In college-level courses, the vast majority of students read expository textbooks with a primary purpose in mind: to memorize and, hopefully, understand enough information to receive a particular grade on a course exam. Intuitively, this kind of reading is different than the kind of reading that these same students do when reading a novel while waiting for a friend in a coffee shop. As commonsense as this may seem, only recently has empirical evidence supported the notion that reading proceeds very differently depending on the reader's purpose for reading. To illustrate, readers have been shown to exhibit different inference-making patterns, which influence what is remembered from a text, as a function of their purpose for reading (e.g., van den Broek, Lorch, Linderholm, & Gustafson, 2001). Unfortunately, a sizeable number of students do not effectively alter their cognitive processing to meet specific educational goals. For example, many college students are used to reading in order to memorize the material, so they struggle when they are asked to generalize textbook concepts to new situations as is the case in applied courses such as educational psychology. That is, some students are reading for college courses with the incorrect purpose in mind. I wish to establish why it is important for study and reading skills instructors to consider the specific purpose for reading when advising college student readers. Thus, the focus of this paper will be to briefly review the empirical evidence that readers alter cognitive processing in accordance with the purpose for reading and to provide educational applications for this research for use by study and reading skills instructors at institutions of higher learning.