Judith Kleinfeld, Joe Cooper, and Nathan Kyle

The Postsecondary Counselor Program offers a new model for increasing the success of Native American students in college. In contrast to university-based strategies, this program is located within a K-12 school district and represents a fundamental change in the role of the public schools. A postsecondary counselor, familiar with individual students and their families, takes on the responsibility of guiding Native American students through their college years. The counselor provides to Native American students the support and system know-how that middle class students routinely receive from their parents. The Alaskan school district that originated this program reports substantial increases in college success. Other Alaska school districts are adopting this model.

Developing new strategies to increase the success of Native American students in college is an important challenge. The number of Native American college graduates continues to be low. While 23% of the Caucasian population has completed four or more years of college, only 6% of the American Indian population has done so (Astin, 1982). Some advances in college success rates were made during the early 1970s as a result of institutional changes stimulated by the "War on Poverty," but progress has slowed (Wright, 1985).

In Alaska, an even greater gap exists in the college completion rates of the Caucasian and Native populations. While 25% of Alaska’s Caucasian population has completed four or more years of college, less than 4% of the Native population has done so (U.S. Census, 1980). Assessing the extent of recent progress is difficult because of the lack of comprehensive statistics between census periods. Some students, for example, choose not to identify their ethnicity on institutional forms. Many students withdraw from college and later re-enter or transfer to different institutions—a pattern which makes analysis of yearly changes in college success rates difficult. Nonetheless, statistics at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, the institution enrolling the largest proportion of Alaska Natives, indicate that college success rates increased in the 1970s but have since leveled off (Kleinfeld, Travis, and Hubbard, 1982). In 1981-82, about 63% of rural freshmen, most of whom were Alaska Natives, left college before the end of the first year (Kleinfeld, McDiarmid, and Hagstrom, 1985).

Given these indications that improvements in Native American college success rates are tapering off, it is important to search for fresh approaches in assisting students to enter and graduate from college. Nationally, programmatic efforts to increase Native American college success have taken three major forms. One of these is the pre-college orientation program, usually offered to Native American students during their junior or senior years of high school (Williams, 1981; Decker and Granzow, 1978; Herman, 1985). These programs typically follow the Upward Bound model in which students travel to a college campus for an intensive summer program stressing both academic preparation and socialization into college life. Frequently, the summer preparation is followed by continuing academic work and counseling service delivered at the high school.

Special student services programs for Native students at the university have been a second major program strategy (Wright, 1985). These programs typically combine academic support services, such as tutoring and remedial work, with social support services, such as counseling and a recreational center. Often Native American Studies programs and an emphasis on recruiting minority faculty accompany such student services programs.

A third strategy has been career-focused programs which have the goal of increasing the numbers of Native American students in particular occupational areas, such as medicine (Beiswenger, 1995), natural resource development (Indian Resource Development Annual Report, 1985), engineering (Landis, 1985), or education (Moore-Eyman, 1981; Kirkness, 1981). These programs take a variety of forms. At the pre-college level, many stress increasing Native American students’ awareness of the occupation. If Native American students enter college with an interest in the career field, the programs provide various combinations of financial support, counseling, academic assistance, coursework tailored to students’ background and geographical location, and summer employment in the occupational area.

These three major approaches to increasing Native Americans’ college success share common characteristics. Typically, they are initiated by and located within a college or university. Although they often operate in cooperation with Indian organizations or school districts, the programs have little long-term personal connection with students’ families and communities. The programs tend to rely on special funding from foundations or state and federal sources. Consequently, they are vulnerable to grant priorities and funding cut-backs. Most important, the programs are mission-based rather than student based. They provide services to students so long as they remain within the scope of the program mission—graduation from a particular college or entrance into a particular career field. If students drop out, the program typically loses contact with them.

