With many states adopting legislation seeking to provide more access to CTE pathways and career exposure in high school, many district leaders are faced with the challenge of meeting new requirements without being provided additional funding to hire counselors or advisors, who are essential to students’ career-preparation process.
Most guidance counselors already have high caseloads, with the national average student-to-counselor ratio being around 376:1, far above the 250:1 recommended by the American School Counselor Association.
As a result, a number of student advising software platforms have entered the market and are growing in popularity. These platforms are intended to enhance school-level advising without the need to hire additional counselors. However, there hasn't been much objective research about their effectiveness.
To learn more, MDRC conducted a two-year study of five different schools using two popular CTE advising platforms, Xello and YouScience, with ninth and tenth grade students. Guiding questions included:
- Do career advising tools truly enhance the number and quality of options students are presented with when considering career-aligned courses, college options, and careers?
- Do students put the same stock into personalized recommendations from tech advising tools as they do those from counselors or teachers?
The study made four main observations:
- In schools where school staff members and leaders were committed to implementation and the technology worked well, students tended to have better experiences.
- School staff members and students both had preconceived notions about what students were capable of, but reacted differently to results from the software platforms that did not fit those notions. Teachers and counselors encouraged students to explore unexpected results or recommendations from the software, whereas students tended to be less flexible about the careers they wanted to pursue.
- The advising platforms exposed students to careers they were previously unfamiliar with, and students learned about the salaries they could earn and the education required to succeed in those careers.
- Students could not always act on the recommendations from the platforms when picking career-related courses. Often, students’ decisions were limited by course offerings at their schools and were also influenced by what was socially acceptable in their community or family context.
