By Andy Schmitz and Bill DeBaun
The most recent nationally representative survey data of school leaders offers a valuable look into how students receive postsecondary advising supports, who provides them, and how (and whether) schools inform their advising with data. The data comes from the RAND Corporation’s American Mathematics Educator Study (AMES), which recently released data from its spring 2024 administration. The survey collects data from principals and covers topics like data-informed improvement, student access and opportunity, and supporting students’ future careers (disclosure: one of the authors is an advisor for the AMES Survey).
OneGoal and the National College Attainment Network (NCAN) are national leaders in college access and attainment. Below, we considered the most recent AMES results and identified five findings that grabbed our attention and informed our understanding of the support students may (or may not) receive. NCAN also published findings from last year’s AMES administration.
1. School leaders’ access to college and career readiness data remains a challenge
School leaders report not having access to a broad spectrum of college and career readiness data. These data points include leading indicators, data on what happens to students post-graduation, and data on postsecondary advising. For example, 39% of high school leaders reported not having access to postsecondary application data, and another 31% reported not having access to Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) completion data. Both are leading indicators of student postsecondary success. Post-graduation, 37% of school leaders reported not having access to data on where students enrolled, and 64% reported not having access to student employment data after graduation. Even those with access rarely can disaggregate by student sub-group, making equity interrogation difficult.
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2. Quality advising is an uphill battle without access to regular, current, and disaggregated data
We’re making it too hard for principals, assistant principals, counselors, college and career readiness (CCR) coaches, etc., to identify the patterns and trends of their students post-graduation so that they can better support future graduating classes. Nearly half of high school leaders (49%) do not use data on student employment after graduation, and 42% do not use data on postsecondary advising (hours of advising, activities students have participated in). We’ve made collective progress on better and more frequent continuous improvement focused on instructional (GPA, test scores) or social emotional (attendance, disciplinary data) data. The parallel in the college and career readiness space has yet to take hold. All this leads to a critical question: can schools advise current and future classes effectively on their postsecondary pathways without knowing what happened to previous classes?
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3. Students have access to a variety of college and career readiness supports at their schools
Equitable access to advanced coursework is high, as 74% of school leaders report that students have access to AP/IB offerings, and 89% of school leaders report that students have access to dual enrollment and dual credit classes. When asked if these courses are available to “only college-bound students,” 67% of school leaders rated the statement as inaccurate. Similarly, 71% of school leaders say students can access internships and work-based learning opportunities. Access to advanced coursework and career development opportunities is supported by advising to help students consider their best-fit postsecondary pathways. 90% of school leaders reported that students receive counseling to help them understand the pros and cons of different pathways, including two-/four-year college, military, and workforce pathways.
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4. Counselors remain the key and critical entry point for postsecondary advising
Almost all (91%) school leaders indicated that regular 1:1 meetings with counselors were a “top three” way students receive advising and support about different college and career readiness pathways. The following two most popular choices were during an advisory period (54%) and intermittent or standalone programming (50%). Standalone courses focused on postsecondary advising (17%) or a push-in model in an academic course (21%) are not nearly as common. This makes sense, given high school structures, systems, and organization. There’s finite time in a school day for additional courses in a master schedule (especially with more regular opportunities for dual credit and career and technical education classes as electives). Asking your ELA department teachers to also serve as postsecondary advisors through a push-in model is a tall order, given their core focus on instruction.
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When asked who is primarily responsible for providing postsecondary advising, 74% of high school leaders identified counselors as the key individuals. The next closest role was school leaders/administrators at 8%. Interestingly, staff supplied by a non-school entity (AVID, GEAR UP, College Advising Corps) was lower than school leaders/administrators at 4%.
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5. There are too few counselors, and their caseloads remain way too high
This might be the understatement of the century, but it bears repeating: only 29% of high school leaders reported having five or more counselors at their school. This means about 70% of school leaders have essentially “one counselor per grade level” or one counselor responsible for every student whose last name ends with A through F. That’s a lot of students.
Only 13% of high school leaders report that counselors have fewer than 100 students. Quality postsecondary advising needs to be highly individualized and localized. What scholarships are available for this student profile in my state? Which career and technical education classes best match a student’s aspirations and strengths aligned to local career pathways? How do I work with this student’s family to increase their understanding of different options?
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Despite national efforts to “blur the lines” between secondary and postsecondary spaces, we have yet to see the type of aligned human capital investments or aligned counselor and leader capacity building. It’s unlikely that we’ll suddenly cut the counselor-to-student ratio in half. However, we can better support counselors and leaders in leveraging (not layering) already existing structures (like advisory or standalone programming). For example, we can refine and/or expand the schoolwide “entry points” for students to receive advising. We can also ensure that we improve advisors’ access to and training on using various postsecondary readiness data. Headline – don’t reinvent the wheel in search of a shiny object to solve postsecondary advising – build capacity, strengthen systems, and develop counselors as leaders.
The AMES dataset offers more than these five findings, and the survey’s results are worth exploring from policymakers and practitioners alike.
Beyond AMES but related to district- and school-level postsecondary advising, OneGoal and NCAN are part of a partnership of more than a dozen leading national college access organizations. This partnership recently released a framework that asks, “How can districts enable postsecondary success?” The framework identifies five enabling conditions that our organizations see in school districts successfully providing postsecondary advising support to students. Given that the prevalence of these conditions in school districts across the country would be associated with the survey responses above, we highlight this new framework and its related resources and partners as a way for K-12 systems to dig in, consider new or revised approaches, and shift students’ postsecondary trajectories.
Andy Schmitz is the Senior Managing Director of System Impact, OneGoal, and Bill DeBaun, Senior Director of Data and Strategic Initiatives, NCAN
This post was originally published by NCAN and can be found here.
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