Washington Monthly - September/October 2019 - 27

ed. After taking over, he arranged a series of meetings in
which company executives and hiring managers told him
they wanted job applicants who could write and speak well
and analyze data efficiently. In response, he mandated
that every class include curricula to help students develop
those skills.
In July 2018, the college expanded to Plano, a Dallas
suburb twenty miles from the original campus but far richer in nearby work opportunities. Paul Quinn College Plano
is, in Michael Sorrell's words, a "campus-less campus." Classes are held in rented or donated corporate office space, with
precious university funds spent on finding students nearby
apartments. Students attend classes three days a week and
spend two days working paid internships at companies like
JPMorgan Chase, Liberty Mutual, FedEx, and Aimbridge Hospitality. Sorrell is betting that the skills and connections they
gain from their internships will land them good job offers
when they graduate.
Other colleges around the country are beginning to
adopt Sorrell's work model, including Kuyper College in
Michigan and Wilberforce University in Ohio, both of which
are doing so through a grant from the University Innovation Alliance. (Clinton College in South Carolina has also expressed interest and is in the early stages of transitioning
into a work college.)

College Advising
The distribution of guidance counselors is an underappreciated inequity in American education. Data from Utah shows that
students who meet with a college access adviser three to five
times are twice as likely to go to college. But many students
don't have that opportunity. According to the most recent publicly available data, the national average student-to-counselor
ratio is 482 to 1. (The American School Counselor Association
recommends a maximum of 250 to 1.) Those figures don't fully
reflect the disparities between rich school districts and poor
urban and rural ones.
Most children who grow up in affluent areas have at least
two things going for them when applying to college: parents
who have degrees and are intensely committed to helping
them get into the best possible school (which can include paying for test prep, helping with essays, and taking them on campus visits), and on-staff high school counselors ready to assist
with the application process. Low-income students, however,
often have neither.
Counselors in economically distressed neighborhoods
rarely get to spend much time on college advising when they're
helping students who may be homeless, food insecure, or
touched by violence. A recent survey of high school counselors
found that only 33 percent of U.S. public high schools have a
full-time or part-time counselor focused exclusively on college
advising, compared to 68 percent of private schools. In other
words, the students who need help the most are the ones getting it the least.

That's where two groups come in: College Possible and College Advising Corps. Both recruit promising recent college graduates to counsel high school students in poor areas around the
country. College Possible, which was founded in 2000, is a nonprofit staffed by AmeriCorps members who do on-the-ground
advising in needy high schools. College Advising Corps, which
started in 2005, likewise inserts advisers in schools all around
the country. While the organization's scope is modest, it has
proven that its approach works. In 2016-17, students who met
with a CAC adviser were 30 percent more likely to apply to
college-and 24 percent more likely to be accepted-than those
who didn't.
Now, thanks in part to that proof of concept, lawmakers in
a number of states are starting to work on policy solutions. Utah
is currently developing an initiative to install an adviser in every high school in the state by 2022. Meanwhile, North Carolina
lawmakers are working on legislation that would place a college
adviser in every county.
Other states have also been considering ways to ensure
that high school students enroll in college. Texas and Louisiana have each passed laws requiring students to complete
their federal student aid, or FAFSA, forms to graduate. The

College Advising Corps
inserts advisers in schools
all around the country. In
2016-17, students who met
with a CAC adviser were 30
percent more likely to apply
to college-and 24 percent
more likely to be accepted-
than those who didn't.
idea is to effectively preempt the possibility that, come August, the student won't be able to start because they haven't
finished their paperwork. The germ for this experiment came
from a few schools that forced or incentivized their students
to complete FAFSA forms in order to go to senior prom. "This
is one of the most innovative policy approaches that really
gets inside the seventeen-year-old mind-set," Nicole Hurd,
the founder and CEO of College Advising Corps, told me.
It's not easy to innovate. But the more that university leaders, reformers, and entrepreneurs step inside the shoes of students, the more they're able to develop cutting-edge ideas that
can make college more accessible and effective. Those breakthroughs may not always make headlines, but they represent
the ideals of American higher education at its best.
Eric Cortellessa is digital editor at the Washington Monthly.
Washington Monthly

Washington Monthly - September/October 2019

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