by Lucien Giordano
On August 1, 2025, Lucien Giordano and his long-time EiM colleague, Luke Devlin, co-founded Amiata Co., a company offering international education solutions at the intersection of secondary schools and higher education institutions (HEIs). Amiata is not an external consultancy, instead operating from the inside out, applying understandings of how schools and universities truly operate, how decisions are made, and the challenges leaders, counsellors and HEIs face, reflected in bespoke services across the full international education continuum. The solutions provided are proven over time, grounded in practice, with support from vetted partners and vendors.
In this three-part blog series, Lucien and Luke will advocate for a more informed and collaborative UCC approach from school leaders. First, we want to pose some important questions, maybe even questions that seem simple but really must be addressed to get things started. We hope that this leads to discussions at your school, which reposition UCC as a paradigm through which to evaluate consequential strategies from the classroom to the extra-curricular offerings, to your family retention strategies and how you outline communication plans.
Question 1: What is my UCC team’s job?
The simplest questions are sometimes the most important to answer, I think?
If you had an instinctual response, did it sound anything like, “to get our students into university?” If so, I’d like you to reconsider.
Before I suggest why or how, let me ask the same question of you that I asked every one of the more than 50 candidates I’ve interviewed for a school-based UCC role. Is this profession more reliant on skills or knowledge?
If I’m looking for the best contributor to a school’s programs, I’m expecting that answer to be confidently stated: ‘skills’.
UCC comes from a tradition of holistic counselling. The work of the profession is in helping students to understand themselves, apply that understanding to post-secondary pathway plans and to maintain a trust-based working relationship.
The knowledge a counsellor commands is simply a set of tools to wield during the dynamic process of students moving through stages of self-understanding to, literally, [university or career] applications.
When I speak with school leaders about how they want to fill an open role in their UCC teams, I often hear, “I’m looking for an American university specialist”; “I’m looking for an IB specialist”; “I’m looking for somebody who really understands Oxbridge applications”. I’ve worked with dozens of schools, hundreds of counsellors and thousands of families. I’ve never personally seen evidence of how encyclopedic knowledge of systems or application requirements or curricula makes a long-term difference to best practice or meaningful outcomes.
Why? Here are 5 good reasons:
- The knowledge that applies to a system one year may be antiquated the next. In fact, entire systems of national universities can fully revise selection criteria. About 15 years ago, universities in Hong Kong overhauled their national higher ed curricula. They went from a more discipline-focused UK style of undergraduate learning to an interdisciplinary and extended American style of learning. Their application system changed accordingly.
In the United States, there has been a 360 on standardised testing over the last eight years.
In the UK, the daunting interview requirements for Oxbridge and Medicine have been re-invented multiple times (MMI? Nobody knew what that was when I started in this career!).
In South Korea, the top universities have gone from being absolutely test-centred to the most holistic in the world to somewhere back in the middle, apparently on schedule every 10 years or so. Let’s not even get into the rise of private universities in Europe or the fluctuations and unpredictability of cost, home fees and immigration regulations. Ok, hopefully I’ve made my point, though I could go on….
From a practical standpoint, the easiest thing of all to do is Google, DeepSeek or ask a colleague for this knowledge. There are no secrets or shortcuts or magic formulae. The knowledge of what it may take to get into any university is already out there in abundance. Perhaps the worst thing a counsellor can do is to apply what somebody else has done to gain admissions offers to application advice the next year. So, while a good counsellor is constantly acquiring knowledge, understanding what works and what doesn’t in each cycle (and well they should) it should never be the focus.
- As an extension of the first point, there is no counsellor in the world who knows it all. It never failed that each year a student walked into my office and said, “I want to apply to national university system X,” and I literally had no clue what that would take. While it was the student who would tell me what was required, I was working with them in the same way as the student applying to universities to which I’d sent many applications. This is because the work centres on the student’s journey and not the destination.
- Students constantly change their minds and often have multi-destination application lists. Some students have interests so specific that the system becomes irrelevant (think of the best performance artists or athletes in your school!) Some students don’t want to go to university at all. Counsellors who cannot work across multiple systems or who aren’t sure where to begin with a student focused on non-academic or non-HEI pathways are going to struggle.
- Prioritising knowledge and practicalities over the skills of counselling theory creates inequities. To the three points above, whether a student wants to study economics in England or New England, needs to complete an entire application in Arabic, or is torn between joining the military or becoming an architect, we need to serve them all equally.
