Biblio Reviews

If you've ever wondered why the guidance department seems to be less than helpful in counseling during the college access process, there's a reason. According to Mandy Savitz-Romer and Suzanne Bouffard in Ready, Willing, and Able: A Developmental Approach to College Access and Success  (2014), that reason is the following: "...[S]chool counselors, who typically hold master's degrees in counseling and licenses provided by state departments of education, rarely obtain training in college counseling...In fact, according to the National Association of College Admissions and Counseling, out of the more than four hundred counselor education programs in graduate schools, only about forty include a credit bearing course specific to college counseling, and even those courses are not necessarily required" (p. 35). While not the main argument of the book, I found this bit of information very interesting because it certainly helped me understand why, from personal experien...

One of my handful of memories from middle school and early years in the U.S. comes from seventh or eighth grade. It's hard to remember which year because we shared the same classrooms and teachers during those two years. In any case, we had a guest speaker, a relatively young (and white) one, and that's about all I remember about why he was there to speak to us. My strongest memory about this speaker, though, was a question he had asked: "Raise your hand if you plan on going to college?" I remember thinking, "Well, d'uh, we're all going to college. That's the goal of going to school. What a dumb question." Reflection upon this particular moment reveals a few things: Until that moment, I didn't consider that I would have a choice in the matter. In my household, that was the expectation. A relatively new immigrant to the U.S., I was an innocent. I wasn't aware of the hostile racial history of the United States and the bitter legacy ...