The Next Letter You Need to Write

by Patrick O'Connor, Ph.D.

We need to face a hard truth. Year in and year out, counselors keep wanting the college application process to change—fix this, drop that. I talk about this as much (if not more) than anyone else, and like anyone else, I really thought we were heading in the right direction when so many colleges became test optional. There were so many promises of revamping the entire process, not just dropping test scores.

Where are we now? A new breed of “coaches” has come up offering advice on when to send scores, and articles are popping up everywhere claiming colleges didn’t go test optional to help the students, as much as they did so to prop up their average test scores.

It’s been argued that every single part of the college application process favors the wealthy, and many have tried to come up with a system where that doesn’t happen. This is harder than it looks. If colleges dropped every single admissions requirement they had today and replaced it with one factor—grades, eye color, push-ups—a new genre of coaches would show up to help students game the system using the new criteria. Yes, there are ways to make the system more fair, but as test optional shows, the odds of creating a system that’s truly fair are pretty slim, at least for now.

So what can we do? Every year, hundreds—yes, hundreds—of new school counselors emerge into the market place with absolutely no working knowledge of college counseling. Most received no training in college counseling because their graduate program didn’t offer any, focusing almost exclusively on the mental health aspect of school counseling. Those that had some training had it in a few hours of a course on college and career counseling, where the emphasis is always more on careers. The skills needed to get a meaningful job are important, to be sure, but once a student realizes they need more training after high school, what becomes just as important? College counseling.

It’s easy enough for folks like me to secure this college knowledge once we’re on the job, because I generally worked at schools where students were already expected to go to college—so off I went to every workshop that taught me how to help them. That only maintains a status quo that is awfully biased, and just plain awful. The counselors who really need that training can’t get out of their building, in part because the caseloads are too high, in part because their administrators don’t think it matters—and counselors don’t have the training to be able to explain why it does. But this misses the larger point—why are we learning the job on the job, when graduate school training in mental health runs into the hundreds of hours, and college counseling training is, as a rule, zero?

The answer is easy—a three-credit graduate course in college counseling. The courses exist, and the syllabi are easy enough to find (Need one? Email me!), so starting one up isn’t hard, provided the educators running counselor training programs are prepared to admit that college is as important as mental health. This isn’t about program certifications or some other credential; this is about helping students build meaningful futures, which is why we all got into this business. A letter to your grad school pointing that out couldn’t be more timely, so we can end a bias that’s killing lots of bright futures.

Year in and year out, counselors keep wanting the college application process to change. What really needs to change is counselors.