- Here is the most important reason: in some instances, or far too many really, there will be families and communities, where this is a high-stakes, high-pressure and outcome-oriented process calibrated to external expectations or the choice for perception over reality. It is clearly unhealthy for students caught in those pressure cookers. The counsellor, as a student advocate first, in possession of the requisite skillsets, should sit in a dynamic with the student in an open manner to all options. They need to be able to negotiate for the student with anybody – from a demanding parent to a frustrated teacher, and maybe especially so, you, the school’s leader.
Here is a call to action: what can you do to make sure your UCC team is comfortable challenging you, appropriately, from the position of student advocacy?
I’ve seen it many times over: counsellors will go to bat for a student when nobody else will. This takes SKILL, dedication and culture. To earn the trust. To communicate effectively. To acquire the understanding of the student as a person entering adulthood, faced in many cases, with the first adult decision of their lives, rather than a product to manufacture for an offer and matriculation.
I remember a series of meetings that I was asked to attend when a student moving into IB was told he was not eligible to take HL math. He was marginally below a predictive threshold. It was agreed between administrators and math teachers. It was only the counsellor who pushed back. Even the parents had acquiesced. Yet, the student was absolutely set on a particular engineering course in the UK that required HL and was staunchly self-advocating.
The counsellor knew the student well and believed that this post-secondary outlook was all the motivation needed. The counsellor made the point that nobody should deprive a student of that opportunity to aspire. At the time, the student was ‘tracked’ for a 29-30 and a 3 in HL. At that school, there was a trust-based relationship between leadership and the UCC team. The leader was open to being respectfully challenged. This was a lesson in good leadership I will never forget. I departed from that school visit as impressed with the Head as with the counsellor and student.
Two years later, the student achieved a 35 with a 6. When a good counsellor has applied the requisite skillset, supplemented by knowledge, the outcome will be positive. As a quick additional point – what if the student had not achieved that score? Would it have been a mistake? No. The right to informed and mature self-determination is critical in the transition from adolescence to adulthood. There are students for whom the end result is less consequential than the reinforcement of self-determination.
So, what is the job of your UCC team?
Is it to ‘get students in’ or is it to ‘help students understand ____’? How would you fill in that blank?
Themselves? Their aspirations? Their options? Their obstacles? Their strengths? Their interests?
The students will know how to apply these answers to their post-secondary options. An important theory from many schools of counselling psychology is that between a counsellor and a client, the client is the expert. The counsellor or psychologist is more of a guide, providing options, tools, and frameworks for self-understanding that enable self-determination on pathways to success, wellness, or recovery.
What then is the expertise? It’s the self. What does somebody want? How are they best suited to succeed and where?
The counsellor can channel the knowledge to them, helping the student sift through the 16,000+ higher education institutions and then the infinite combinations of degree and student life variables, but the student brings the self-expertise to the decisions they must make, which a skilled counsellor has helped them to attain.
Two more thoughts before we move on. I’ve seen tens of thousands of applications from all aspirations and testing metrics, from the high school counselling side and on behalf of UCLA, one of the most selective universities in the world. That is nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands of applications a career admissions officer will review.
First: ‘we got a student into…’ When that ends with, say, an Ivy League institution or Oxbridge, it is often the furthest from reality. The admissions teams in these universities see through the manufacturing of candidacy. The students who are self-driven and lean on their counsellors for support, to identify which institution is most likely to appreciate them, who avoid the ‘expertise’ of how to get in, are nearly always the ones who receive the offers.
Secondary schools that articulate and aim in this way often encourage manufacturing and knowledge-driven counselling work that is more likely to end in disappointment than elation.
Second, this is all the more reason to invest in your UCC teams. The corollary truth I’ve observed is that schools and UCC teams that prioritise skill-based approaches have the most successful selective outcomes AND appeal to a broader market.
I’ve visited schools and met families on (and from) every continent, across every conceivable socio-economic demographic, ability and interest.
Whether in China or Cameroon, the vast majority of families want what’s best for their children, and they define this through the student’s self-understanding. When this is amplified by a school with an ethos and skill-based counselling approach, students have a better chance at the most selective institutions, and everybody has a better chance at long-term post-secondary fulfilment.
Therefore, bring your teams together to figure out how to build holistic and interconnected systems for all stakeholders. Create resources and give your teams space to create a process for your community, without focusing on specific knowledge-based approaches and definitions of success-oriented extrinsic perceptions. We will explore these concepts in the next two instalments of this series.
The job of your counsellor, truly, in the end, is to be a student advocate. The rest will follow.
Lucien Giordano, Co-Founder, Amiata Co.
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