What is High-Quality Advising?

Every student deserves high-quality advising from their school counselor when they’re trying to figure out life after high school, whether that means going to college or starting a career. But what, exactly, does “high-quality advising” mean? 

This is what Senior Lecturer Mandy Savitz-Romer wanted to figure out when a nonprofit asked her to work with them on a definition. The nonprofit, College Access: Research & Action (CARA), where Savitz-Romer is a board member, had been approached by the Gates Foundation to come up with a definition to help with their work around post-secondary paths at the national level and in Washington state, where Gates is headquartered. 

“The folks at Gates began to question what was meant by ‘advising’ and realized that everyone thinks advising means something else,” Savitz-Romer says. “What does it include in rural areas as opposed to suburban or urban areas, for example. They became interested in how we come up with a codified understanding of advising so that we can guarantee that students are getting the same thing or at least the richness of the same thing across the country.”

Savitz-Romer, senior lecturer in human development and education at the Ed School and a former counselor in Boston Public Schools, says she was more than ready to help.

“I was excited to do this work because in the field of college and career readiness, this idea of what we mean by advising is something not very well established,” she says. “We know for so many parts of education what it means to teach literacy or what an appropriate set of standards are for teaching history. College and career readiness is a lot more ambiguous.”

With the CARA organization, Savitz-Romer started to look at what various states and organizations were already saying advising consisted of. 

“We found that there’s almost no empirical research on advising, which is very interesting to me. There are lots of programs that do it, but what they’re doing really varies,” she says. “Somebody might say, we do college advising but we don't start till 11th grade. Someone else says, we do college advising and it starts in ninth grade. So when it starts, who does it, what it consists of — it’s just very vague.”

Based on the research they could gather, existing local and state resources from around the country, and conversations over the course of nine months with educators and leaders in the counseling field, Savitz-Romer and the CARA team created a “framework” — an outline, of sorts — that school counselors can use as a starting point when working with students and families throughout high school.

“We looked at what was out there and we drew on what we knew,” Savitz-Romer says. “I've been in this field for 20-plus years, so has CARA, and we thought, what do we think needs to be included? And then we set out to create very actionable grade 9, grade 10, grade 11, grade 12, and summer sections. In creating this, we wanted to signal that advising had to start in grade nine. That advising isn’t just what happens in 11th and 12th grade. We also wanted to signal that stuff needs to happen in the summer.” 

If counselors don’t help students as early as ninth grade think about life after high school, students “miss out on opportunities for meaningful exploration and preparation,” she says. “They may begin to form ideas about their future that lack important information or possibilities that come from advising relationships and/or experiences.”

She says the framework offers advice — look at a transcript and figure out how a GPA works — but also a range of “experiences” that students could have to better achieve their post-graduation goals. Experiences like practicing communication and interview skills with a range of adults. 

The thinking behind the framework is that “advising isn’t just this one-on-one conversation” that a school counselor has with a student at some vague point during high school, Savitz-Romer says. “It also means helping them try something like shadowing a journalist or joining an engineering STEM enrichment program. Advising isn’t just what I tell you on a Tuesday morning. It’s really about this holistic developmental process.” 

Janice Bloom, co-executive director at CARA, says that although they kept the language in the two-page framework short and actionable, they didn’t want it to be a simple checklist that counselors completed with students and then moved on.

“For counselors advising students, there are so many tasks and it’s too easy for this work to be reduced to a set of tasks, to a checklist,” she says. “It’s too easy to lose the bigger picture that this is one piece of young people’s development. The goal is much larger than getting them to fill out the FAFSA or a career assessment.” There are a lot of time sensitive checklist-type tasks that students do need to get done as they plan for college or career that counselors can advise on, she says, but ultimately, it’s about “exploration and then individual support.”

To help counselors approach their work in this way, the framework uses six guiding principles for what all students should be given: experiences in grades 9 through 12, well-informed academic guidance about milestones, opportunities to reflect on academic and career identity, proactive and concrete application support, knowledgeable pathway advice, and practice building and using navigational skills.

After the framework was developed, it was shared widely, including with high schoolers, college students, school counselors, and nonprofit leaders from around the country. They tweaked content based on feedback. Students, for example, wanted to see more related to families. Nonprofit leaders mentioned that while the “transactional” parts of advising were pretty clear in the framework, they wanted more related to personal development, such as encouraging students to reflect on academic strengths and personal values.

Savitz-Romer says that “no school is probably doing all of this, understandably,” given time constraints and limited staffing, “but we really wanted to write what we think students deserve to have, knowing that this is ambitious and that’s okay. We put some things in bold that we thought are the most important things that if you can’t do everything.”

They were also intentional about “career” being central to the framework — not just college.
“Too often people talk about college advising and career advising as two different things,” Savitz-Romer says. “The problem is then an adult is deciding whether someone gets college advising or career advising, and that's not for the adults to decide. That’s for students to explore and figure out on their own. We wanted something that captured both college and career.” For example, the framework mentions that by 11th grade, students should complete a practice college or job application.

In addition to the national version, they also created a version for the Gates Foundation geared toward Washington state that references specific statewide initiatives. The hope is that other states will take the national version and tailor it in a similar way. Moving forward, next steps include getting the framework into as many hands as possible at conferences and through superintendent networks, and through a partnership with the National College Attainment Network (NCAN), a nonprofit that has been working with educators from the field for the past few years on how school districts can “level up” the postsecondary success of all students through effective advising.

This new work from Savitz-Romer and CARA “is a key piece of that puzzle,” says Elizabeth Morgan, NCAN’s chief external relations officer, noting that they already published a blog post about the new definition and hosted a workshop about the framework at their recent national conference.

“It is easy to say that all students deserve high-quality postsecondary advising, but it’s another thing to outline what high-quality advising is,” Morgan says. “NCAN is delighted with this new definition because it gives our field a better vocabulary for what students need to ensure they take their next best step after high school graduation. We will continue to share it as a way to promote common understanding and spark action.”

It's the kind of common understanding that Savitz-Romer says she would have loved when she was a middle school counselor in Boston.

“Oh, I wish I had this. It would have helped me communicate to students what they deserved from advising. For many, advising was a vague term,” she says. That includes getting them to understand that thinking about their futures — whether it’s college or career — is hard work and isn’t something you start doing your senior year. “It would have helped students understand that what constitutes college and career advising is very comprehensive and that they have to develop a mindset, that this is a process that starts early and happens often.”