The National Association for College Admission Counseling is launching three new on-demand courses devoted to ethical practices in the college admission counseling profession. There is a course for admission professionals,  another for school and college counselors, and a third for independent educational consultants.


I was asked by NACAC to serve as program director to develop the new courses, and I worked with a team of four subject matter experts, all members of NACAC’s Admission Practices Committee.  Jessica Morales Maust, the Vice President for Enrollment Management at Marian University in Indianapolis, was the subject matter expert developing the content for the admission officers course. Chantelle Jackson-Boothby from the Canadian International School of Hong Kong and Joseph Miller from The Comprehensive College Check in Texas oversaw development of the course for IECs, and I worked with Dana Lambert, counselor at West Milford Township High School in New Jersey, on the content for the course for secondary counselors.  Katie Maenz from the NACAC staff guided us and supported us in making the courses a reality.


The new offerings replace a previous on-demand course devoted to professional ethics that dates back to 2019.  That course largely responded to issues raised by the Operation Varsity Blues scandal.  The new courses are built around the guiding principles in NACAC’s Guide to Ethical Practice in College Admission:


  • Truthfulness and Transparency

  • Professional Conduct

  • Confidentiality


In addition, recognizing that changes in technology often create new ethical challenges, each course includes a section on AI.  We know that the tools are evolving rapidly, so we recognize that this part of the course may quickly become outdated, but we attempted to lay out appropriate and inappropriate uses of AI.


Ethics is about ideals, about how we should act, but ethics should also be pragmatic.  We hope that the courses will touch on issues that professionals deal with in their daily work.


The primary audience for the courses is practitioners who are early in their professional career, but as a “has been” with more than 45 years in the college admission counseling profession, I learned a lot from my colleagues during the development of the course materials.


A concern for ethical practice has been at the heart of NACAC’s work since its founding, and our commitment to acting ethically, no matter what side of the desk we sit on, builds trust and confidence in the college admission process.  Several members of the team developing the course content described the work as “cathartic,” renewing focus on why we do what we do, and that adjective captured my experience exactly.


The new courses can be accessed through NACAC Learn on the NACAC website.