Developmental Advising Lowers Costs at a Rural Minority-Serving Community College

ABSTRACT

This study compares outcomes of prescriptive and developmental advising models by means of a posttest-only quasi-experimental design. Three outcomes of interest are degree progression, student satisfaction with advising, and average course-pathway cost. Two years of archival records from first-time, full-time degree-seeking students (n = 96) provide data, and a Wilcoxon signed-rank test evaluates the hypotheses. Results for both progression and satisfaction fail to reject the null hypotheses that there is no difference in outcomes between advising models. Results for average course-pathway cost support the alternative hypothesis, which states that students aggregate different – in this case, lower – average course-pathway cost under developmental advising than under prescriptive. The results of this study imply that basic cost analysis can be successfully integrated with academic outcome analysis and that developmental advising confers cost benefits to both the student and the institution, which is of particular importance for underfunded institutions serving historically disadvantaged students.