College Guidance, Preparation, and Success

With ThroughCollege, BrainReactions conducted a study with the purpose to identify ways to innovate the way college guidance can happen for high school students. Currently the ratio of over 400 high school students for every one school counselor leaves much opportunity for innovation of college guidance: both incremental improvements to the way it is currently done and more innovative solutions which represent significant changes. With advancements in technology and knowledge, there should be opportunities to improve college guidance for students, and this exploratory study sought those ideas.

In the spring of 2008 a second focus group and brainstorm were conducted on the topic of innovating college guidance counseling for high school students. This brainstorm included 7 different idea generators who shared their experiences, their ideas, and their own individual analysis with a survey after the session. The lead researcher and an analyst made meaning of the ideas and individual analysis to identify best ideas for future practice and themes that were important based on the perspectives of the idea generator participants.

This study was conducted as a result of findings from the first study, namely that the opportunity for innovating college guidance involved  helping students to a) discover themselves and what they wanted to do and become, b) utilize the internet (especially Facebook, YouTube, etc.) and resources for college guidance activities, and c) to better engage in the process of college planning with stronger relationships.

The topic areas this second study focused on included more specific idea generating questions. Significant focus group and brainstorming questions posed were:

1. What was your own college guidance experience like?

2. What are the problems with existing college & career guidance for High School students?

3. What could a better and amazing college guidance system feature?

4. How can you help High School students figure out who they are: what their strengths, interests, values, etc. are so that they can make better college and life choices?

5. If there were a new system for college guidance, how could you use the especially the internet to increase awareness about it and get people to use it?

6. How would you increase the amount of high school and college students using a Facebook application and get educators to use this with students?

7. What are ideas for new activities that would help students with their self learning, and preparing for a peak college experience?

This report can be downloaded from the ThroughCollege Educator Resources page.

Author: Darin Eich, Ph.D.

If you are interested in the research on college guidance and the future implications of helping students achieve college, access this article in the 2008 Review of Higher Education Journal on the role of college counseling in shaping college opportunity. I was most surprised to find that at over half of the schools they studied, the number of students per counselor was greater than 400 to 1! Even 3 of the 5 high resource schools they studied had greater than 400 students for every one counselor. This is well above the 100:1 recommended ratio from the American School Counselor Association and a problem that needs to be addressed in innovative ways.

The abstract for this article is: “This study draws on data from descriptive case studies of 15 high schools, three in each of five states. The findings highlight constraints in the availability of college counseling, differences in the availability of college counseling across schools, and the influence of schools, districts, higher education institutions, and states on the availability and nature of college counseling. The study suggests that, in the context of limited fiscal and other resources, changes in federal and state financial aid policies, district policies pertaining to counseling, and relationships with higher education institutions will help ensure that all students receive sufficient college counseling.”

The citation is: Perna, L. W., Rowan-Kenyon, H., Thomas, S. L., Bell, A., Anderson, R., & Li, C. (2008). The role of college counseling in shaping college opportunity: Variations across high schools. Review of Higher Education. 31(2), 131-159.

ThroughCollege and BrainReactions conducted a study with the purpose to identify ways to innovate college guidance for high school students. Currently the ratio of over 400 high school students for every one school counselor leaves much opportunity for innovation of college guidance. This includes both incremental improvements to the way it is currently done and more innovative solutions which represent significant changes to how one experiences college guidance in schools. With advancements in technology and knowledge, there are new opportunities to improve college guidance for students, and this exploratory study sought those ideas.

Based on preliminary research, this study focused on the following topic areas:
1. Problems with college guidance for high school students.
2. What a remarkable college guidance system could feature.
3. How school counselors can increase the quantity and quality of college guidance.
4. What college guidance that doesn’t require a counselor could be like.
5. What non-profits or non-school organizations can do to help students with college guidance.
6. How the internet can be utilized for college guidance.

