Ivan Medina did not get the best college counseling when he was a high-school student. He didn’t think about how he would pay for his education until late in the process, and he neglected to turn in a form one college required. Despite that rocky start, Mr. Medina recently graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, where he majored in marketing.
Now he is spending the year working as an adviser with the Texas College Advising Corps at a high school in San Antonio, giving students the kind of advice he could have used.
“I had a lot of people who helped me out,” Mr. Medina says, but “there wasn’t one person who I could always go to. I wanted to be that one person who wasn’t there in my school.”
Education leaders have long worried that many high-school students don’t get adequate help when it’s time to choose a college. Nationwide, there is an average of one full-time guidance counselor per 315 public high-school students, according to a 2003 report by the National Center for Education Statistics.
And those counselors don’t necessarily spend much of their time helping students choose and apply to colleges. Their work also includes advising students on high-school course selection, counseling students with personal problems, handling discipline issues—and can even stretch to supervising the cafeteria at lunch.
Several years ago, the University of Virginia decided to step into that void. In 2006, with start-up money from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, it sent a group of new graduates to about a dozen high schools across the state to work as college advisers. The program went national in 2007, with $1-million grants for each of 10 universities.
Now called the National College Advising Corps, the program collaborates with 15 colleges in 14 states, and has its headquarters at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Jobs for New Graduates
It is continuing to expand as colleges, mostly public flagships, see it as a good way to help high schools in their state, to connect with prospective students from less-affluent communities, and to provide fulfilling work for their new graduates. The program can generate more than a little good will, too.
Holden Thorp, chancellor at Chapel Hill, says that flagships can get a reputation for swooping in to take a school’s top students and ignoring the needs of everyone else. “I think every flagship university worries about whether people see us as being connected,” he says. “It’s great for Carolina to be seen across the state as contributing to these schools.”
The advising chapter in North Carolina, along with those in Alaska, Michigan, Missouri, and Texas, has a boost from the federal government through College Access Challenge Grants, which are distributed by states.
And at least one other program has started up on a similar model. The College Illinois Corps, started by the state and the Illinois Student Assistance Commission, places two recent college graduates in each of the state’s community-college districts. The advisers, who come primarily from Illinois colleges, each work with all the high schools in their district.
The national corps added chapters at several universities this year. Its expansion to Texas will be the largest to date and allow the program to refine its focus. “It’s a chance to take all we’ve learned in the first four years as a national program and set up a program with lessons learned,” says Nicole Farmer Hurd, executive director of the National College Advising Corps. In particular, this expansion will provide a new opportunity to study the program’s results.
After years of planning, UT has joined the program with support from a public-private partnership. This year Texas at Austin has 15 advisers; next year there could be 120 or more. Some of them will be from other universities. The national program typically works with one university in a state, which hires its own graduates as advisers, but the University of Texas at Austin will try to involve other colleges.
Texas has a worse-than-average student-to-counselor ratio, says Jeff Pilchiek, director of guidance at Westlake High School in Austin. Mr. Pilchiek has met students at college fairs from rural parts of Texas who are unfamiliar with basic college-admissions concepts, like early decision. Though he’d rather see enough college counselors, Mr. Pilchiek says, in communities like those, the corps’ college advisers will be “like gods.”
The program will help Texas round out its approach to college access, says Joaquin Castro, vice chairman of the Texas House of Representatives’ higher-education committee. “This college-advising piece is important,” he says, because while the state has focused on college preparation, it has done less to help college-ready students who need help navigating the admissions process.
Selling Good Information
That was certainly true for Mr. Medina. The son of two Mexican immigrants, neither of whom finished high school, Mr. Medina grew up in Garland, Tex., a suburb of Dallas. His plan had been to attend Texas Christian University, along with his girlfriend. It wasn’t until his choir director, who had previously worked in financial aid, raised the question of how much debt Mr. Medina would have to take on to go to Texas Christian that he thought carefully about college costs. TCU was out of the picture. Mr. Medina had applied to Texas at Austin, but a forgotten form meant he had been admitted for the spring, not the fall—and not to the business school.
