UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — This month Penn State's Division of Undergraduate Studies marks its 50th anniversary, celebrating not only a golden jubilee, but a long history of responding to student needs, institutional challenges and an ever-changing world. 

To mark the anniversary, DUS partnered with Berkey Creamery to offer a specially branded DUS 50th Anniversary Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream through the month of October. 

DUS has had two main roles at Penn State since its inception: to be a home for students who are still exploring majors and to lead academic advising across the entire University. 

Today higher education recognizes the importance of developing academic advising as a profession, of providing not only navigators for students in a complex higher education environment, but also a mentor to help them make the big and small decisions that can change the trajectory of their lives and guide them through challenges. It’s also now common practice for colleges and universities to provide an academic home specifically for exploratory students. 

But it was not always this way. Academic advising was “invented multiple times, in multiple places,” said Janet Schulenberg, senior director of DUS. In her keynote address at the 2023 Penn State Advising Conference, Schulenberg laid out the often ad-hoc nature of advising that sprang up in the 19th century. Until this point, higher education was focused on classical education, with students all taking the same courses. When specializations entered the higher ed sphere, so too did advising, which was done by those who happened to be there. Often this was junior faculty. 

By the 1940s, colleges and universities saw an increase in access to higher education for populations that had been previously excluded, Schulenberg said. Many more students were ending up in academic difficulty because they didn’t have the same privileged education as past undergraduates. Those who could not keep up and earned failing grades were automatically booted from college. 

In 1948, Penn State established the Division of Intermediate Registration, and in 1949 adopted a student guidance plan under the premise that students having academic difficulties could be helped with the right guidance. The DIR’s purpose was in its name: to be a place for students who were between academic programs. Higher education was also beginning to understand the students that were coming into college undecided could benefit from counseling. 

Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, Penn State continued to work toward solving issues of academic difficulty and curbing the dropout rate, partly due to a backlash from veterans using their GI Bill. Eric White, director of DUS from 1986-2012, who began working in higher ed in the late 1960s, said Penn State likely felt “a sense of obligation” to these World War 2 veterans. “Even though they’re not thriving as students … because they’re just not prepared for it, we owe them something, we really have to work with them," White said. "That was not an attitude that was very common in universities.” 

Enrollment had been growing steadily up until the U.S. involvement in the war, with 7,260 enrolled in fall 1942, compared to 4,641 in 1930. Enrollment jumped back up to 10,563 in 1946 and 14,416 just two years later. 

In 1956, first-year students could take pre-registration testing and had counseling services available to them to help them plan their college careers. This led to 20 percent of the incoming 1,350 students that year who used the testing and counseling services to change their intended program of study. That same year, Penn State established the Division of Counseling, the precursor to the modern-day DUS and Counseling and Psychological Services. Testing and counseling became mandatory for first-year students in 1957. Then Penn State President Eric A. Walker said the following year that many more students than usual, about 500, returned to their studies in 1958 and credited the counseling program for the increase. 

These programs under the Division of Counseling continued through the 1960s, mainly under the direction of professors of psychology as directors and associate directors, who would also be instrumental in creating mental health support services at the University.  

According to a 1973 report on the history of Division of Counseling, it was thought that in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Penn State was one of the few, if only, large higher education institutions in the U.S. which required academic counseling sessions with all incoming students. About one in four students entering Penn State changed course after counseling during this era. The dropout rate plummeted from 1952-1961, declining from 51% to 27%. 

Then Penn State President John Oswald proposed the creation of a “university college” in the early 1970s. The idea was that all incoming students would be enrolled there, then declare their affiliation with one of the academic colleges sometime after their third term (Penn State was on a term system instead of a semester system at the time). The University Faculty Senate rejected the idea, but later voted to create the Division of Undergraduate Studies in 1973, charging it with providing an academic home for students undecided about their major and supporting the University’s academic advising and the academic information programs and services. Its mission was to enhance Penn State students’ opportunities to explore academic programs and career alternatives and to change from one program to another, especially during students’ first years at the University. 

By this time the Division of Counseling had been shuttered, and many staff were given the option to continue with either psychological counseling or academic advising. Many of the psychology-trained counselors opted to pursue academic advising, said White, who experienced the transition himself in 1973 at Penn State Brandywine. He described it as the beginning of “an era of specialization” in higher ed. 

