In U.S. public high schools, school counselors are tasked with assisting students and their families in the college-going process. This support includes building student college expectations and helping students search for, apply to, and enroll in postsecondary institutions. Even with this formal support, students, particularly those most at-risk, hold lower postsecondary expectations, matriculate to, and persist through higher education in disproportionately low rates. Moreover, when these students do matriculate, they often do so at institutions with less selective enrollment criteria than their academic credentials suggest they would be successful, a phenomenon known as academic undermatch. Using a mixed methods approach, this study seeks to understand how college counseling dosage, as administered primarily by school counselors, influences student postsecondary academic match expectations. Further, this study explores school counselor responsibilities and college counseling beliefs in high-need schools to better understand the context of their college counseling efforts.
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