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I spent much of the past several years working for a a UC Berkeley-based college access program, guiding high school students toward meaningful college experiences that lead to more positive life outcomes. Every day, I helped students navigate applications, financial aid, and the overwhelming number of choices they faced. For many of them, I was the only person in their life who could walk them through these steps. Without that advice, their path to college may have been far more uncertain.

This is a hugely important job. But here’s the thing: It shouldn’t need to exist.

The fact that college advisers and other college access professionals are so essential reveals a fundamental flaw in our education system. Educational challenges are deeply interconnected to other systemic issues like economic inequality, health care access, housing instability, mental health, and the school-to-prison pipeline. 

A college admissions process already riddled with complexity is made all the worse by the deep inequities baked into it. Students with well-resourced support systems at home or in school can manage. But for many, especially potential first-generation college students and students from low-income backgrounds, the process adds to an unfair obstacle course. 

It’s difficult to imagine a future where college access professionals aren’t necessary to ensure equitable outcomes. Despite years of conversations about making college more accessible, the truth is that we are still far from closing the educational attainment gap. As we address those deeper challenges that make that process seem so insurmountable for so many students, we need more college advisers to help them through it.

Today, there simply is not enough school support to meet demand. The American School Counselor Association recommends a student-to-counselor ratio of 250:1, yet the national average has climbed to 376:1. In some states, there is just one counselor for every 600 students. 

Among the counselors who do exist, there’s little guarantee that a student’s college-going aspirations will be a topic of discussion. In fact, only one-third of public high schools have a counselor dedicated specifically to college advising. Most school counselors are primarily trained in mental health support, and they receive minimal formal education in college planning. As a result, far too many students never have a single conversation about college before they graduate.

This lack of guidance disproportionately affects first-generation students, low-income students, and students of color, leaving them to confront a complex system on their own. But it’s not just that they have to navigate the college process alone — their navigation is different from the start. 

These student groups often attend schools with higher levels of poverty, leading to poorer quality teaching, less rigorous course offerings, fewer extracurricular and out-of-school learning experiences, and fewer mentors with the knowledge and capacity to support students in their college-going endeavors. 

They are also more likely to be tracked out of honors and AP classes and less likely to have teachers and administrators who expect them to attend college and therefore mentor and encourage them through that process. They rarely see themselves represented at the institutions they might aspire to attend, perpetuating beliefs that they do not belong there. Financial barriers discourage them from pursuing higher education every step of the way. 

The consequences are staggering: Just one-third of Black adults have earned an associate degree or higher, compared to half of white adults. While about 90% of students from wealthier families go to college, just half of students from low-income families do so.

The COVID-19 pandemic only widened these gaps, creating a crater that — even five years later — many districts and students are still struggling to climb out of. School closures and remote learning meant students lost critical access to in-person advising, and many missed out on college application and financial aid deadlines altogether. Many high school seniors who had planned to go to college simply never made it there. The pandemic exposed just how fragile the college pipeline is — and just how vital it is to have advisers guiding students through it.

When students from under-served communities do make it to college, we celebrate them as resilient. Many college access professionals themselves come from backgrounds where they had to be resilient through college enrollment and graduation, creating a cycle of resilience as they continue to take on the weight of the system’s failures. 

We view overcoming this broken system as a badge of honor. While resilience is an important tool for taking on life’s challenges, students shouldn’t have to fight against systemic obstacles just to reach the starting line. College should be a bridge to opportunity and economic mobility, and getting there should not be an endurance test. 

In an ideal world, college advisers wouldn’t exist because disparities in college enrollment and attainment wouldn’t exist. That’s the system we should be building — a system rooted in a culture that expects and prepares all students for college and where educators and administrators see college-going as the norm, not the exception. That’s not the world we live in today. Until it is, we need to invest in more college access professionals in more schools — because for too many students, their future depends on it.

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