College Advising Capacity in Schools

Introduction

  • Matt Giani and Kaitlin Ogden from the University of Texas at Austin are presenting on college advising capacity in schools.

  • They aim to explore how to measure, diagnose, and improve college advising.

Speaker Checklist

  • Key takeaways should be clearly defined.

  • Identify a key activity for the session.

  • Determine the minimum time needed for each activity.

  • Plan for time adjustments by identifying content that can be shortened or omitted.

  • Incorporate interactive strategies and tools for attendees.

  • Balance presentation time with discussion and Q&A.

  • Anticipate questions from a data-savvy and diverse audience.

  • Consider the experiences of those working in districts/LEAs, state education agencies, and education-focused nonprofits.

  • Address how different socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds are supported or impacted by the work.

  • Explain how the session advances equity in education.

Background

  • Students, especially those from historically marginalized backgrounds, require high-quality advising for postsecondary decisions.

  • School counselors play a crucial role in college and career advising.

  • High student-to-counselor ratios are a common problem.

  • Partnerships with external college access/advising programs (CAPs) can be a strategy to improve advising.

Student-to-Counselor Ratio

  • The American School Counselor Association (ASCA) recommends a ratio of less than 250:1.

  • Few states or districts achieve this ratio.

  • Patel, P. & Clinedinst, M. (2021) provide state-by-state student-to-counselor ratio maps by school district.

College Access/Advising Programs (CAPs)

  • CAP partnerships may strengthen schools’ college advising capacity.

  • There is limited understanding of how and why CAP partnerships are effective.

Dimensions of College Advising Capacity

  • Transactional: Focuses on counselor/advisor supply, student-to-advisor ratios, and counselor/advisor time use.

  • Transformational: Focuses on navigational, sociocultural, and motivational capacity.

  • Systemic: Focuses on strategic alignment, stakeholder alignment, and CAP alignment.

Key Objectives

  • Summarize two-year research on college advising capacity in Texas.

  • Discuss implications of federal actions for research and reforms related to college advising.

  • Develop action plans to assess college advising capacity in various states/contexts.

Methods

  • Mixed-methods research was conducted in Texas.

  • Advising Capacity Survey: Included 1,983 respondents (district leaders, CAP leaders, counselors, advisors).

    • Measured transactional and transformational advising capacity.

  • Aligned Advising Survey: Included 973 respondents (district leaders, school leaders, counselors, advisors, teachers).

    • Measured components of advising systems (vision/goals, metrics, resources, trust, CAPs).

    • Measured job perceptions (well-being, burnout, exit intentions, program quality).

  • District Leader Interviews: Included 10 district leaders.

    • Focused on barriers and opportunities for strategic CAP partnerships.

Transactional Capacities

  • Focus on counselor/advisor supply, ratios, time use.

Student-to-Counselor Ratios Over Time

  • Presents student-to-counselor ratios from 2000-2021 by district type.

Advisor and CAP Presence in Texas

  • Percentage of respondents working with different numbers of CAPs

  • Percentage of districts based on mean number of advisors.

Counselor Constraints

  • Counselors work 40 hours/week for 30 weeks, totaling 1200 hours.

  • If 25% of their time is spent on college and career advising, that's 300 hours.

  • With 300 students, this equates to 1 hour per student per year, assuming 1:1 meetings.

  • Average time allocation for advisors and counselors

    • College Advising:

      • Advisors: 41\%%

      • Counselors: 16\%%

    • Career Advising

      • Advisors: 14\%%

      • Counselors: 11\%%

Transformational Capacities

  • Focuses on navigational, sociocultural, and motivational capacity.

Challenges for Navigating Advising

  • Looks at access to student-level data and the ability to connect to organizations for college and career preparation.

The Need for Sociocultural Capacity

  • Addresses the difficulty in advising students from certain backgrounds.

  • Explores the need to learn more about socioeconomic (SES) and cultural backgrounds.

Motivational Capacity

  • Focuses on having time to motivate students, understanding student circumstances, and knowing strategies to motivate.

Systems Capacities

  • Focuses on strategic alignment, stakeholder alignment, and CAP alignment.

Enabling Conditions of Effective Advising

  • Strong program leadership and planning

  • Effective, well-supported school counselors & advisors

  • Internal school culture of advising

  • Effective external partnerships

Key Levers to Align Advising

  • Pave the path to support advising

  • Assessments

  • Unlock Alignment at Scale

  • Own the Handoff

Aligned Conditions for Effective Advising

  • Vision/Goals: Clear vision, support, quantifiable goals, high standards.

  • Resource Allocation: Advising ratios, physical space, training, advising tools, equitable allocation.

  • CAP Partnerships: Presence, roles, resource allocation.

