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M UCH has been written re-cently about the advent of massive open online cours-es, or MOOCs, and what

role, if any, they should play in disrupt-ing centuries-old models of pedagogical practices speci!cally and the higher-education landscape more broadly.

Proponents argue that MOOCs can lower the skyrocketing costs of a college degree and usher in a new age of equal access for students and prosperity for institutions.

These supporters argue that the online courses can fundamentally democratize higher education by putting the have-nots on equal footing with the haves.

Opponents argue that the true pur-pose of MOOCs is to usurp the notion of higher education entirely, relegating more than 100 years of scholarship and carefully honed teaching to the scrap heap in favor of a modem and high-speed Internet connection.

But lost in the increasingly vitriolic debate is any discussion of those people who are locked out of higher education’s land of milk and honey altogether: low-income youths all across the country who have neither the wherewithal nor the knowledge of how to fully share in the bene!ts of either an online course or a traditional college.

If we want to truly re-engineer American higher education to meet the evolving needs of the 21st century and an increasingly diverse America, I sug-gest a different kind of MOOC: massive open online counseling sessions for low-income students.

According to a 2009 New York Times article, “Before College, Costly Advice Just on Getting In,” “admissions of-!cers say that, for many high-school students, the advice of their high-school counselors should suf!ce.” But as a booming industry of independent col-lege consultants continues to grow, with

some consultants charging families in a position to afford it as much as $40,000 for their supposed expertise, “those ap-plicants who might bene!t from supple-mental counseling—like those at urban high schools with overworked counsel-ors—are often among the least able to afford such services.”

That prompts a critical question: If the vast majority of low-income stu-dents in cities like New York will be the !rst in their families to attend college, whom do they turn to for help in decod-ing the often confounding college-ad-missions process?

Sadly, the answer to that question most often is, “No one.”

At the average American high school, the student-to-guidance-counselor ratio is more than 400 to 1, according to the American School Counselor Association, which recom-mends a ratio of 250 to 1. At larger urban schools that serve large numbers

A MOOC That Would Make a Real Difference An online format could help low-income students learn how to apply to college

By JERMAINE TAYLOR

of low-income students, that disparity is even greater.

Gwyeth Smith, a nationally recog-nized speaker on college advising and the subject of the book Acceptance: A Legendary Guidance Counselor Helps Seven Kids Find the Right Colleges—and Find Themselves (2010), told me in an interview that private-school students, teachers, and administrators are no better than their public-school peers, by and large. Where they differ is that chronically understaffed public high schools simply don’t have the resources or can’t afford to place a high-enough premium on college counseling and admissions.

Public schools just can’t compete with private schools in terms of the im-portance they place on getting students into college, Smith told me. In other words, we are not so much failing our students in the classroom as we are fail-ing them in the guidance of!ce.

I RECENTLY asked a friend, a teach-er at a public high school in New York City, how many guidance counselors his school dedicated

to college admissions. He said that one guidance counselor, on top of his regular counseling duties for the entire school, was responsible for helping some 200 seniors try to cut their way through the dense college-admissions process.

At my alma mater, Chelsea High School, also in New York, the situation was even bleaker. Our “college adviser,” Mr. Gupta, was a sweet, affable man, but his primary role at Chelsea was as a full-time math teacher. He simply moonlighted as a college counselor during his off periods. He had no train-ing as a counselor and was responsible for the college preparation of the entire senior class.

And in Philadelphia, where steep budget cuts nearly prevented the pub-lic schools from opening on time this year—a standstill that was averted only at the 11th hour by a $50-million emer-gency loan from the city—students are !nding guidance of!ces either unstaffed or understaffed when they go looking for help with college applica-tions.

An article published in September in Diverse: Issues in Higher Education quoted Janice Palmer, the parent of a Philadelphia high-school student, who said: “I’m going to be honest, I don’t know much about these Fafsa forms and stuff like that, so I can’t be all that helpful to my son as I want to be. You look to the schools to help you with these things, but they keep telling me, there ain’t no money. I just don’t un-derstand it.”

So why not harness the power of MOOCs to disrupt the traditional model of counseling in poor communi-ties? It’s clear that the current model is woefully dependent on shrinking resources and scarce manpower.

There is seemingly another article written every day about the income or achievement gap. Massive open on-line courses providing the counseling

services young people so desperately need would go a long way toward equipping underserved students with the knowledge and resources they need to make their college-going dreams a reality.

The dearth of resources available to such students is disturbing in itself; even more troubling, though, is that this problem is within our scope to solve.

If technology can enable learning and the globalized exchange of ideas

across continental borders, can’t it also help us plug the gaping hole of need for counseling in our most underresourced schools?

After all, all we need is a modem and high-speed Internet connection.

Jermaine Taylor is the founder of Sponsor-ing Young People, a college-access advocacy group for low-income students in New York City. He is a former seventh- and eighth-grade language-arts teacher and high-school counselor.

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Massive open online counseling could usefully disrupt the traditional model of guidance in understaffed high schools.