Exploring Advising Through In-Depth Landscape Analysis and Framework Creation - College and Career Advising Field Assessment and Framework
Screenshot from Kinetic West final report
Services: Research and Analytics, Community Engagement
Focus Areas: K-12 education, Postsecondary education
Staff: Avery, Tsewone, Julia
During summer and fall 2023, Kinetic West worked with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on their goal to increase postsecondary enrollments for all students. Through this work Kinetic West was asked to investigate the enabling conditions that support strong college and career advising for Washington state students and understand how Washington state is performing relative to those areas.
In order to better understand what makes a strong college and career advising environment, we decided to conduct a field assessment and develop a framework ultimately culminating in the College and Career Advising Framework and the College and Career Advising Field Assessment. This framework and assessment helped us understand local and national best practices of equitable and effective college and career advising, assess Washington state’s college and career advising performance and identify opportunities to improve advising.
The assessment aimed to capture the current landscape of college and career advising and was based on the following data sources:
Analysis of 150+ statewide district, school and community-based organization survey respondents on college and career vision, staffing, partnerships, curriculum, data and equity practices.
College and career advising workforce analysis.
20 interviews on best practice districts and national leaders in college and career advising.
From this analysis and data collection, the Kinetic West team found that college and career advising in Washington state is acknowledged as critically important by schools, districts, students, families and communities but there is significant inconsistency across the advising field – both between districts, and school to school within districts. Additionally, there has been little holistic guidance for districts, schools, and communities on “what good looks like.” These findings and research culminated in the creation of recommendations for the Gates Foundation to use in addressing gaps and inequities in postsecondary education pursuit.
While conducting the assessment, the Kinetic West team also reviewed 43 existing frameworks/reports and analyzed over 34 job descriptions. After gathering all of this information we were able to distill our findings into an overall framework to assess the current advising environment in Washington state. The framework outlined several key components of assessing advising success including vision, staffing, partnerships, curriculum, data and equitable supports. By applying this framework to the current career and college advising landscape we recommended that investment should be expanded in high school and beyond planning, including staffing support, curriculum development, and data collection into new statewide platform and that we should support funding of post-high school summer transition roles.
By creating these tools, we are proud to support the Gates Foundation in their goal addressing gaps in college and career advising. Through using the College and Career Advising Framework we’ve created a way to assess equitable and effective advising and portrayed the current state of advising in Washington through the College and Career Advising Field Assessment. We look forward to continuing to partner with organizations and initiatives invested in student success and would welcome the opportunity to expand this work to other states.