This op-ed was originally published in The Hill on September 18, 2025.
By Cameron Schmidt-Temple
At a time when policymakers are calling for more career-connected learning and employers are warning of a worsening talent shortage, the United States is quietly defunding one of its most effective workforce tools: college advising programs. Recent AmeriCorps cuts have impacted more than 100 organizations that provide essential guidance to students, helping them navigate the college process and choose a path that aligns with their long-term career goals. In addition, federal college access and success programs such as TRIO and GEAR UP face major cuts if President Trump’s 2026 “skinny budget” is passed.
These cuts do more than just negatively impact postsecondary attainment; they also jeopardize a cost-effective two-for-one economic strategy. College advisers support students by providing otherwise inaccessible information about college and career, generating significant economic returns. Simultaneously, the presence of these advisers drives economic progress in the communities they serve, and oftentimes supports the development of early career skills for the advisers themselves.
Many nonprofits and college access organizations, such as College Advising Corps, and College Possible, use a near-peer model that employs recent college graduates who work directly with students in high schools. These advisers typically serve for one or two years, gaining critical, hands-on experience, professional development, and a meaningful foothold in fields such as education, policy and community development. I know these benefits firsthand.
As a college adviser for UC Berkeley’s Destination College Advising Corps and Early Academic Outreach Program (DCAC/EAOP), I had the opportunity to build skills in project management, data management and analysis, marketing, stakeholder engagement, facilitation, and relationship building. These are the kinds of durable skills that carry professionals into successful careers across all sectors.
The benefits are not limited to recent graduates and young professionals. School-based professionals, school counselors, community-based organization staff, and many college access professionals also serve in career-staff roles. Their work sustains long-term institutional capacity and delivers consistent support for students over time. These roles provide stable employment, particularly in regions where job creation is a priority.
Together, these efforts form a comprehensive support system that reaches millions of students each year. For those students, the return on investment is substantial. Research shows that advising significantly improves postsecondary attainment, especially for students from low-income backgrounds and first-generation college students. In turn, college attainment boosts lifetime earnings, increases tax contributions, expands economic mobility and reduces the conditions that make public assistance necessary.
In other words, college advising strengthens the entire economy. Pulling back support now shortchanges both our current and future workforce, undermining the practical economic strategies that leaders on both sides of the aisle often publicly champion. The impact extends beyond students and advisers. College advising, whether delivered through AmeriCorps-supported corps members, federal TRIO programs or local nonprofit efforts, creates measurable economic value for communities and the country as a whole.
In 2010 alone, the U.S. lost an estimated $3.8 billion in potential lifetime earnings due to students not completing college, resulting in $566 million less in federal tax revenue and $146 million less in state tax revenue. Without systemic improvements to college access and completion, these losses compound year after year, limiting economic mobility and reducing public resources. In an economy where nearly three-quarters of jobs will soon require education beyond high school, helping students reach and complete postsecondary programs is central to building and supporting a stronger workforce.
Advising drives local economic development not only through its outcomes, but through the presence of paid professionals embedded in under-resourced communities. Advisers are often embedded in rural areas or historically excluded urban neighborhoods, where they become trusted advocates and act as a local investment in talent, stability and upward mobility.
They help students succeed while bringing in wages, talent and leadership that boost both educational and economic vitality. Many of the students that these advisers serve go on to graduate from college and return to their communities, leading those communities to higher employment rates, increased productivity and greater economic resilience.
Despite these clear benefits, initiatives like TRIO, GEARUP, and my own former advising program at UC Berkeley are now grappling with funding shortages, even as demand continues to grow. The recent AmeriCorps cuts are just one part of a broader trend of declining budgets threatening to undermine a key lever for economic growth. College advising isn’t just an educational imperative; it’s an economic one — a crucial component of the infrastructure that supports a skilled and resilient workforce. Investing in it is a smart bet on America’s future workforce.
Cameron Schmidt-Temple is a project policy analyst at UC Berkeley Center for Educational Partnerships. His work advising high school students in Antioch, Calif., was featured in the PBS series, “The Class.“