Advising Future Public Administrators: An Overlooked Form of Public Service

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.

By Kyle W. Rudrow
March 27, 2026

What My MPA Taught Me About Academic Advising and Public Service

Public administration programs play an essential role in preparing students for service, yet academic advising within the field remains underexplored. The applied nature of many public roles, particularly in management, service delivery, and policy implementation, creates advising needs that differ in meaningful ways. What is academic advising, after all, if not a form of public service? Despite this, advising is rarely framed as part of public service preparation within PA programs.

Like many who earned an MPA degree, I found the experience incredibly rewarding. Generally, the MPA provides a skill set largely absent in many other fields and an ethical leadership foundation transferable across professions, including the private sector. During graduate school, I served as a graduate assistant in my MPA program, advising undergraduates and supporting graduate-level public administration students. This experience ignited my passion for advising through a public service lens in higher education. Since then, I have approached my work as an advising administrator in public colleges and universities through that same lens. Yet while significant work in PA has focused on developing, teaching and assessing public administration programs, very little attention has been paid to the specific needs of advising students in such programs.

The Advising Gap in Public Administration Education

Advising realities in PA programs vary depending on departmental structures, college-level resources and institutional support services. It is often difficult for public administration faculty, who are practitioners or researchers themselves, to devote sufficient time to advising graduate students, let alone undergraduate students. Advising frequently falls to MPA coordinators or faculty stretched across teaching, research and service.

Moreover, undergraduate public administration programs are growing. These programs provide a foundation for pre-service students entering public service roles and serve as a steppingstone to more specialized graduate-level work.

Unfortunately, research on advising in PA is limited compared to curriculum development, program assessment and accreditation. Data on advising are often limited to counts of faculty or staff assigned to advising roles for reporting or accreditation purposes.

Understanding Today’s PA Students

Students come from more diverse and nontraditional backgrounds than in the past. Many are pre-service with minimal exposure to the public sector. Interest has increased in internships, mentoring, interdisciplinary exploration and experiential learning earlier in the educational pipeline.

This shift requires awareness of student issues including college transition challenges, mental health concerns and career planning in uncertain environments. Madinah Hamidullah’s 2021 book, Undergraduate Public Affairs Education, highlights considerations for undergraduate public administration and public affairs programs including curriculum design, experiential learning and community engagement. These insights are equally relevant to graduate and mid-career students.

Why Advising Matters for Future Public Administrators

Beyond helping students complete degree requirements, advising provides opportunities to build public service competencies, understand expectations of public service roles, explore career pathways and pursue experiential learning opportunities. Student success work is an extension of public service values. Put simply, effective advising helps students understand public service delivery.

Re-Centering Advising Through a Public Service Lens

Academic advising plays a fundamental role in developing students’ capacity in public administration. While advising is an underexplored dimension of PA education, it offers an opportunity to strengthen public service development when framed as public service work itself. Strong advising provides critical guidance and helps prepare students to become effective values-driven public administrators.

This is also an area ripe for development through improved data collection and further scholarship that moves advising from the periphery to a more central place in public service preparation.

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Author: Kyle W. Rudrow, EdD, is Assistant Director of Academic Advising at Dalton State College. He earned a BBA in Economics and an MPA with a concentration in public policy from Valdosta State University, a Graduate Certificate in Leadership & Ethics from Kennesaw State University, and an EdD in Higher Education Administration from the University of West Georgia. He has a decade of experience in academic advising at public higher education institutions and has served on the boards of multiple nonprofits.

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