In the end, Mr. Medina started at Richland College, a two-year public institution, and earned his associate degree in one year with the help of his Advanced Placement credits. Some of his high-school classmates looked down on attending a community college, Mr. Medina says, but it was a good option for him—and saved him a lot of money. He then transferred to Texas at Austin, where he was accepted into the business school.
By the time he graduated, in May, Mr. Medina wasn’t sure corporate America was for him. Then a friend told him about the Texas College Advising Corps, which was hiring for its first year.
In Texas, as in all the chapters, advisers are paid by the university, not by the schools, which means the advisers can’t be asked to do tasks outside their core work. And, program officials say, most counselors in high schools with advisers are happy for the extra support. It also helps that the program won’t work with schools that change counselors’ salaries or job descriptions as a result of having an adviser on hand, Ms. Hurd says.
Mr. Medina says that a big part of what he has been doing so far is selling himself as a resource to the students, so having a background in marketing has proved helpful. He has designed what he hopes is an eye-catching newsletter and is setting up Facebook and Twitter accounts in an effort to create more buzz. But he knows it can be hard to capture teenagers’ attention.
Over the course of the year, advisers like Mr. Medina will bring in university representatives and help students register for the SAT and ACT, search for scholarships and file financial-aid paperwork, and find the best college fit.
Advisers go through an intensive “boot camp"-style training, learning the basics of admissions and financial aid. At Texas at Austin, the admissions and financial-aid staff spent a lot of time teaching advisers about the ins and outs of college applications and the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. The training also included guest speakers who covered issues like transferring from a community college to a four-year institution, because students who have a transfer plan going in are more likely to pull off the move.
Mr. Medina says the training was eye-opening. Although he transferred from a community college to a four-year university, he had not realized how many students struggle with that transition.
Advisers also take a bus tour to visit area colleges, a trip that doubles as fact-finding and team-building. At each campus, they meet with admissions and aid staff members whose help they may need as they start working with students.
The advisers are encouraged to stay in touch with one another throughout the year. Chris Edwards, another adviser with the Texas College Advising Corps, lives with two other advisers. And more advisers from around the country are also available through the national program if he should need good information on an out-of-state college option for a student. “We have a great network of people,” he says.
Not only are advisers well trained, program leaders say, their youth makes them more approachable for high-school students, and their status as recent graduates makes them natural role models.
Not Counselors
But the advisers are not counselors. Joyce E. Smith, chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, got to meet this year’s advisers at a national meeting held in Washington this summer. Her first impression? “They look like high-school students themselves.”
“They’re not counselors,” Ms. Smith says, “but we kind of view them, if you will, as messengers.” She was reassured to learn how involved universities’ admissions staffs are in training them.
Mark D. Giesmann agrees that the advisers won’t be able to do everything that a certified counselor could do for students. Mr. Giesmann, director of counseling at St. Thomas High School in Houston, says the college search process is deeply connected to other counseling issues because it changes the dynamics of a family. And he wonders how much a graduate of the University of Texas would be able to tell a college senior about liberal-arts colleges or going out of state, two options that the state’s culture already de-emphasizes.
But at the same time, Mr. Giesmann says, the common application used to apply to all public universities and some private and community colleges in the state is complex, and students could really benefit from personal attention as they fill it out.
Just how much the advisers are helping is difficult to measure. But the national program is trying to find out. After all, if the program has good data to back up its approach, that could open the door to more financial backing. Program officials have brought in researchers from Stanford University to evaluate the program using data from the National Student Clearinghouse. The hardest part is finding a control group of schools similar to those hosting advisers, says Eric P. Bettinger, an associate professor at Stanford’s school of education who is working on the evaluation.
The program’s expansion to Texas provides a good opportunity for the researchers, Mr. Bettinger says. Next year, advisers in the state will be randomly assigned to high schools, allowing the researchers to make better comparisons between schools with advisers and similar schools without them.
Schools often rely on incomplete data about their graduates, Mr. Bettinger says. Principals often look at exit surveys, which reflect graduates’ plans, but not necessarily what ends up happening to them the next fall. Actual college-enrollment figures can be discouraging, he says. But good data, Mr. Bettinger says, can deepen the partnership between the advising corps and the school.
And, at the end of the day, relationships are what will determine the program’s success.
