WASHINGTON — The federal government should do more to ensure that prospective college students and their families get better and more timely information about what it takes to get into college and how to pay for it.
That was the heart of a message delivered by a panel of experts Wednesday during a U.S. House subcommittee hearing titled “Keeping College Within Reach: Enhancing Transparency for Students, Families and Taxpayers.”
While there is an abundance of information on college-going available on the Internet, getting the right information to students remains a challenge, said Donald Heller, dean of the College of Education at Michigan State University.
“And it is critical that we help prospective students to get the right information in their hands at the necessary times,” Heller told the U.S. House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Training in recommending that students begin to learn about college-going and what it takes as early as middle school.
Lamenting the lack of good college counseling at the secondary level, Heller recommended that the federal government consider a “highly-targeted, federally-funded program to place more qualified college counselors in schools serving lower-income students.”
“Today, we have a higher proportion of students who aspired to attend college, and they are distributed among a broader set of high schools than in the past,” Heller said. “However, we have not provided access to good college counseling in the schools to many of these students who have historically been underrepresented in higher education, those predominantly from lower-income and racial minority families.”
Heller also suggested that the federal government partner with nonprofits, such as the National College Advising Corps—a program that places recent college graduates into high schools serving mostly low-income and first-generation college students—to get more counselors into schools.
