Rethinking Postsecondary Advising: Ensuring Individualized Support for All

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Strategy and Resources

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September 26, 2024

By Janice Bloom, Co-Director, College Access: Research & Action (CARA)

Reading time: Seven minutes

50 years ago, most high school seniors applied to a maximum of three-to-four colleges, and higher education costs represented 45% of family income for students from the lowest income quartile. Since then, the process of applying to college has become increasingly complicated, with many students submitting upwards of 10 applications, and higher education costs now consuming 84% of family income for those in the lowest quartile.

When students meet one-on-one with a school counselor to discuss their future, they are 6.8 times more likely to complete the FAFSA and 3.2 times more likely to attend college.

Simply put, applying to college has become such a high-stakes and complicated process that most 17- and 18-year-olds cannot do it on their own. From the many bureaucratic steps involved in applying for admission and financial aid, to deeper questions around career focus and what to study after high school, research shows that young people need hands-on guidance from someone they can trust and relate to. Indeed, when students meet one-on-one with a school counselor to discuss their future, they are 6.8 times more likely to complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and 3.2 times more likely to attend college.

While the importance of individualized postsecondary advising is becoming increasingly recognized, schools face steep barriers to providing this kind of support for students of color, students from low-income backgrounds, and first-generation students. With a national counselor to student ratio of 311:1, most public high schools don’t have enough counselors to meet with students individually. Paradoxically – but unsurprisingly – this number is even higher at schools serving predominantly low-income students and students of color, where the need for guidance and support is greater. There are important programs providing additional support, such as AVID, Upward Bound, and GEAR UP, but these only reach a fraction of all low-income students. Upper and upper-middle class students often make up for the lack of advisors by paying for their own, but this is a privilege few can afford.

In the current postsecondary advising model, advising is treated like an enrichment activity, akin to an after school club offered to those who spend extra time to participate. In an economy where most jobs that pay a living wage require postsecondary education, advising in high school should be an entitlement – the same way that four years of English or social studies instruction are.

Individualized Advising for All – Three Necessary Conditions

What will it take to move college advising from an enrichment to an entitlement model for all students across the country? In the schools we work with, we’ve found three conditions are needed.

Condition 1: Lowering Advising Ratios

Counselors need to have enough time to work individually with every student from the second semester of junior year to the end of senior year. In schools that serve predominantly students of color, students from low-income backgrounds, and first-generation students, we’ve found this requires at least one full-time counselor for every 80 seniors. (With some caveats explained below, this ratio can be met through the part-time work of multiple staff, in addition to a college counselor.)

Condition 2: Expertise

Staff doing advising must be experts in postsecondary access. In a complex and rapidly changing field where students are heading to a wide range of postsecondary destinations, it is critical that advisors know how to help students build strong “reach, match, and likely” lists; navigate federal and state financial aid with complex family situations; network with representatives at colleges; and participate regularly in professional communities to keep up-to-date with the latest changes.

Condition 3: Tracking All the Steps

Schools need a system to track each postsecondary step so that counselors can proactively ensure every student is getting the support they need. Students must navigate multiple, interlocking bureaucratic steps to find, apply, and matriculate to a postsecondary destination. A centralized system for tracking each of these steps makes it possible to do much more strategic work, allowing counselors to proactively conduct outreach to students who have missed key steps and to focus their time with students on what they need. This is also important for equalizing access to resources, as research finds that even when counselors are available, low-income students may have more difficulty accessing them.

In an economy where most jobs that pay a living wage require postsecondary education, advising in high school should be an entitlement – the same way that four years of English or social studies instruction are.

How Schools Can Do This: Creatively Rethinking Resources

Unsurprisingly, few schools, even those working hard to increase their matriculation rates, are currently devoting this level of resources to postsecondary advising. With enough funding, schools could simply hire enough counselors to reach a 1:80 ratio, but the reality is that most schools must find creative ways to utilize existing resources. Successful approaches include:

Dedicate at least one school counselor entirely to postsecondary advising. Many counselors have their time split between guidance and college advising, but we’ve found this usually results in either triage, with only some students receiving intensive support, or burnout, with counselors leaving their positions after a relatively short time. Reallocating at least one counselor’s time entirely to postsecondary advising can help them develop expertise and oversight capacity that benefits them and the rest of the staff.
Create strong postsecondary offices where advising is shared across multiple people. While an expert counselor is needed, a single expert is not enough. Taking a “distributed counseling” approach increases the advising capacity of a school, and it creates layers of support so that the work doesn’t sit on the shoulders of just one person. When only one person holds this work – as College Access: Resource & Action (CARA) observed in our study of seven schools over three years – turnover and leaves create tremendous instability and deeply impact the matriculation of seniors.
Pick a strategy for incorporating the broader staff into the work. There are a range of ways to widen the circle of staff supporting advising. At some schools, teachers take on this work in advisory with small groups of students. At other schools, events over the course of the year create time and focus staff energy on a particular task that seniors need to do, e.g., parent conferences serve as a moment to gather financial information from parents, senior portrait day becomes FAFSA day, and graduation practice becomes a moment to check in on summer plans.
Bring young people into the process. Training and paying college students or recent graduates to work alongside the college counselor is another (highly cost-effective!) way to add advising capacity. Including near peers in the advising team provides credible messengers, elevates positive role models, and creates a valuable professional development opportunity for young people in underserved communities. Models for doing this are proliferating, including College Advising Corps, College Possible, Let’s Get Ready, and CARA’s College Bridge program.
Effectively leverage technology. To support all students, schools need to track the many steps of their application processes, as missing even one of these steps can lead to a failure to matriculate. How to implement this kind of data tracking will be described at length in the fifth blog in this series.

What States and Districts Can Do

Schools can make important strides in this work, but they can’t be expected to make larger shifts by themselves. Systems level change is needed to position counselors to effectively serve all students. CARA’s work in schools suggests that states and districts need to be funding more school counselors. When states have mandated and funded lower counseling ratios, schools that have hired additional counselors have seen college-going rates jump by 10%. While counseling ratios are too high across all grades, our experience is that additional support is especially needed in 11th and 12th grade and at schools predominantly serving students from low-income and first-generation backgrounds.

States and districts can also invest in near-peer programs, which have the triple impact of increasing advising support for students, providing valuable internship experiences for peer advisors, and diversifying the counseling/advising fields by creating a pipeline of young people from low-income communities entering the profession. The Education Commission of the States recently drafted a framework for statewide near-peer advising corps.

Finally, districts and states can underwrite additional training for postsecondary counselors, and university-based counselor preparation programs and counseling organizations like American School Counselor Association can expand learning standards around postsecondary pathways. Most school counselors learn career development theory as part of their certification programs, but the specifics of postsecondary applications are rarely covered in the detail necessary to do this work well.

From the emotional pressure of big decisions to the practical challenge of managing a million steps, the postsecondary application process is overwhelming. It makes all the difference when students have someone with expert knowledge that they can trust and rely on. That is something all young people are entitled to.

This blog is part of a series of five posts on Rethinking How High Schools Support Postsecondary Access. You can find the other posts below:

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