By Neshat Yazdani, Associate Director of Evaluation at College Access: Research & Action (CARA)
Reading time: Seven minutes
Now more than ever, students, families, and educators have the opportunity to leverage data to inform the postsecondary process. For example, schools and districts have invested in new data systems to better track students’ educational trajectories; state departments of education have begun publishing data on high schools’ Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) completion rates to raise awareness of equity gaps and inspire action; and state legislatures have passed bills making it easier to share data across educational agencies. While these efforts are essential, they have often left out the perspectives and experiences of key data users in schools: postsecondary counselors.
As described in the first post in this series, a strong postsecondary access infrastructure that treats individualized postsecondary counseling as an entitlement for all students requires using data in ongoing ways to ensure that students are progressing through postsecondary planning milestones. In this post, we draw on our work with schools and conversations with postsecondary counselors to outline what a proactive, data-informed advising approach looks like and how schools and systems can support it.
What does proactive, data-informed advising entail?
“Proactive advising” – direct, deliberate outreach to students and families around particular topics or milestones before issues or questions arise – has received increased attention in recent years. However, these discussions have primarily focused on supporting college students through graduation. In CARA’s experience, proactive advising needs to start much earlier and it needs to be informed by data for progress to be made towards closing equity gaps. A proactive, data-informed approach to postsecondary advising leverages data for three key tasks in the advising process:
- To strengthen individual best-fit advising: Counselors should connect student data with information about postsecondary options to help students learn about the options available to them and evaluate which are the best fit. Both academic and financial data about a student should inform a realistic list of reach, match, and likely institutions that will also be affordable. As one postsecondary counselor in New York (NY) described, “As a counseling team, we often are using grade data and academic data to…inform our work of ‘here’s where this person should be applying, here’s where they shouldn’t be applying, here’s where we need to focus on.’” To provide each student with this kind of individualized advising, counselors need data on their students alongside data on postsecondary options, in a system that is up-to-date and accessible in real-time as they meet with students.
- To track completion of key steps to keep students on course in the postsecondary application process: Counselors should also use data to identify who is not walking through the door of the postsecondary office and thus might be missing crucial steps in the postsecondary process. Explaining how they approach this component of their work, a counselor in New York (NY) said: “Every week we look at kids’ progress. What have they completed, what else do they need to do, what are they falling behind on?…We go through each name and check, who’s submitted? Who hasn’t?” Proactive process tracking is a critical part of advising for equity, as low-income and first-generation students are both more likely to need support and less likely to secure it. Data systems must be a space where counselors can easily track individual students’ progress through each step of the process. The system also needs to facilitate sharing information across members of a school, as counselors alone cannot track up-to-date information for all students.
- To learn from trends in the data and guide advising practices: Summarizing student outcomes and reflecting on trends is the final component of data-informed, proactive advising. At a minimum, this involves compiling overview statistics of student progress, such as the percentage of students enrolled in a postsecondary program. A more robust approach involves disaggregating outcome data by student characteristics to identify student groups who are underserved by a school’s current practices. Reflecting on trends in the data – and their connection to ongoing efforts or initiatives within a school – can thus help illuminate areas for growth and intervention, and highlight promising practices currently in place. As a postsecondary coach working in Connecticut reflected, “To really be putting a strong emphasis on closing achievement gaps, you need [disaggregated] data. It has helped us to say, ‘these students aren’t being served – what are we going to do?’” To enable counselors to learn from the outcomes of their graduates, their data systems must be integrated with higher education data systems (like the National Student Clearinghouse, or NSC, StudentTracker 3.0) in ways that allow counselors to track student pathways and allow them to easily summarize and disaggregate outcomes by student characteristics.
How can schools support data-informed proactive advising?
Access to data alone does not allow counselors to integrate it into their advising practices. A strong culture of data use, along with well-developed data tools and supports – which begin with a school leader invested in building postsecondary access – empower counselors to unlock the practical applications of data. To foster this culture, schools must:
- Allocate time for data use in the counselor’s role: Counselors in public schools spend only a fraction of their time on traditional college counseling, making it hard for them to also set aside time to work with data. School leadership must support the development of a postsecondary access infrastructure that integrates the responsibility of managing data, interpreting it, and using it to inform their work with staff and students into the counselor role. This brings data into the center of a school’s advising work. However, working with data should not be the counselor’s responsibility alone. A strong postsecondary access infrastructure requires that school staff and leadership also be invested in using data and in supporting the counselors’ use of data.
- Provide training around data use: Data systems are continually evolving tools and their use is a new skill set. Schools should therefore invest in staff members’ professional development around data use. This will help counselors build the skills needed to interpret data and facilitate discussion around trends in outcomes. Districts should also host professional development sessions where counselors are trained on using data in a student-centered way, empowering them to draw on the data system in real-time while advising students.
- Provide robust data tools: While many schools provide counselors with access to a student success data system, counselors are often excluded from decisions around which data system a school purchases. Many of the counselors we spoke to mentioned developing their own tracking tools because the data systems provided to them did not capture all relevant metrics and milestones. Involving counselors in the decision-making process around which data system a school uses can help ensure that the system provides actionable data.
How data system providers can support counselors’ data use
Over the past few years, we’ve seen a proliferation of student success data systems, such as SchoolLinks, Overgrad, Scoir, Xello, and Naviance, to name a few. Each of these systems provide counselors with valuable pieces of information, such as students’ academic profiles, their completion of application steps, and data on the institutions students are applying to. This information can be even more powerful when used in tandem with integrated data from state and national systems. Data must be actionable for immediate intervention to support more equitable postsecondary counseling. Counselors therefore need a comprehensive platform that provides best-fit, application completion step and career exploration data integrated into an easy-to-use system. To facilitate this, student success data systems must work to integrate data from state and national systems. For example, data on college applications can be integrated from the Common App and through partnerships with university systems. Data on students’ postsecondary outcomes can similarly be integrated through partnership with the NSC. And, because distributing responsibility for postsecondary planning is key to a strong postsecondary access infrastructure, data systems must be accessible to staff beyond the counselor – such as teachers, community partners, or even near-peer counselors – who can help input data and use the data system to outreach every student who is missing application steps.
CARA’s goal in this blog series is to outline a shift in schools’ approach to postsecondary access, from one that treats individualized counseling as an enrichment for some students to one where individualized counseling is an entitlement for all students. In our experience, this model is not possible without a comprehensive data system and support for the staff using it. It is time we provide the many passionate and dedicated counselors who work tirelessly to support their students’ postsecondary planning with the tools that bolster their work and make the postsecondary planning process more equitable for all students.