By Naomi Long and Hoori Kalamkarian
The community college students of today don’t look like they did a decade ago. Campuses are serving a more racially and ethnically diverse population and more first-generation and part-time students. More students are in short-term programs than ever before. At the same time, policymakers, employers, families, and students are asking colleges to do more than confer credentials. Increasingly, success means finishing on time and affordably, and then either translating the credential into a job that pays a living wage or transferring to a four-year college. As these expectations evolve, colleges need to revisit which student support practices effectively help students attain a credential and prepare students to achieve their post-completion goals.
In 2013, CCRC completed an extensive literature review on academic and nonacademic student supports. Based on this review, we developed an advising framework called SSIPP (sustained, strategic, integrated, proactive, and personalized). Together, the SSIPP principles defined effective advising as helping students access the support they need when they need it from someone who knows them well. CCRC’s decade-long Integrated Planning and Advising for Student Success (iPASS) research project reinforced the SSIPP framework by demonstrating how colleges can provide, at scale, the individualized advising experience that underlies SSIPP with the help of technologies like early alert systems and degree planning tools.
Now, 13 years after first introducing SSIPP, we are working on a new project to understand how SSIPP principles can help colleges facilitate post-completion success. CCRC—in partnership with Achieving the Dream (ATD)—is collecting qualitative data at six community colleges engaged in extensive advising redesigns with the goal of improving their post-completion outcomes. Drawing on what we hear from the staff and students involved in this work, we plan to update SSIPP to incorporate what colleges have learned about how to effectively support students as they pursue their post-completion transfer or employment goals.
What Is SSIPP?
SSIPP stands for sustained, strategic, integrated, proactive, and personalized advising. As noted, these principles are evolving but are currently defined as follows:
- Sustained: Students have an ongoing relationship with an advisor from enrollment through completion, not just a single meeting.
- Strategic: Support isn’t one-size-fits-all; it’s tailored to what different students actually need, when they need it.
- Integrated: Academic advising is connected to other supports, like tutoring, financial aid, and mental health services, instead of existing in a silo.
- Proactive: Advisors reach out before a student veers too far off track, rather than waiting for a crisis.
- Personalized: Students get help from someone who knows their specific situation and goals.
SSIPP has become fundamental to how the field thinks about advising. It underpins programs like SHEEO’s Holistic Advising for Student Success learning community and serves as the foundational framework for key tools, including ATD’s Holistic Student Support Toolkit (which ATD network colleges identify as one of the most frequently used ATD resources) and the Advising Success Network’s institutional theory of change.
What Are We Learning So Far?
We began our work on this project with a scan of recent academic research and field-based resources on advising. We looked for what colleges, technical assistance providers, and academics have learned about providing sustained, strategic, integrated, proactive, and personalized support since we first introduced SSIPP. Based on this scan—and on a preliminary analysis of data from our virtual data collection, which is well underway—we see several ways to refine and reinforce the key principles outlined in SSIPP.
Notably, with the aim of post-completion success, colleges can be truly strategic in their advising only if they focus on aligning academic planning with transfer and career planning, exploration, and goal-setting. This aligned academic and career advising is not just meant to bookend students’ tenure at the college. It is just as important to help students refine their career objectives during the messy middle of college, when they are making key decisions about courses and experiences that can set them up for post-completion success.
Similarly, a truly integrated advising experience doesn’t just efficiently direct students to different academic, nonacademic, and career services but fundamentally brings all three together into a cohesive whole. For students hoping to transfer or get a well-paying job, an integrated advising experience is one where information about post-completion pathways directly informs the academic and nonacademic support they receive.
In spring 2027, we plan to present further refinements of the SSIPP framework based on additional analysis of data from our six partner colleges. Our goal is to build on decades of research on effective advising with what colleges’ have recently learned, ultimately strengthening SSIPP and its relevance today.