This paper describes a very different approach to increasing the success of Native American students in college, the "Postsecondary Counselor Program." In brief, the school district provides a counselor for Native American students at the point where they are about to graduate from high school. This counselor is someone who knows the students personally and is familiar with the student’s family and school background. The counselor’s fundamental attachment is to the individual student and not to a particular college or career program. Very much like a parent, the counselor guides students as they try out different pathways to adulthood. The counselor offers the same type of support to Native American students as middle class students routinely receive from their parents. The counselor is someone who knows the students well, knows the system well, and can manipulate the system on their behalf.

We found no description of a program of this type in the research literature on American Indian students, higher education, counseling. This program developed in Alaska’s Yukon-Koyukuk School District without special external funding. During the period the program has operated, college drop-out of Native American students in this district fell from over 50% to 16%. The Postsecondary Counselor Program model has been widely discussed in Alaska. Three other school districts which enroll primarily rural Native students have adopted it.

The Postsecondary Counselor Program differs in fundamental ways from conventional programs to help Native American students succeed in college. First, the program is lodged in the central office of a K-12 school district, rather than in a college or agency. Thus, the program constitutes a significant departure from the traditional role of the school district. In American schools, the responsibility of a school district to its students traditionally ends upon high school graduation. The Postsecondary Counselor Program continues the responsibility of the district to its students through the early adult period.

Second, the Postsecondary Counselor Program is student-based, not institution-based or mission-based. The counselor stays with particular students as they move in and out of postsecondary institutions, hospitals, correctional institutions, and alternating periods of urban and village life. The counselor thus acquires a knowledge of the student’s background, history, and patterns of behavior that makes counseling much more responsive to the individual person.

The Yukon-Koyukuk School District is a regional school district which serves ten small isolated villages scattered over a 65,000 square mile area--nearly the size of the state of Washington. Most of the villages have an Athabascan Indian population and an economy based on subsistence activities, some wage employment, and government assistance programs.

The Postsecondary Counselor Program began through informal activities common in many rural Alaska school districts. Teachers were concerned about the young adults, particularly the young men, who graduated from high school and hung around home. Some were causing trouble at the high school. The teachers were used to helping their own high school students drink about a postsecondary education. The teachers extended their efforts to the young adults staying at home: helping them fill out college application forms, figure out a package of financial aid, and cope with the details of getting off to school. During the year, the teachers telephoned the students away at school to find out how they were getting along, gave them local news, and helped them with problems that came up during the school year. The approach seemed to reduce the high college drop-out rate, and the school district decided to continue it through a formal program.

In 1982, the school district started the program on an official basis. The Postsecondary Counselor Program has two primary goals: (1) to help graduates find a college or a vocational program suited to their interests and talents, and (2) to help graduates remain in school.

The Yukon-Koyukuk School District assigned specific responsibility for postsecondary students to a staff person located in the district office. The assignment requires about a third of the staff person’s time. The postsecondary counselor also has responsibility for district-wide activities, requiring travel to villages and to urban centers. The counselor can efficiently combine working with postsecondary students and working on other district activities.

Critical to the success of the program is the type of person who assumes the role of postsecondary counselor. The first counselor was an Alaska Native female, a teacher in the school district. The present counselor is a Black male, a former teacher who has spent many years in the district.

The school district deliberately chooses for the postsecondary counselor role a person who knows how to work within bureaucratic systems and who has personally experienced the frustration of dealing with the majority culture as a member of a minority ethnic group. The school district also chooses a counselor who has spent considerable time in the villages and knows the students, their families, and community values and lifestyles.

The program started with one postsecondary counselor based in the central office. Since then, a system of "satellite" counselors has developed informally in about half the villages. These volunteers, teachers or community people, alert the postsecondary counselor to problems and assist in counseling.

The Postsecondary Counselor Program does not replace or in any way substitute for the district’s conventional counseling program. The district also employs two itinerant counselors who provide academic, personal, and vocational counseling to students.

