Only three percent of young high
school graduates report that they didn’t
have a high school guidance counselor.
high school guidance system stunningly
poor reviews (see fig. 1, p. 76). Among
young adults who have graduated from
high school and at least started some
form of postsecondary education, a
surprising 6 in 10 give their high school
guidance counselors ratings of fair or
poor for helping them think about
different careers they might want to
pursue. Sixty-seven percent give their
counselors fair or poor ratings for
helping them decide which school to
attend, with 35 percent giving the
lowest possible rating of poor.
Respondents give similarly low
ratings for how much counselors helped
them find ways to pay for college, with
33 percent of young people saying their
counselors’ performance was actually
poor. Although the ratings are marginally better on helping students with the
college applications process, even on
this dimension, more than half of the
survey respondents ( 55 percent) assign
ratings of fair or poor.
In an episode of The Simpsons, Homer
recalled his visit with a guidance counselor who told him that he was glad to
help any student whose last name
started with a letter from N through Z.
The show’s writers latched onto a
common perception among students—
that guidance counselors do not see
them as individuals and regard them as
little more than a name on a file that
somehow wound up on their desk. In
the Public Agenda study, nearly one-half
of young people ( 48 percent) say they
usually felt like “just another face in the
crowd” in dealing with their high school
guidance counselor—slightly more than
the 47 percent who say that their counselors really made an effort to get to
know them and work with them.
In focus groups conducted as part
of the research, young people often
described experiences that can only
be described as jarringly bureaucratic
and impersonal. “We had to take a test,”