Study Methodology

In late 2007 a focus group and brainstorm were conducted on the topic of innovating college guidance counseling for high school students. This brainstorm included 7 different idea generators who shared their experiences, their ideas, and their own individual analysis with a survey after the session. The lead researcher made meaning of the ideas and individual analysis to identify best ideas for future practice and themes that were important based on the perspectives of the idea generator participants. Four of the participants are undergraduate students, two graduate students, and one recent alumnus. This session was conducted through BrainReactions, an organization that conducts professional brainstorm and innovation sessions with trained idea generators. The session generated approximately 500 ideas. There were six significant topic areas for the session. Results were synthesized with a summary of the themes and most important idea cluster areas for each topic and question.

With additional research it is hoped that the results of this study can provide ideas to enhance college guidance for high school students. You can find the complete report on the ThroughCollege Educator Resources page.

Author: Darin Eich, Ph.D.

I interviewed an old friend and a great education thinker, Helen Janc Malone who is a Doctoral Candidate in Education Policy, Leadership, and Instructional Practice at Harvard University Graduate School of Education. Helen and I were colleagues at the University of Maryland a handful of years ago. I knew she was knowledgeable and passionate about the issue of student pathways to college and asked her a few questions pertaining to college guidance counseling, our specific interest.

Darin: Do you think there is a need for better or more college guidance counseling for high school students?

Helen: The main problem is that the ratio is extremely large in most high schools, which means that counselors can’t effectively track individual student progress and really learn about their personal interests for college/career. Although some guidance counselors create school-wide college days, workshops, and small group counseling, it is often not enough. This posses a particularly big problem in large urban schools, where potentially future college kids might be overlooked. The “solution” really involves a culture change on the part of districts and principals. If they want to see more kids graduate and go on to college, they need to support their guidance counselor staff (hiring more staff, providing professional development opportunities, and integrating their programs into the curriculum). Parents also need to be involved through parent workshops on college access, which really ought to start in middle school, as it happens in affluent neighborhoods. Finally, students need to be given a better roadmap of what their responsibilities are to reaching college and more importantly, staying in college.

Darin: Do you feel there is a need for high school students to have a better personal development experience as a result of that application process, meaning they have a special opportunity for personal discovery, learning, and skill and identity development because of having to go through that significant college application process?

Helen: I think an application process is a great way for teens to gain fundamental writing and communications skills, learn how to market themselves, do some self reflection on who they are, where they are going, overarching goals, personal strengths/weaknesses. In that respect, you could benefit from developing a series of pre-application worksheets or  workshops to get students to think about those holistic issues, write them down, share in small group discussions, and talk to their families about. All this would open the door to richer discussion, reflection, feedback, that would lead to good application.  This is particularly an important exercise for kids who weren’t considering college but were doing well in school or had overall potential.

Darin: Do you feel that individuals other than guidance counselors (like teachers, mentors, parents, etc.) can provide a sort of pro-am guidance counseling if they had a system of activities to work with on students.

Helen: Yes. I think teachers have a role in encouraging students to seek counselors for advice, read materials about colleges, work with parents and staff to develop workshops on getting into college. Teachers can also use their writing assignment to reflect application or college essays to prep students better. There is a lot of room for innovation, but to get there you need to address the pressures teachers have to “show performance” (NCLB stuff). Perhaps, creating an after-school program (e.g., GEAR UP) could help educate both parents and teens about the college access issue. This could be valuable for community members as well (perhaps, there are unutilized resources or some of them might want to reenter higher ed).

Darin: Finally, who do you think would want a system of activities for college application prep and self discovery? The school? Counselors? School district? Certain non profit orgs? Parents? Parent groups?

Helen: All of these groups could benefit from a comprehensive college access program that encourages collaboration across these stakeholders, provides input and opportunities for each group, and utilizes existing community and school resources to motivate students and provide them support as they think about college.

Authors: Helen Jance Malone & Darin Eich, Ph.D.

