In the research that has identified factors that predict college access for underrepresented students, the role of the guidance counselor has been identified as critical for college planning. Unfortunately, there is very little research concerning this issue. The literature concerning this issue becomes even more inadequate when researching the perspectives and voices of African-American males to describe the counselor's critical role in the post-secondary preparation process. African-American males' personal accounts of their experiences are conspicuously missing and non-existent in academic literature. This study attempts to fill that void by collecting and presenting data that focused on African-American males' experiences in school, especially in regards to their relationship with their guidance counselor while preparing them for post-secondary and career endeavors. This was accomplished by collecting qualitative data to perform an inductive cross-case analysis. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 40 African-American males (ages 18-24) who attended urban high schools and who are presently undergraduates attending four-year colleges in the Southern California region. Questions related to the memories of interactions with high school counselors, when contact with counselors occurred, and how counselors impacted students' decisions about college. Data analysis will consist of transcribing the interviews, coding, and organizing common themes around salient education-affective counseling factors that impacted access to post-secondary opportunities.

Major themes that emerged from the study were: (1) Late Counselor Interaction, (2) Low Expectations from Counselors, (3) Lack of Post-Secondary Options/Pathways Offered, (4) Counselors' Race as a Dynamic in their Pedagogical Orientation, and (5) Positive Parental Involvement/Expectations. Implications for counseling professionals, the counseling paradigm, graduate training programs, urban and suburban public schools, African-American males, and policy makers are discussed.