Academic & Career Planning

Academic and career planning are essential components of a quality educational experience that help students transition into their post-secondary lives. To ensure successful school to work transitions, Rural students need support exploring, planning, and pursuing their academic and career interests.  

  

Academic Planning

Since 2009, both legislative and policy efforts in Colorado have supported ensuring that every high school student and ideally, every middle school student in the state has their own career and academic plan. ICAP (Individualized Career & Academic Planning) is a research-based, multi-year, developmentally appropriate process designed to support secondary students in their transition to adulthood. The goal of ICAP is to ensure every student receives the support needed to make a successful post-secondary transition.  

  

Career Planning

Rural students are less likely than urban students to attend college, but once enrolled, they  are equally as likely to graduate (Guiffrida, 2008). Rural students also tend to attend different types of colleges compared to students from urban areas. Learn more about the research and how to prepare rural students for college.

  • College Approach is a college tutoring service that assists first-generation and low-income students through the college application and admission process. Services are free and their highly-qualified tutors have helped students achieve better outcomes with college admissions and financial aid. 

  • My Colorado Journey, previously Colleges in Colorado, was initiated by the Department of Higher Education to serve the citizens of the State of Colorado by promoting access to, affordability of, and success in higher education and training for all students. Coloradans can use the platform to explore career and education pathways, break down barriers to post-secondary attainment, and create a plan for their postsecondary and workforce success.  

  • Portrait of a Graduate is a locally developed, but globally positioned vision that serves as a north star for system transformation. It provides strategic direction for the redesign of the overall educational experience for students, and its collective vision reinvigorates and re-engages students, teachers, and community stakeholders.  

  • YouScience offers tools and assessments to guide students to make career and life choices that are best for them.  

 

Advising

To prepare students for success after school, schools need to provide support for both academic and social-emotional learning. Advising plays an important role in creating an integrated system that considers the whole child through social-emotional learning (SEL), academic support, mentorships, and other programs. Finding the right approach to advising is often a challenge for rural schools with limited resources and staff. Here you will find resources and tools related to advising in the rural context.  

 

Guidance

Having an effective system of support and guidance for students is essential to ensuring students are given all the tools necessary to be successful in school. Most guidance systems require tremendous amount of resources, time, and capacity that rural schools often lack. The Distributive Guidance model is an approach to advising and guidance systems that takes rural resources scarcity in rural into consideration. It tackles issues relevant to rural communities, such as mental health. Distributed guidance can be employed as a peer support program to reduce suicide risk. Data shows that rural schools are in dire need of systems that will train teachers to identify students who are at higher risk of suicide and that will give students the social and emotional skills necessary to self-regulate and form positive relationships and support groups (Murphy, 2014).