What Students Actually Ask
A corpus study of student advising requests, and what the categories institutions use fail to capture.
What do students bring to advising, and how well do institutional taxonomies describe it?
Support systems are designed around assumed questions. The real distribution looks different, and the tail is where the need concentrates.
Key findings
advising conversations analysed
of requests unmapped by existing institutional taxonomies
About the project
Roughly 44% of requests did not map cleanly onto any existing institutional category.
Financial and logistical questions dominate volume; the highest-stakes conversations are rare and easy to miss in aggregate reporting.
The taxonomy released by this project is now used by four of the twelve Advising at Scale campuses.