  • Relationships/Trust/Collaboration: Leadership trust, community trust.

Hypotheses

  • Enabling conditions of aligned advising systems will relate to:

    • Educator job wellbeing

    • Educator burnout/exhaustion

    • Educator job change intentions

    • Educator perceptions of advising system effectiveness

    • Student college and career outcomes (future research)

Job Demands - Resources (JD-R) Model

  • Model showing relationship between job demands, job well-being, and job resources.

Conditions Related to Job Wellbeing

  • Trust is particularly important for advising staff wellbeing, as impactful as salary.

  • Vision, CAP partnerships, and resources are unrelated to wellbeing.

Conditions Related to Exhaustion

  • Advising resources are the only factor that decrease exhaustion, with a large and significant relationship.

Conditions Related to Job Change Intentions

  • Advising resources are the only factor that decrease job change intentions.

  • Leadership trust has an almost as a strong relationship, but it's non-significant.

Conditions Related to Advising Program Grade

  • Community trust is the most important factor in the grade given to districts' advising programs.

  • The district's vision and advising resources also improve the grade districts receive.

Conditions Related to School Advising Program Grade

  • Community trust is the most important factor for school grades.

  • Advising resources and CAP partnerships also significantly improve school grades.

Aligned Perceptions

  • Stakeholders generally agree with the statements in the survey.

Misaligned Perceptions

  • School leaders are twice as likely as district leaders to believe CAP partnerships create competition.

Advise Texas Study Schools

  • Shows number of college advising programs available in treatment and control schools over time.

Key Findings

  • CAP Partnerships are Necessary given Counselor Constraints

  • Funding Constrains CAP Options

  • Limited District Capacity Prevents Effective CAP Management

  • Constrained CAP Partnerships Create Misalignment

  • Strong CAP Partnerships Matter, and are Possible

CAP Partnerships are Necessary given Counselor Constraints

  • Counselors must handle social-emotional and academic advising in addition to college and career counseling.

  • Partnerships with local community colleges may only offer limited presence.

  • increased workloads and fewer professional development opportunities limit counselor's ability to deeply understand college landscapes impacting their ability to provide tailored advising for students.

Funding Constrains CAP Options

  • Districts lack the budget to expand advising services and rely on CAP partners to bring in their own grant funding.

  • Grant funding comes with restrictions.

  • Partnerships are dictated by money- plain and simple.

Limited District Capacity Prevents Effective CAP Management

  • Districts and schools let their partners do their thing without formal evaluation processes.

  • Lack of personnel to manage and coordinate those partnerships effectively leaves gaps in how services are provided.

  • There is a need for better communication between the partners and internal advising staff.

CAP Partnerships of Convenience Create Misalignment

  • Goal Misalignment:

    • Partnerships are kept based on whether they can help CCMR (College, Career, Military Readiness) numbers.

    • The push for four-year college matriculation does not always align with the cultural and economic realities of the student population, where many prefer CTE, two- year colleges, or military pathways.

  • Student Population Misalignment:

    • Some partners cannot work with undocumented students.

  • Strategy Misalignment:

    • Partners say one thing, and counselors say something different.

    • Resources and strategies provided for students may not necessarily align with the group of students that they are recruiting.

  • Metric Misalignment:

    • CAP partners have their own metrics and reporting standards, and sometimes those don’t align with what the district needs for our accountability measures.

Strong CAP Partnerships Matter, and are Possible

  • CAP partnerships are significantly related to the grade counselors and advisors give their school’s advising program and are more important than salary.

  • Measure of CAP partnership strength from survey items shown previously.

What is Community Trust?

  • School counselors trust each other regarding college an career advising.

  • School counselors trust college advisors to provide college and career advising.

  • College advisors trust each other to provide college and career advising.

  • Students trust the school counselors who provide them college and career advising.

  • Students trust the college advisors who provide them college and career advising.

Strong CAP Partnerships

  • Leadership Vision, Prioritization, and Stability

    • align middle school pathways with high school programs and make decisions together across academics, culture, and postsecondary.

    • Priorities shift with leadership, and sometimes meaning losing partnerships that were actually working well for the students.

  • Critical Role of Liaisons/Intermediaries

    • Serve as a local liaison between CAPs.

  • Need for Integrated Systems and Data Sharing

    • Use data trackers for applications, FAFSA, (college) decisions to guide decisions.

    • Measure the quality of advising, not just activity.

Higher Education

  • Diverse goals pursued among partnering institutions.

  • Not all student populations targeted throughout.

  • Differing advising strategies employed.

