High School Counselor Week

How can districts ensure students have enough social-emotional support?
K-12 Dive – March 25, 2024
A CDC program director shares four key steps to build these supports into busy academic schedules.

Students nationally continue to struggle with mental health. Here’s what support looks like at one Oregon high school
OPB (OR) – March 21, 2024
Addressing student mental health is now a part of the many services schools offer. A look at what’s available at David Douglas, the school several students in the Class of 2025 attend.

DEI lives to fight another day at the University of Wyoming
USA Today – March 26, 2024
Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon’s vetoes last weekend included something unexpected: a line-item veto that allowed the legislature’s decision to axe funding for the university of Wyoming’s DEI office, but would still allow the school to use its own funds for diversity-related programs. In his veto letter, Gordon explained that the bill had ‘inadvertently put millions of dollars of federal grants that regularly flow to the University at risk’ because the recipients of the funds must offer opportunities to those ‘underserved and underrepresented populations’ including military veterans, first-generation college students, Native Americans, and people impacted by the Americans with Disabilities Act.’ He suggested that the state’s legislature might be using an antiquated definition for DEI…

Top 10 Biggest Mistakes Parents Make on Campus Visits
Post – March 20, 2024
College Advice & Timely Tips with Lee Bierer

School counselors can’t undo the FAFSA mess on their own. We need a national movement right now
The Hechinger Report – March 26, 2024
News coverage of the disastrous new FAFSA rollout and the Education Department’s unprecedented delays in sending FAFSA data to institutions has detailed everything that went wrong. What hasn’t been covered is the potential impact this could have on the nation, what we can do to mitigate some of the unintended consequences or what we all must do right now to help. There is no time to waste. We need a national movement to get students in the pipeline to higher education. Every single person reading this article should share this link that details state-by-state workshops, events and tools to help students complete their FAFSA. We simply can’t afford to lose more students. Share this resource with places of worship and local community centers, at school board meetings and beyond. If you engage with a high school senior on the bus, on the metro or elsewhere in your local community, ask them, ‘Have you filled out your FAFSA yet?’ During the height of COVID, we lost over a million students from the pipeline to higher education. School counselors can’t do this work alone. We need your help.

9 Ways to Help Your Teen With the College Decision
U.S. News & World Report – March 25, 2024
While parents may be tempted to sway their teen’s college choice, experts say it’s best to leave the main decision-making to students. ‘Your child has likely made a number of excellent decisions to get to this point. Let them take the lead here as well,’ says Chris Lanser, IvyWise college admissions counselor, former associate dean of admission at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and the parent of two recent college graduates. Choosing a college affects the rest of your child’s life. Here are some ways to help your teen with their decision.

Gen Z is attending college online — and their parents are joining them. Here’s how to help.
Higher Ed Dive – March 25, 2024
Colleges can encourage parental support while still respecting students’ personal and legally mandated boundaries, says a student success expert at Penn State World Campus.

8 Ways for High School Students to Spend Spring Break
U.S. News & World Report – March 6, 2024
Spring break provides opportunities for volunteering, job shadowing and preparing for college.

Listen: Is College Worth It? What Marc Andreseen & Ben Horowitz Get Right (and Very Wrong) About Higher Education Today
The 74 – March 26, 2024
Stacey Childress, a senior adviser on education at McKinsey, joins Class Disrupted weighing in on Marc Andreseen and Ben Horowitz’s recent analysis of higher education. In this first episode, they react to the venture capitalists’ diagnosis of the problems with higher education. They share what they think the investors got right, call out points of disagreement and each add their own insights about higher education along the way. (Full transcript provided)

OPINION: The glitchy FAFSA is only one problem with getting into college. Here’s how to make the process less confusing
The Hechinger Report – March 26, 2024
Policymakers and higher ed institutions must try harder. Here are a few starting points:

Oops. Education Dept. discovers calculation error in over 200,000 students’ financial aid applications
Fortune – March 25, 2024
The U.S. Education Department said it has discovered a calculation error in hundreds of thousands of student financial aid applications sent to colleges this month and will need to reprocess them — a blunder that follows a series of others and threatens further delays to this year’s college applications. A vendor working for the federal government incorrectly calculated a financial aid formula for more than 200,000 students, the department said Friday. The information was sent to colleges to help them prepare financial aid packages but now needs to be recalculated — even as the department works through a backlog of more than 4 million other financial aid applications.

How to choose the best college: One that you can actually afford
VTDigger (VT) – March 27, 2024
As students wait for financial aid decisions, a student assistance expert offers some advice

Front-Loading Financial Aid: Watch Out For This Sneaky Trick
The College Investor – March 23, 2024
Front-loading of financial aid like grants and scholarships is a form of bait-and-switch, where a college gives a better financial aid offer to freshmen than to sophomores, juniors and seniors. When a college practices front-loading of financial aid, the average grant per recipient decreases after the first year and/or the percentage of students receiving grants decreases. Here’s how to tell if a college practices front-loading of grants:

Half of graduates end up underemployed — what does that mean for colleges?
Higher Ed Dive – March 25, 2024
Researchers examined what kind of jobs graduates were landing and whether they required a college diploma.

On-The-Job Training Prevails as Students’ Disinterest in College Grows
The 74 – March 13, 2024
A new study has found more than 80 percent of high schoolers value on-the-job training over other postsecondary options, including a four-year degree — laying bare students’ interest in immediate employment and disdain for a college education. But a panel of experts came together yesterday to discuss the report’s findings — expressing concern over the growing apathy high schoolers and non-enrolled adults are showing in a college education.