The postsecondary counselor is an additional counselor who takes responsibility for two groups of students: (1) seniors on the verge of high school graduation, and (2) young adults hanging around at home. The counselor helps them with college and financial aid applications--keeping copies in case the students lose theirs. They help with the myriad of details that come up when a student goes away to school, like finding the least expensive plane fare, working out appropriate living arrangements, and finding child care.

While students are away at school, the counselor monitors their well-being much in the manner of a parent eager to help but anxious to allow their children independence. They visit them on campus, find out how they are doing from other college students, and take them out to dinner. Students telephone their counselor with problems: financial aid that didn’t come through, difficulties with roommates, or getting into trouble. The district accepts charges for these long distance calls. In the superintendent’s view, the cost is trivial and the students need to know that they can always get through to someone.

In addition to helping the students, the postsecondary counselor also assists the postsecondary institutions. When problems arise with students, the institution often seeks advice on the most appropriate way to deal with the individual’s situation. Mutually supportive working relationships have developed between the postsecondary counselor and the various colleges and Native organizations that work with district students.

The postsecondary counselor also supports village parents who are worried about their children away from home. They let parents know how their children are doing and assures them that being homesick at college is normal and no cause for alarm.

In short, the postsecondary counselor maintains the personal nurturance characteristic of the village and the small high schools from which students have come as the students make the transition to college and adult roles. While a few local residents criticize the program for "being in the handholding business," the district superintendent maintains that such personal support is essential and culturally consistent. Such continuing support is nothing different from what middle class urban parents routinely provide to their children.

Just as "effective schools" closely monitor their achievement test scores, the school district closely monitors the postsecondary success rate of its students. The counselor provides detailed statistical reports to both the superintendent and the district school board. These reports are not vague "graduate follow-up studies." The board views the statistics as concrete measures of program results.

Prior to the postsecondary counseling program, the district did not systematically collect information on postsecondary dropout. Experienced district staff, however estimates that over 50% of the students dropped out.

After the postsecondary counselor program was instituted, the district began to keep careful records. Drop-out rates fell to 16%. Thus, from 1983 to 1986, 159 Yukon-Koyukuk graduates entered postsecondary programs, and only 25 students dropped out. In addition, the postsecondary counselor worked with 105 other students. Of these, 71 have applied to postsecondary programs and are waiting to enter. The remaining 34 students applied to postsecondary programs but did not go for such reasons as pregnancy or sickness.

A college drop-out rate of 16% is remarkably low. At the University of Alaska, in comparison, 63% of students from similar backgrounds typically drop out during their freshman year (Kleinfeld, et al., 1985).

The dramatic success of the Postsecondary Counselor Program, along with its low cost and lack of reliance on outside funding sources, has created considerable interest among other school districts with large Native American student populations. Three other Alaska school districts have adopted the approach. One of these reports an increase in freshman survival from about 2% to 47% (Schaeffer, 1986). The other programs are too recent to have developed reliable statistics.

The Yukon-Koyukuk District has found that implementing the program has three major steps:

The district must ascertain why its students are not staying in college. The Postsecondary Counselor Program is useful when many students are academically prepared for college but have difficulty negotiating urban life and institutional bureaucracies. It is not useful when basic changes are needed in the district’s academic program to prepare students academically for college work.

It is important to discuss the program with school board members informally and to deal with board member concerns, such as the overprotection of district students. Once consensus is achieved, a postsecondary counseling position can be established and funded at formal school board meetings.

Selecting the counselor is a crucial task. The Alaska districts using the program have all employed minority counselors who are well-regarded in the local community. Familiarity with the school and community gives the counselor an advantage in working out informal referral and assistance systems.

The Postsecondary Counselor Program offers a very different model for increasing the college success of Native American students. The program is lodged within a school district, rather than a college or agency. It extends the responsibility of a school district for its students past high school graduation into the young adult years. The program focuses on individual students rather than success at a particular college or in a particular career field. The Postsecondary Counselor Program provides rural Native American students with the same type of personal attention and support during the difficult early adult years that middle class students take for granted.

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