Professional Staff Retention in Higher Education: Making Sense of Why Advisors Stay

Abstract

This qualitative study investigated staff retention in higher education by focusing on the retention of academic advisors. Academic advisors play an integral role in student success and advising is notably one of the fields in higher education with the greatest turnover. This turnover comes at great costs, financial and otherwise, for the institution. An interpretative phenomenological approach (IPA) was used to study how academic advisors make sense of their persistence in a high turnover field and to identify professional, personal, and institutional factors that contribute to persistence. Eleven professional staff members whose primary role is academic advising at a four-year institution with less than 15,000 students were interviewed. The sample was 60% female and 40% male: 60% white and 40% BIPOC. Interviews were analyzed using IPA to identify Personal Experiential Themes (PETs) for each participant and then Group Experiential Themes (GETs) were identified through clustering of the PETs. Four themes and eight subthemes emerged from the analysis to address the four research questions on persistence. This research contributes to the existing literature on academic advising and staff turnover and retention. It has implications for practice for new and veteran advisors and advising administrators. The study\u27s findings bring attention to the reasons professional staff in higher education persist when so many others leave the field