The end of race-based affirmative action and persistent gaps in enrollment and degree attainment among students from low-income backgrounds have intensified calls for strategies that expand postsecondary access and completion. One such initiative, Advise TN, is a statewide advising program that places college advisors in Tennessee high schools with a history of low college enrollment. They are there to supplement the work of guidance counselors and are employed, trained, and overseen by the Tennessee Higher Education Commission (THEC), not by schools themselves, and are prohibited from engaging in non-advising school duties. Their work includes helping students complete the FAFSA, apply for state-level financial aid programs like Tennessee Promise, submit college applications, and explore non-college options. A new working paper examines whether the program improves students’ postsecondary outcomes.
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison followed more than 120,000 students across 33 Advise TN high schools, as well as 28 eligible schools that were not accepted due to funding limitations from 2010–11 to 2019–20. Although the program began in 2016, data from 2010–2016 serve as a baseline, capturing student outcomes at these schools before the advising intervention.
The researchers draw on student-level data from TN DATA, which follows students from pre-K through high school, postsecondary education, and into the workforce. These records are combined with four additional administrative and program data sources to compare six outcomes across the two groups of schools: whether students filed FAFSA, Tennessee Promise application rates, college enrollment within one year of high school graduation, college persistence, degree attainment, and post–high school employment among students who do not enroll in college.
Advise TN produced substantial gains early in students’ transition to postsecondary education. FAFSA filing rates increased by 7 to 8 percentage points, applications to Tennessee Promise increased by 3 to 4 percentage points, and college enrollment within one year of high school graduation increased by approximately 3 percentage points. Gains were especially strong for historically underrepresented students, including Hispanic students and those in rural areas (up 6.3 and 6.4 percentage points, respectively), suggesting that intensive advising is particularly effective at reducing procedural and informational barriers that disproportionately affect certain populations.
Importantly, gains are correlated with program design: highest in schools with more frequent meetings, fewer students per advisor (especially 99:1 or lower), and among students who received advising in person or through a hybrid model combining in-person meetings with texts, calls, or emails. Students who only interacted with advisors remotely showed no increases in college enrollment.
Despite initial college enrollment boosts, however, the researchers find no significant causal impacts on college persistence, degree attainment, or post-high school employment. While there is suggestive evidence of a small (1.9 percentage point) increase in degree attainment in the earliest years of the program, these effects are not consistent across cohorts. For students who never enrolled in college, Advise TN did not appear to alter employment outcomes following high school graduation.
Later graduating cohorts in the study (e.g., high school class of 2019) were enrolled in college during the Covid-19 pandemic, a period that disrupted college persistence and completion nationwide. Despite this, the study does not explicitly address how the pandemic may have affected student outcomes, so it may underestimate Advise TN’s impact. Future research incorporating additional post-pandemic cohorts will help clarify whether Advise TN is more effective at boosting persistence and degree attainment without the context of a global pandemic. An in-depth analysis of post-college employment outcomes could help reveal whether Advise TN leads to longer-term gains.
Nevertheless, without sustained gains in persistence or completion, Advise TN risks inflicting significant harm on both individuals and the state with increased student debt and lost time. Policymakers must seriously weigh whether the program’s enrollment gains justify its costs, particularly when historically underrepresented students enroll in college and leave without a credential.
High school-based college advising can be effective at helping students clear the administrative and informational barriers that stand between them and college enrollment, but may be less effective at influencing what happens next. Without continued support after high school graduation, even well-designed advising programs can open the door to college without ensuring students can finish, leaving low-income students at risk of unnecessary, debilitating debt and lost time that might be better spent pursuing alternative pathways to the workforce.
SOURCE: Taylor Odle and Isabel McMullen, “When and Why Does College Advising ‘Work:’ Evidence from Advise TN,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (December 2025).
