Photo Credit: Nicolas Scola
By: Malia Sanghvi
Abstract: Guest Columnist Malia Sanghvi argues that the Wharton academic advising system spreads academic advisors too thin, making meaningful advisory nearly impossible
I’ve had five advisors in four years.
Not counting specialty advisors, two academic advisors through Wharton, two academic advisors through the Joseph Wharton Scholars program, and a minor advisor all listed neatly on Path@Penn. Every single one has been friendly and well-intentioned, but that is not the problem.
The issue is structural: Wharton’s advising model overextends advisors to the point where meaningful, personalized advising becomes nearly impossible.
Wharton has 1,841 undergraduate students and 10 academic advisors, meaning that each one has close to 185 students across four years to handle. And advising is not their only responsibility, as they also oversee specialty areas such as study abroad, leaves of absences, and submatriculation, to name a few. Even if every advisor were exceptional, the amount of students alone makes individualized advising difficult.
To compensate, Wharton utilizes peer advisors. While occasionally helpful, peer advising is not a substitute for an ongoing professional relationship. A one-time drop in with another student who is navigating the same issues may be useful for surface-level conversations such as an individual course, professor, or extracurricular recommendation, but not in the context of planning for four years, much less for a potential career.
High turnover compounds the lack of personalization. The longest-standing academic advisor has been at Wharton since only 2018, and seven out of the 10 advisors have joined in 2022 or after, meaning that many seniors have been here longer than their advisors. As a result, most students have had their advisors changed anywhere between one and three times during their tenure at Penn.
This turnover does not just disrupt relationships, but also limits institutional knowledge. Even though many of these advisors have previous experience in advising at other universities, each university, program, and student body is unique. Especially at Wharton, the curriculum is highly sequenced with a lot of required courses, and it is often competitive to register for these courses. Anyone, especially someone new to the university, would be confused, or at least uncomfortable with these requirements.
The result of this lack of institutional-specific knowledge is that advice becomes inconsistent and confusing. Some advisors suggest optimizing for ease, while others recommend that grades should be a secondary concern to learning. Especially for students looking to pursue competitive roles in consulting or finance, which is over 75% of Wharton students, getting tailored advice to their interests is critical.
Without a trusted resource for which to turn, students examine the requirements themselves and consult upperclassmen who pursued similar career paths. Students map out their own sequencing plans, and advising becomes a formality, rather than a resource to lean on.
These adaptations create a feedback loop. After a student receives inconsistent or surface-level advice, they disengage and begin self-advising. This leads to fewer meaningful interactions with their advisor. As a result, when that student needs an administrative approval, or has a pointed question, requests are slowed since their advisor is not familiar enough with them to be a good advocate. Thus, advising becomes transactional.
This system does not just fail students, it fails advisors too. Over 57% of advisors entered the field because they wanted to nurture student development. However, under the current structure, advisors are asked to manage hundreds of students across all four years along with ascertaining knowledge of a specialty subject and process administrative approvals. This leaves little room for proactive outreach, relationship building, or developing familiarity with individual students and their goals. Especially with Wharton’s specialized curriculum and many opportunities across four undergraduate schools, advising appointments move at a rapid pace, and are not conducive to relationship building. With these constraints, advisors cannot meaningfully invest in students, instead adhering to the Wharton model of incentivizing efficiency over depth.
If Wharton wants advising to be more than a box to check, administrators should consider lowering the advisor-to-student ratio, improving retention, and creating longer-term advisor-student pairings for a proper mentorship model.
Right now, advising feels like a requirement when it should be a resource.
MALIA SANGHVI is a senior studying finance and management from Fort Wayne, Indiana. Her email is malia1@wharton.upenn.edu.
