Can I Get A Little Advice Here?

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ON THE AGENDA

The High Stakes of Stakeholder Engagement: A Plea for Careful Planning from Public Agenda

Alison Kadlec
Feb 1, 2012

This post was written for the 20 community colleges participating in Completion by Design, a five-year Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation initiative that aims to significantly increase completion rates for low-income students under 26. As a “National Assistance partner” for Completion by Design, Public Agenda provides direct assistance to the colleges to help them build capacity for solutions-oriented dialogue among faculty, staff and administration. Here, Public Agenda's Alison Kadlec discusses best practices for authentic internal stakeholder engagement. While the post is geared toward Completion by Design planning teams, the principles are useful for any authentic engagement process.

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You Can't Do It Alone: A New Guide to Creating Sustainable Change in Education Reform

Allison Rizzolo
Jan 24, 2012

Far too often, throughout our work in the education field, we've seen even the most earnest and promising ideas from experts and reformers for improving schools and ramping up student learning met with confusion, anxiety or even anger from teachers, parents, students or community members.

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Press Releases

Can I Get A Little Advice Here?

How An Overstretched High School Guidance System Is Undermining Students' College Aspirations

Jean Johnson and Jon Rochkind, with Amber N. Ott and Samantha DuPont

03/02/2010

Based on a national survey of young adults ages 22 to 30, Can I Get A Little Advice Here? asks young Americans how much help they received from the high school guidance system when it comes to choosing a college or career or getting financial aid for college. In too many cases, young people tell us, the answer is "not much."

Our research, done for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, found that six in ten young adults who had gone on to further education gave their high school counseling poor grades for college advice, and nearly half say they felt like "just a face in the crowd." With college costs rising and completion rates sinking in the United States, this raises serious questions about what kind of help young people need, and whether they're getting it.

Can I Get A Little Advice Here? is the second in a series of reports on college completion: what factors influence success and failure, and what kinds of measures might be taken to improve college graduation rates. Click here to check out the first report in this series, "With Their Whole Lives Ahead Of Them." A third report will be released later this year.

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Tags: advisors, education, financial aid, guidance counselors, higher education, Tuition

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Re: Can I Get A Little Advice Here?

On March 6, 2011 Anonymous says:

I graduated from high school in 2004 from a school near Cleveland, Ohio. After high school, I went on to college in which I graduated in 2008. My high school lacked the guidance for college bound studebts in that I can not remember if my high school had a guidance counselor or if such a person exists. High schools need to put more effort into the type of people hired to help students with college choices and less effort on sports, theatre/arts and other extracurricular activities that will not benefit students if they do not choose the right college. Overall, guidance counselors are an important part of the transition to college and they serve as an inspirational role for young adults moving forward to the next level of their lives.

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