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Measuring the Impact of High School Counselors on College Enrollment. Research Brief.

An important duty of high school counselors is to complement the work of teachers by promoting college and career aspirations and to help students navigate the college process. In practice, the responsibilities of high school teachers are well defined and relatively consistent across schools. Teachers are generally responsible for transferring subject-specific knowledge to their students and enhancing the abilities of their students to think critically. By contrast, the actual role played by high school counselors varies greatly across schools and even within schools (Paisley & McMahon, 2001; Bridgeland & Bruce, 2011). Effective counselors possess a nimbleness and an ability to work with students on an extremely wide range of issues, including college and financial aid application completion, academic planning, and the resolution of behavioral and personal problems. Recent budget cuts have led to mass layoffs of counselors across many districts, particularly in California (Po, 2012). When financial resources are strained, difficult decisions must be made regarding dismissing school-level staff. Lacking evidence on the causal impact of counselors on student outcomes, it is possible that counselors are seen as more dispensable than other school staff. Given the laser-like focus on teachers in the educational research arena, the dearth of rigorous empirical studies on the extent to which school counselors influence student outcomes is not surprising. In this brief, we highlight the first causal evidence on the impact of an additional school counselor on four-year college-going rates among students in