Professional advisers have a linear focus: pushing students to sign up for the “right” classes to and graduate on time. “Advising at many schools has become so intrusive, so maternal,” said Robert Talbert, a professor at Grand Valley State University, who writes a blog on teaching called Casting Out Nines. “The implicit assumption is that students are incapable of making their own decisions, so we have to be constantly in their business.”

But large public universities, with massive course catalogs to negotiate and many first-generation students to guide, are investing heavily in hand-holding. Temple University in Philadelphia, with more than 27,000 undergraduates, began to focus on improving advising in 2006, and since then has more than doubled its advising staff, hiring a cadre of 60 full-time counselors.

“Our hope is that students see us as more than just clerical workers,” said Irina Veramidis, a professional adviser at Temple. “We’re always here and we’re less intimidating than faculty, who are inaccessible to a certain extent.”

One morning near the end of last semester, Ms. Veramidis met with a sophomore who was debating between marketing and tourism as a major after she dropped her initial choice, biology. The student was debating between marketing and tourism.

Ms. Veramidis mentioned that the marketing major required a calculus course for business students. “You already took calculus for science and math and that didn’t work out so well,” she said, looking over the student’s record on her computer monitor. The student asked about the difference between the two calculus classes. The adviser read the course descriptions and then recommended an online tutoring tool and a talk with a peer adviser — a student who works in the advising center — who had taken business calculus. Before the student left, Ms. Veramidis took one last look at the transcript and noticed she had taken enough Spanish to come close to qualifying for a minor. “Keep that in mind,” she said. “We don’t want you to be here longer than you need to be.”

The appointment lasted a half-hour — longer than a student would be likely to get during a professor’s limited office hours — and the dialogue went beyond the initial reason for the appointment: advice on registering for spring classes. Rather than just focus on courses for the next semester, Ms. Veramidis is constantly looking at course sequencing over multiple semesters, to be sure students take classes in the right order and that required courses will be offered when they expect to take them in subsequent semesters. The advisers go through training each summer to learn about changes within the university’s 12 undergraduate schools.