Dr. Derron Hilts, assistant professor of education at Niagara University, and his colleagues, Dr. Yanhong Liu, associate professor in the School of Education at Syracuse University, and Dr. Xiuyan Guo, a psychometrician at Pearson VUE, recently published a paper entitled, “An investigation of student outcomes based on student-to-school counselor ratios” in the inaugural issue of the peer-reviewed journal Counseling Scholarship & Practice in Educational Communities.
The researchers examined the differences in students’ four-year college enrollment, graduation rate, chronic absenteeism, and standardized test scores based on student-to-school counselor ratios across New York State during the 2021-2022 school year. Their findings supported previous studies conducted over the past decade that suggest lower student-to-school counselor ratios enable counselors to more effectively deliver programmatic services aimed at facilitating students’ development and achievement.
“Our analyses generally support that investment in school counseling resources, such as more school counselors, may yield important benefits for students across grade levels,” said Dr. Hilts. “We also recognize that optimal caseload sizes should be further considered and explored in conjunction with other system and ecological contexts, and that evaluating and tracking the aggregate time that school counselors spend in direct and indirect services could be particularly beneficial for improving service delivery in schools.”
For more information on Niagara University’s school counseling program, visit https://www.niagara.edu/programs/school-counseling/.
CSPEC is a peer-reviewed journal with a focus on rigorous empirical, conceptual, and applied scholarship pertaining to mental health, wellness, prevention, education, and career activities that occur in and around preK-12 educational settings. It is the official journal of the Fredrickson Center for School Counseling Outcome Research and Evaluation at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst.
Dr. Hilts and Dr. Liu also co-authored a paper that was recently published in the Journal of Counseling & Development, the flagship journal of the American Counseling Association. “Ecological Factors That Predict School Counselors’ Comprehensive School Counseling Program Implementation,” investigated whether sociocultural factors, professional development experiences, intrapersonal and interpersonal factors, and systemic factors predict school counselors’ CSCP implementation. A national sample of 265 school counselors were surveyed for the study, which indicated that there are significant associations between these ecological factors and school counselors’ programmatic outcomes; specifically that self-advocacy, transformational leadership, motivation, and role stress were significant predictors of CSCP outcomes. Eunji Park, a graduate student at Syracuse University, was also a co-author.