Bostonindicators.org reports “In 2003—the most recent available data—Boston had 94 guidance counselors, a ratio of 1 counselor to every 664 students.” In education the student to teacher ratio is an important one. 40 to 1 gets most people upset. What about 664 to 1? This is the ratio of students to guidance counselor in Boston and the data is similarly alarming elsewhere. College guidance counseling is important work. Good guidance counseling can help students identify and realize life goals, choices, and careers that fit with who they are as people and their own potential. But many students never get a chance to meet with a guidance counselor to start this process? This is significant problem. Because there are on average hundreds and hundreds of students for every one school counselor and counselors have many more responsibilities than meeting with students one on one to advise them on the college application and selection process, one cannot expect the school counselor to devote more time to this since they are extremely busy. The obvious solution would be for the school to add more school counselors and bring the ratio down with doubling their counselors. This is still a high ratio and it is widely known that schools don’t have a lot of money to bring new staff on. So ultimately there is a need for innovation of how college guidance counseling is happening in schools. We have been researching, thinking about, and generating ideas for solutions to this problem. Here are some innovations we are proposing based on insight, research, and experience.
1) Utilize a system that allows people that are interested in guiding, advising, or mentoring high school students to do guidance counseling. Consider them pro-am college guidance counselors. These could be teachers, coaches, and other staff at a school or mentors in the community or other organizations. They may have interest or expertise in working with students but not necessarily counseling or college application and selection strategies.
2) Provide a way for school counselors to counsel more students on the college application process through a group format rather than individual one on one sessions. For instance instead of meeting with one student they can meet with three to five during that hour. Over the course of the year many more students will get the chance to have at least one meeting with a school counselor. Having other students present will also allow for a different kind of learning and allowing the students to help each other as well. The challenge here is that this is a different kind of counseling requiring different kinds of activities.
3) Institute a formal program or course in the school that all students should participate in and they can receive college guidance counseling through this course or program. Many pre-college programs provide guidance counseling through this strategy. Again, it is a new departure for schools requiring a curriculum, teacher knowledgeable in this, and formal time in the school day.
4) Provide a series of activities for students and parents to do the guidance counseling themselves. It is a do-it-yourself strategy. It is like going to a cafeteria where you do everything yourself including selecting the food, filling your own drink, bussing your own table vs. being waited on at a restaurant. This will require a series of activities that is effective in simplifying the process and engaging the students.

We have created the ThroughCollege system to help solve the problem of too many students, too few school counselors, and too important a process for one’s life. The system is designed to be used in these alternative ways to innovate the experience students’ have in preparing for college applications.

Author: Darin Eich, Ph.D.

By eliminating early admission programs in 2006, Harvard and Princeton took an important step in making college admissions more equitable, but much more needs to be done in order to ensure low-income students are able to make an effective transition from high school to college. Before moving to Madison, I worked for three years as a college counselor at Eastside College Preparatory School, a school in East Palo Alto, Calif. Eastside serves low-income students aiming to become the first in their families to attend college. Like many high-schoolers across the country, these indefatigable students took challenging academic courses, participated in extracurricular activities, and completed three to four hours of homework each night. Unlike many of their peers, however, these students had no idea how to apply to college. No one in their families had gone to college. The students and their parents did not know the gauntlet of college admissions consisted of essay writing, teacher recommendations, and financial aid forms. During my first day on the job, one of the parents off-handedly asked me, “What’s a college counselor?”

Every student should have access to guidance throughout the college application process, but that ideal lies far from the current reality. In most public high schools one counselor serves 490 students. And this counselor’s main role is organizing a student’s schedule, not providing college application advice. Expensive private college counselors have filled this void for those students whose families can afford to pay for them, but low-income students working to become the first in their families to attend college get left behind.

I’ll never forget the first College Night I held at Eastside — the intent gazes of the students and their parents and the nervous energy in the room. As they sat there listening to me, soaking up the information on college selection, I realized I would need to guide them through each and every step of the process. Fortunately, the class size of 13 students was extremely small, so I was able to provide each student with individualized attention.

This level of attention is what it took in order to help these students navigate the process and break their family’s cycle of not earning a college degree.

While Harvard and Princeton have done an admirable thing by eliminating early admission, they and other institutions of higher learning could use their political clout and financial resources to motivate public high schools to ensure each and every student receives ample college guidance. In addition, colleges and universities should expand and enhance outreach programs like the PEOPLE program run here at the UW-Madison. PEOPLE exposes low-income, minority students to college and instills in them the belief they can start a new family tradition of earning a college degree.

Low-income students deserve the same quality of college admissions guidance as received by their more affluent peers. As for those students who sat in that College Night? Last spring they graduated from colleges like Columbia, Stanford, and Harvard.

Author: Matt Messinger