84. Improve student access to college and career counseling

Here’s what the federal government can do:

• Congress should adequately fund Title II of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and appropriate funding for programs that train and increase counselor staffing.
• The U.S. Department of Education should collect, conduct, and disseminate research on students’ access to college and career counseling in high school.
• The U.S. Department of Education should collect, conduct, and disseminate research on counselors’ access to training and professional development about the college admissions process.
• The U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR) should investigate instances where college and career counseling is inequitably available, suggesting possible racial discrimination.

Here’s what state government can do:

• State legislatures should set benchmarks and goals to address the counselor shortage and decrease their student-to-counselor ratio, especially in higher poverty schools.
• State legislatures should provide funding for programs that train counselors and reduce ratios.
• State legislatures and education agencies should establish maximum caseloads for high school counselors, with lower ratios at higher poverty schools.

Here’s what institutional leaders can do:

• Higher education institutions should require high school counselors to complete at least one semester of coursework on college advising.

Yet at many high schools, counselors are responsible for advising hundreds of students each year and may lack the capacity to work individually with students to support their postsecondary pathways. Nearly a third of high school counselors have also reported that they did not receive any training in graduate school about the college admissions process, and an additional 32 percent believe the training they did receive was inadequate.^[vi]