Stanford and Cal Admission Leaders Speak Out

WACAC’s Government Relations Committee has long lobbied for increased access to high quality college counseling resources for all students in California and Nevada. This was, once again, a featured talking point at WACAC’s 11th Annual Legislative Conference in Sacramento, CA, which took place less than one month ago in February 2014. A recent Op Ed in the San Francisco Chronicle by Amy Jarich of UC Berkeley and Richard Shaw of Stanford University shows that WACAC is not alone in recognizing the critical role counselors play in the transition to college. For the past two years, the Government Relations Committee has also emphasized how important it is for legislative leaders to increase access to high quality college counseling resources at the community college level, in addition to K-12 schools. The Op Ed by Jarich and Shaw states that cuts to college counseling resources in schools are short-sighted and will ultimately backfire. We agree. The legislative challenge in response …

How I Got Involved with the Government Relations Committee

I’ve always been a bit of a nerd about the law. It started my sophomore year of high school, when my honors history teacher witnessed me arguing with a fellow classmate. The next thing I knew, I was sitting in a meeting for the high school mock trial team. I loved it enough to continue it at the collegiate level.  Four years of arguing cases, learning case law, and competing in courtrooms later, I was a college graduate, working a real job, and I started having withdrawals for everything legal. In November of 2012, my colleague emailed me the information for the 2013 Legislative Conference provided by the Governmental Relations Committee. I signed up immediately because it sounded fascinating. I later worried about my rash registration, since I didn’t know much about what was going on in the legislature in our state, but I figured it would at least be a two-day binge of college counselor networking! Once at the hotel and settled in, we jumped right into training for our lobbying …