Paper: High School Counselors Need Standardized Training

As more college admissions counselors are seeking specialized training, a newly released paper from the National Association for College Admission Counseling argues that high school college readiness counseling requires standardized training, too. Author Mandy Savitz-Romer wrote that high school college readiness counseling lacks pre- or in-service requirements, or a unified certification or body of knowledge, and she proposed a set of core areas of competency that should be part of a pre-service training program for prospective counselors:

• Psychological processes associated with college readiness
• Social environments that affect students’ resources for succeeding in college
• Microeconomics, especially related to individual decision-making behavior
• Educational reform policies related to college readiness
• Higher education research, including college access and enrollment and college choice theories
• Family engagement models