Although LAUSD high schools offer college readiness supports, our findings suggest that existing supports are insufficient to provide students the assistance they need. To reach more students, and to provide the individualized counseling that research suggests is helpful for college access,^vi our findings point to several strategies that LAUSD may want to consider. We list these strategies as a holistic set of recommendations emerging from our research, and do not order them in terms of importance because research in this area is too incomplete to prioritize particular strategies over others. We suggest that LAUSD consider the following recommendations:

1. Set consistent, districtwide expectations for the college access-related resources available to students, the level of individualized support families can expect, and the college-related topics that will be covered at each grade level.^vii

2. Encourage schools to consider how staff might work together as a team to ensure that all students complete key college application and enrollment tasks. Perhaps with an assistant principal or lead or college counselor coordinating this team effort, staff could, for example, assist counselors with registering students for the SAT and ensuring eligible students receive fee waivers, following up on recommendation letters, supporting families’ FAFSA completion and verification, or reminding students of college enrollment tasks over the summer following senior year. A team planning process might also help identify tasks that administrators or other staff might be able to take on, to free up counselors’ time during particularly critical periods during the college application process (such as the fall of students’ senior year). Distributing staff responsibilities for college readiness more broadly may also help nurture the development of a college-going culture in schools, which research suggests is important for enhancing students’ college enrollment.^viii

3. Provide additional college-counseling related professional development to school staff responsible for college counseling tasks, particularly in areas of need identified by counselors, including college eligibility and college application requirements, use of online college planning tools and resources to track student progress, and financial aid applications and awards.

4. Deliberately implement a select set of strategies that are already used by some schools, and that seem promising, and rigorously evaluate their influence on important outcomes such as college application, enrollment, persistence, and completion. These strategies might include the following practices:

a. Adopting a common checklist throughout the high school years, or using online tracking and college resource tools, to support counselors and other school staff, parents, and students themselves in tracking students’ progress toward important college milestones (e.g., all students take the SAT/ACT, complete the FAFSA by the Cal Grant deadline, apply to a certain number of colleges, etc.)^ix and

b. Using time during the instructional day to focus on a sequenced curriculum related to the college application and financial aid process throughout the high school (and possibly middle school) years. By building college-related tasks into class assignments or class time (e.g., working on essays or other college application writing assignments in English class), schools may more systematically reach students who might not otherwise seek out assistance.

5. In addition, to help school staff ensure that students receive quality support, reduce duplication of services, and mitigate students falling through the cracks, the district could maximize the effectiveness of existing partnerships with external service providers by:

a. Recognizing that school counselors and other school staff who connect schools and students to external providers play a critical liaison and relationship-management role, for which staff may need information and resources;

b. Asking external service providers to contribute to a common system for keeping track of which students have received which college-related services, and with what regularity and intensity, so that the district or individual schools can determine which students are not receiving sufficient help;

c. Working with external service providers to understand which types of information about students’ needs and academic preparation would help providers serve their students well, and providing this information, as appropriate; and

d. Evaluating the effectiveness of the college-related services students receive from external providers.

Optimizing the college readiness resources available throughout the system and matching them to students’ individual needs requires coordination and time. School staff, particularly counselors, are at the center of this challenge. And yet counselors vary in their training and experiences in college counseling. Counselors will continue to need additional support to bring the promise of widespread college access to fruition, whether from the district and its centralized efforts to ramp up counseling services, from external service providers and the programs and supports they offer, or from additional school staff incorporating college readiness responsibilities into their existing roles and activities.

Our findings suggest that the system of college readiness supports and resources available to students in Los Angeles is broad, in the sense that school and district staff and a diverse array of providers support students at key points during high school. Yet, this collective system also appears to be somewhat thin, in terms of the proportion of students served and the intensity of support they receive. Improving students’ access to college readiness supports and completion of college access milestones will require a consistent commitment in Los Angeles—among leaders on the school board and in the central office, school staff and students, external providers, community and civic organizations, and philanthropists and funding agencies. LAUSD’s collaboration on identifying strategies for data collection for this report—for example, by adding counselor survey questions to the School Experience Survey—and the College Futures Foundation’s support of this type of research, were essential for taking this first step in gathering information to inform decision-making. In upcoming work, our ongoing researcher-practitioner collaboration will explore college counseling supports in LAUSD in more depth, after talking with counselors and observing professional development meetings focused on counseling; examine differences among schools in their college access supports; and describe recently-collected survey data on whether and where LAUSD twelfth graders applied to college. We are hopeful that Los Angeles can sustain this commitment to using research to inform our understanding of students’ educational experiences at key transition points on the path to their postsecondary futures, and how those experiences can be improved.