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, DUS would work to provide all of Penn State’s colleges and campuses with academic information relevant to advising and administer the placement and basic skills tests to incoming undergraduates. White said Penn State was ahead of its time by focusing on academic advising and testing during orientation, as well as conducting counseling sessions with the families of new students. In 1975, White moved from Penn State Brandywine to the University Park campus to run the First-Year Testing, Consulting, and Advising Program (FTCAP) program in concert with the orientation schedule. He would become DUS director in 1986. 

DUS continued to serve as the main unit of enrollment for the increasing number of incoming students who were unsure of their educational plans, becoming the second-largest enrollment unit in 1983. DUS students gained representation in the University Student Government in 1991 and the University Faculty Senate in 1994. The 1980s and 1990s were also a period of continued growth for Penn State as a whole. Enrollments had been climbing steadily through the decades, and 61,608 students enrolled in 1980 across all of Penn State and 81,270 by 2000. 

White considered these two decades a stabilization of DUS, when the division had found its identity and the work of sinking roots throughout the University was paying off as a network of DUS program coordinators was established at the colleges. The profession of academic advising was also seeing significant development nationwide.

The 1990s would see DUS adapt to rapidly changing computing and internet technologies, launching CAAIS, the precursor to eLion, in 1997, and online versions of the University Undergraduate Advising Handbook and a pilot of computer-based placement testing in 1996. 

January 1999 saw the debut of “The Mentor,” an academic advising scholarly journal published by DUS. Today renamed “The Mentor: Innovative Scholarship on Academic Advising,” it continues to serve as a journal for essays about theories, philosophies and concepts that inform academic advising, as well as research that challenges existing theories. White said “The Mentor” was a way for his staff to write and publish and served as an alternative to the few outlets available to academic advisers at the time.   

DUS in the 21st century 

The 2000s brought an abundance of recognition for DUS by the National Academic Advising Association (NACADA). Numerous academic advisers and DUS leaders would earn NACADA awards and serve on the board of directors and in commissions and committees. Staff and leadership continued to host conferences, publish in journals, contribute to books and serve as leaders in the field. 

David Smith first became aware of DUS while at the University of Michigan, which had an academic adviser exchange program with Penn State. He assumed the role of associate dean for advising and director of DUS in 2013 following White’s retirement.  

Through its role of leading academic advising, DUS serves as one of the listening posts for the University, with academic advisers keenly aware of the struggles and successes of students. 

“I think we have a wide view of the University as a whole because we have such a broad network of people” Smith said. “They may not all report directly to DUS, but there is an informal network, and we help guide people in their thinking about the importance and value of advising.” 

DUS has worked to adopt a holistic approach to students and use technology to intervene early in the semester when a student appears to be struggling in one or more courses, Smith said.

“To be proactive, an adviser really needs to understand the students that are on their roster, and to manage that roster to watch it routinely to see if there are signals of students in distress or who need certain resources more than others,” Smith said. “Advising is something that is really becoming a daily thing. You’re daily reviewing your roster, you’re not just responding to the student that raises their hand, but you’re proactively trying to understand how your students writ large are moving through the course of the semester.” 

To help achieve proactive outreach, Penn State has invested in technology such as Starfish, a product from the company EAB, as well as homegrown tools such as Elevate, which was developed by the Data Empowered Learning team in Teaching and Learning with Technology. 

“People and technology together are what is going to move forward student success and produce more equitable outcomes,” Smith said. “It’s important that students are still connected to somebody that knows them as an individual. There are many places that see advising as a checklist, and it’s not. It has to evolve to a higher-level conversation about the students and how they hope to grow as an individual as a result of their time at the University.” 

In its 50 years, DUS has had only three directors: Harvey Wall (who started in 1974), White and Smith. Though a native of New Jersey, White still lives in State College. 

“I loved my job,” White said of his time as DUS director. “At the end of the day, I would just sit there, you know, 5:30 or 6 o’clock after everybody was gone. And I would say, ‘you know this was one heck of a satisfying day. We got a lot of things done.’” 

To learn more about DUS, visit dus.psu.edu. Academic advisers can access DUS’s advising resources at advising.psu.edu. DUS is part of Penn State Undergraduate Education.