Study: College Advising for High School Students Useful, Sort Of

A high school student with an interest in engineering is encouraged to apply to Carnegie Mellon University, but never follows through.

“He would have gotten in and I would have put him in touch with the minority recruiter,” says the guidance counselor who worked with the student. “But it may have seemed too far away to him.”

This and other troubling anecdotes of potentially life-changing opportunities not being pursued by America’s youth are contained in a new National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) report titled The Effects of College Counseling on High-Achieving, Low-Income Students.

Researchers followed 107 high school seniors through the 2006-2007 college admissions season and selected roughly half of them at random to get ten hours of individualized counseling. More than one-third of the students who accepted the offer of individualized counseling either did not meet with counselors or did not follow the advice that they were given.

So what? According to the study:

Not following advice is estimated to have a large and statistically significant effect, reducing the probability of enrollment at ‘Most Competitive’ colleges by 30.1 percentage points among all students and by 39.0 percentage points among students with an original first-choice college ranked by Barron’s as ‘Most Competitive.’

Correspondingly, counseling is estimated to increase the probability of enrollment at ‘Most Competitive’ colleges by 22.6 percent among students with an original first-choice college that was ‘Most Competitive’ and who follow the advice of counselors.

Thus, a major conclusion of the report: college counseling advice is only useful to those who implement it.

Of course, that sounds a lot like the old adage about how horses can be led to water but cannot be compelled to drink it. However, the trouble with taking such an indifferent posture in this case is that we’re not talking about horses. We’re talking about America’s students, for whom earning a post-secondary degree—or not earning one, for that matter—will likely play a determinant role in their employment prospects and income.

Accordingly, one has to wonder if there’s a better way to effectively reach students with sound advice in a way that they are likely to accept it and act upon it. At the same time, there’s another layer of complexity to the matter: making sure the advice that students get is sound in the first place.

Unfortunately, as the NBER report reveals, guidance counselors are often at odds over what constitutes sound advice.

Case-in-point: One counselor in the study told a student to make an appointment with his regular guidance counselor to get a letter of recommendation, but that counselor “basically told him to write his letter of recommendation because she didn’t have time to write it.”

So the counselor in the NBER study edited the student’s letter, but the regular counselor discarded it saying it was “way too long and not what colleges are looking for.”

The NBER study counselor had equal contempt for the regular guidance counselor’s letter, saying it was “terrible—including nothing personal about him at all—it read like a form letter.”

And this was just one of several instances in the NBER study where counselors associated with the study felt that students were being “misdirected” by their regular school counselors.

It’s bad enough that America’s high school guidance system is already seen as weak. But for it to be seen as wrong, too, makes things all the more worrisome.

Jamaal Abdul-Alim is a staff writer for Campus Progress.

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