Major: Is There a Relation?

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of academic advising on changing or maintaining majors in university degrees. It is also a goal of the study to determine which semester students change their majors and whether advising contributes to that change. Through this correlational study, the researchers explored students’ perceptions about the academic advising they received and the relationship of its absence on students’ major change. The participants were 1725 undergraduate students from all year levels. The survey used to collect the data for this study is: the Influences on Choice of Major survey. Based on the findings, it was found that university advisors have a very poor effect on students’ decisions to select their majors as 45.6% of the 1725 participants indicated no influence of advising in their survey answers. Whereas career advancement opportunities, students’ interests, and job opportunities indicate a strong effect on their majors’ selections, as they score the highest means of 3.76, 3.73, and 3.64, respectively. In addition, findings show that students are most likely changing their majors in their second year, and specifically in the second semester. Second year major change scored 36.9% in the second semester and 30.9% in the first semester. More importantly, results indicate that there is a positive significant correlation between college advisors and major change in the second year (p = 0.000). It is to researchers’ understanding based on the findings that when students receive enough academic advising in the first year of study, and this advising continues steadily into the next year, the probability of students changing their majors decreases greatly.

Keywords

• academic advising
• undergraduate students
• major choice
• influence
• major change