Forget the College Counseling Timeline- What Do We Do Now?

2020 brought both new challenges and shed light on the same problems we’ve experienced in the field of college counseling for years. 

In “normal” times, we, school and college counselors, often use variations of the same college application checklist with our students. The usual items are on there: (re)take the SATs or ACTs, finalize college lists, discuss options with family, write a personal statement, visit colleges, complete the Common Application, request fee waivers, submit the FAFSA, and the list goes on. The format of the checklist itself implies that the college process is linear–a neat laundry list of discrete tasks that we can help students check off, in order, one by one. We give presentations based on where students “should” be on the college timeline. Yet, as many of us experience, especially now as we navigate through the challenges of COVID-19, counseling students through the college process is far from simple or perfectly chronological. Students are at different places, at different times, at every juncture. Part of the problem is that we only have the capacity to do so much given the resources we have and the systems we operate within. And, part of the problem is that the tools we use follow an overly simplified checklist approach that does not work for all counselors, families, or students and certainly does not work in the context of 2020. So, how can we start college counseling off the timeline?

Based on a nationwide text-message college advising campaign for 35,000 students, a team of practitioners and researchers from K-12 and higher education began to identify the parts of the college application process that do not occur once, but continue to emerge and re-emerge. We realized that we needed a more realistic and dynamic representation of the college process. To that end, we are creating and evolving an interactive “timeline” that captures the non-linear messiness of the college counseling process. As we hear from counselors, students, and parents about their concerns and challenges during this unprecedented year, we will update this new “timeline” in part 2 of this blog post to help counselors reimagine when and how they provide information and support to their students. Stay tuned and send us your ideas and feedback!