Scaling High-Touch College Advising: Causal Evidence and Program Design Insights from Tennessee

Abstract: College advising can raise postsecondary enrollment, but few programs prove effective at scale. We leverage the rollout of a statewide, professionally staffed, and centrally coordinated college advising program (Advise TN) across 33 communities to estimate causal impacts on enrollment, persistence, degree completion, and workforce participation. Using event-study and robust difference-in-differences strategies, we show the program raised immediate college enrollment by 3-4 percentage points (roughly 8%), with particularly strong effects for Hispanic, female, and rural students. We show enrollment gains were preceded by larger causal increases in FAFSA filing (7- 8 points) and state aid applications (3-4 points), suggesting a central mechanism: intensive, taskoriented advising must guide students through specific procedural barriers to college entry. We also leverage novel student-advisor interaction data to descriptively show that enrollment gains vary meaningfully by advising intensity, modality, and student-to-advisor ratios, with in-person and hybrid advising associated with substantially stronger outcomes. Consistent with prior work, we find no significant effects on persistence, degree completion, or employment—a pattern we argue reflects the limits of programs focused primarily on short-run task completion: Addressing the academic and financial barriers students face after enrollment likely requires a supplemental focus on longer-run skill development. Our findings contribute to ongoing debates about scaling high-touch interventions and offer practical guidance for program design.