Students Who Meet With High School Counselor Much More Likely To Receive Financial Aid For College

New data released this week by the National Center For Educational Statistics reveal a strong relationship between students meeting with their high school counselors and their later success in receiving financial aid to attend college.

The data, part of the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, addressed these questions:

1. Whether students who planned to go to college also met with a high school counselor about financial aid and whether there was an association between those meetings and the likelihood of the students completing required financial aid forms.
2. Whether there was a relationship between meeting with a high school counselor and the likelihood that students who enrolled in college also received financial aid.

The High School Longitudinal Study followed a national sample of more than 23,000 students who were in the ninth grade in 2009. Those students subsequently answered various surveys between 2009 and 2016. In addition, the students’ college transcripts and financial aid records were collected in 2017–18.

What percentage of students who met with a high school counselor about financial aid also filled out a Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA)?

One of the first steps for students seeking financial aid for college is that they complete the FAFSA, the form that state agencies, private funders and most colleges use to determine eligibility for need-based financial aid, like federal Pell Grants. In addition to helping students learn about college and career options, high school counselors also help them learn about the importance of the FAFSA to their obtaining various sources of financial aid such as loans as well as grants and scholarships that do not need to be paid back.

In 2012 when most of the students in the study were in the 11th grade, they were asked how far they thought they would go in school. Fifty-four percent said they intended to go on to college.

Among those who said they planned to go to college, 87% who met with a counselor about financial aid completed a FAFSA, compared with 59% of those who did not meet with a counselor, a whopping 28-percentage point difference.

This pattern was found for students whose parents had a high school education or less as well as for those whose parents had a college degree, but the difference in FAFSA filing for those students who did and did not meet with a counselor was somewhat larger for students with parents who had a high school education or less than it was for students whose parents earned a bachelor’s or higher degree.

How did meeting with a high school counselor about financial aid relate to receiving need-based or merit-based grants in students’ first year of college?

Among students in the study who had attended college by 2016–17, a higher percentage of those who had met with a high school counselor about financial aid received need-based college grants than those who had not met with a counselor.

Two-thirds (67%) of college students who met with a high school counselor received need-based grants, compared with 45% of college students who did not meet with a high school counselor. In contrast, there was a negligible difference in merit-based grants received by students who had met with a high school counsellor (32%) compared to those who had not (30%).

The report is careful to caution that its analysis does not prove a causal relationship between meeting with a counselor and receiving financial aid for college. Nonetheless, the implications are obvious. Providing sufficient high school counseling resources has a strong association with students taking – and succeeding with – the necessary steps to obtain need-based financial aid for college.

Helping students understand how financial aid works and how, if they receive it, they can afford college requires a strong ground game that needs to start early. High school counselors are the key troops in that effort.

The study also points to the importance of supplemental advising programs such as the recently announced expansion of a Bloomberg Philanthropies and Matriculate partnership that will provide free, personal “near-peer” college advising to thousands of high-achieving students from lower-income families through Bloomberg Philanthropies’ CollegePoint initiative.