Introduction

Matt Giani and Kaitlin Ogden from the University of Texas at Austin are exploring how to measure, diagnose, and improve college advising capacity in schools. They emphasize the importance of clearly defined key takeaways, identifying a key activity for the session, determining the minimum time needed for each activity, and planning for time adjustments. They also suggest incorporating interactive strategies and tools, balancing presentation time with discussion and Q&A, anticipating questions from a data-savvy and diverse audience, and considering the experiences of those working in districts/LEAs, state education agencies, and education-focused nonprofits. Addressing the support and impact on different socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds, and explaining how the session advances equity in education are crucial.

Background

Students, particularly those from historically marginalized backgrounds, require high-quality advising for postsecondary decisions. School counselors play a crucial role in college and career advising, but high student-to-counselor ratios are a common problem. Partnerships with external College Access/Advising Programs (CAPs) can be a strategy to improve advising.

Student-to-Counselor Ratio

The American School Counselor Association (ASCA) recommends a ratio of less than 250:1, though few states or districts achieve this ratio. Patel, P. & Clinedinst, M. (2021) provide state-by-state student-to-counselor ratio maps by school district.

College Access/Advising Programs (CAPs)

CAP partnerships may strengthen schools’ college advising capacity, yet there is limited understanding of how and why these partnerships are effective.

Dimensions of College Advising Capacity

College advising capacity can be viewed in three dimensions: Transactional, focusing on counselor/advisor supply, student-to-advisor ratios, and counselor/advisor time use; Transformational, focusing on navigational, sociocultural, and motivational capacity; and Systemic, focusing on strategic alignment, stakeholder alignment, and CAP alignment.

Key Objectives

The key objectives include summarizing two-year research on college advising capacity in Texas, discussing implications of federal actions for research and reforms related to college advising, and developing action plans to assess college advising capacity in various states/contexts.

Methods

Mixed-methods research was conducted in Texas, including an Advising Capacity Survey with 1,983 respondents, an Aligned Advising Survey with 973 respondents, and District Leader Interviews with 10 district leaders. The Advising Capacity Survey measured transactional and transformational advising capacity, while the Aligned Advising Survey measured components of advising systems and job perceptions. The District Leader Interviews focused on barriers and opportunities for strategic CAP partnerships.

Transactional Capacities

Transactional capacities focus on counselor/advisor supply, ratios, and time use. Student-to-counselor ratios from 2000-2021 vary by district type. Advisor and CAP presence in Texas are measured by the percentage of respondents working with different numbers of CAPs and the percentage of districts based on the mean number of advisors. Counselors work constraints impacting time spent on college and career advising were evaluated with the average time allocation for advisors and counselors being 41\%% and 16\%% respectively.

Transformational Capacities

Transformational capacities focus on navigational, sociocultural, and motivational capacity. Navigational advising addresses access to student-level data and connections to organizations for college and career preparation. Sociocultural capacity addresses the difficulty in advising students from certain backgrounds and the need to learn more about socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. Motivational capacity focuses on having time to motivate students, understanding student circumstances, and knowing strategies to motivate.

Systems Capacities

Systems Capacities focus on strategic alignment, stakeholder alignment, and CAP alignment. Enabling conditions of effective advising include strong program leadership and planning, effective, well-supported school counselors & advisors, an internal school culture of advising, and effective external partnerships. Key levers to align advising involve paving the path to support advising, assessments, unlocking alignment at scale, and owning the handoff. Aligned conditions for effective advising include clear vision/goals, resource allocation, CAP partnerships, and relationships/trust/collaboration.

Hypotheses

Enabling conditions of aligned advising systems are hypothesized to relate to educator job wellbeing, educator burnout/exhaustion, educator job change intentions, educator perceptions of advising system effectiveness, and student college and career outcomes.

Job Demands - Resources (JD-R) Model

The Job Demands - Resources Model illustrates the relationship between job demands, job well-being, and job resources. Trust affects advising staff wellbeing as much as salary. Advising resources are the only factor that decrease exhaustion and job change intentions. Community trust is the most important factor in the grade given to districts' and schools' advising programs. Stakeholders generally agree with the statements in the survey, though school leaders are twice as likely as district leaders to believe CAP partnerships create competition.

Key Findings

CAP Partnerships are Necessary given Counselor Constraints because counselors handle social-emotional and academic advising in addition to college and career counseling. Funding Constrains CAP Options, leading districts to rely on CAP partners for grant funding, which comes with restrictions. Limited District Capacity Prevents Effective CAP Management, resulting in a lack of formal evaluation processes and communication gaps. CAP Partnerships of Convenience Create Misalignment due to goal, student population, strategy, and metric misalignments. Strong CAP Partnerships Matter, as CAP partnerships are significantly related to the grade counselors and advisors give their school’s advising program and are more important than salary. Community trust is built when school counselors and college advisors trust each other and when students trusts them. Strong CAP Partnerships prioritize leadership vision, the critical role of liaisons, and the need for