By Loida González Utley, Director of Recruitment and Enrollment Services at A&M-Central Texas, Live from #SEM2025
What happens when two parts of the academic institution—both essential, both overloaded, both deeply committed to students—realize they’re speaking different languages?
That question electrified the room at this year’s 35th Annual AACRAO Conference for Strategic Enrollment Management. Attendees quickly discovered they weren’t alone in navigating the push-and-pull between academic advising and enrollment management. The session, “SEM and Academic Advising: Conflict or Collaborate?” led by Dr. Sean Bridgen of NACADA and Dr. Mike Simmons of AACRAO, cut straight to a truth many of us feel daily:
Advisors and SEM leaders need each other but often don’t fully understand each other’s worlds.
And yet, students depend on this partnership’s strength now more than ever.
Where Advising ‘Lives’ Is Changing … and It Matters
The presenters opened by asking a deceptively simple question:
Where does academic advising live on your campus?
Nearly half the room said within enrollment management—a shift that would have been surprising just a few years ago. Institutions are increasingly recognizing that advising is both academic support and strategic enrollment infrastructure.
Advisors guide decision-making, translate curriculum, and intervene when students hit barriers. They influence progression, velocity, and completion.
SEM leaders shape the structures, policies, and outreach systems that keep students moving.
Different work—same goal. So why does it still feel hard?
Real Talk: The Tension Isn’t Personal, It’s Structural
Advisors and enrollment managers often feel the friction long before it’s articulated:
Advisors feel urgency around academic accuracy and student readiness.
Enrollment teams feel urgency around yield and headcount.
Both feel the weight of student expectations—with less time and more complexity than ever.
But the presenters named something rarely said aloud: A major source of tension is not behavior, but instead metrics.
When advising doesn’t understand the pressure behind yield campaigns, those outreach efforts can feel disruptive. When enrollment doesn’t understand advising’s responsibility to continuing students, delays can feel like resistance. Neither interpretation is accurate. Both functions are simply doing what their structures, metrics, and caseloads demand. Understanding each other’s pressures reduces frustration, and it creates room for trust.
The Metrics Problem: We Can’t Align Work We Don’t Understand
Bridgen and Simmons urged attendees to embrace a new kind of transparency:
Advising metrics: persistence, progression, academic momentum.
Enrollment metrics: new student targets, continuation, headcount.
Shared metrics: retention, completion, satisfaction.
When these aren’t openly discussed, misalignment grows:
Advisors may view recruitment outreach as disruptive.
Enrollment may perceive advising timelines as inflexible.
But when metrics are shared? Alignment becomes possible. The presenters encouraged teams to ask:
Are advising caseloads realistic based on enrollment growth?
Do advisors know how continuation rates shape SEM forecasts?
Do SEM leaders understand how advising bandwidth affects academic momentum?
Are both teams receiving the same data, not just the same goals?
These questions unlock the conversations campuses often avoid but desperately need.
Learning Mobility Is Coming, and Integration Can’t Wait
One of the most forward-looking insights from the session was this: Credit mobility will amplify both existing tensions and opportunities.
With students earning credit from …
Multiple institutions
The workforce
Military experience
Microcredentials
… the boundary between “advising work” and “enrollment work” is dissolving.
Students will move more. Credit will move more. Learning will move more. And if our internal systems don’t move with them, we will unintentionally create friction where we need flow. Future-ready institutions will integrate systems and relationships.
A Call to Reimagine Partnerships
The presenters ended with a simple but powerful charge: We cannot ask students to navigate complexity we haven’t resolved internally.
Advisors and enrollment managers are on the same team—working toward persistence, progression, and student success. But success requires understanding each other’s metrics, pressures, and decision-making frameworks.
Because students don’t experience the institution as separate units, they experience one campus. And they deserve one campus that works seamlessly behind the scenes.
The work ahead is:
Operational AND Relational.
Strategic AND Cultural.
Important AND Urgent.
And as this SEM session made clear, the future of student success depends on the strength of the SEM-Advising partnership … a winning combination.
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