Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Students make many choices in high school which affect their human capital accumulation and labor market outcomes. These are often complex choices and many students lack the resources and information needed to make optimal choices (Hoxby & Avery, 2013). School counselors have long aimed to assist students with these choices, but little is known about how much influence they have over students' choices and long-term outcomes. This paper provides the first quantitative evidence on how much counselors can influence students' choices, academic achievement, and education attainment, as well as how much variance exists in the ways that counselors influence students. I show that counselors are an important element of the education production function and a crucial lever for improving students' human capital accumulation.

I measure how counselors influence students’ high school and college outcomes, and how these effects vary across counselors, using data from over 600 counselors and 200,000 students in Massachusetts and Wake County North Carolina. I focus on schools which assign students to counselors based on the first letter(s) of their last name. These quasi-random assignment rules vary over time and across schools, so I use them to show how a student’s counselor assignment is causally linked to a range of outcomes during and after high school.

Value-added estimates for counselors indicate that being assigned to a better counselor is roughly as important for postsecondary outcomes and earnings as being assigned to a better teacher (Jackson, 2018). High school counselors impact attendance, AP course enrollment, SAT taking, high school graduation, college enrollment, college selectivity, and college degree attainment. A one standard deviation better counselor increases high school completion and four-year college enrollment by about 2 percentage points. These estimates are larger for low-income and low-achieving students, who may receive less guidance from their parents or social networks.

Many counselors specialize in a few types of student outcomes or students, rather than improving a wide range of outcomes for a variety of students. Specialization most often occurs over more rare outcomes, such as high school behavior and highly selective college attendance. Counselors’ effects on high achieving students are also quite different than their effects on low achieving students. In addition, students benefit from being matched to a counselor of the same race or a counselor who attended a local college. I use these estimates to discuss how changes to counselor assignment mechanisms, based on specialization or observable characteristics, may increase student success.

Finally, I explore the relationship between counselor caseloads and student success. I find that larger caseloads are associated with worse student outcomes but assignment to a counselor with a small caseload appears less important than assignment to an effective counselor, at least in places like Massachusetts where caseloads are near the national average. Overall, my results indicate significant potential for counselors and increased access to effective counselors to increase educational attainment and close socioeconomic gaps. Principal ratings and credentials, however, are not efficient ways to identify effective counselors.