It is well known that college and career counseling or readiness services in Romania are underfunded and understudied. This certainly impacts the life of Romanians, with the country having the highest rate of young persons neither in employment nor education or training (NEET) in the EU for 2022. For Romanian high school students who wish to study and live abroad in more developed countries, this presents obvious challenges in university and career planning. It is in response to these challenges and gaps that Upgrade Education designed an evidence-based college and career guidance course. The findings and curricular demonstrations in this paper are written in the spirit of Upgrade Education's commitment to overcoming education challenges in low- and middle-income countries.

The first half of this paper measures gaps in Romanian guidance counseling against international research in the US and UK. Translating global research into Romanian contexts, this paper finds that Romanian students in general face many of the same barriers as those faced by vulnerable student groups in the US and UK, such as first-generation students, racial minorities, and low-income students. The quality of teachers and counsellors in Romanian schools can also vary greatly in the absence of robust government-mandated evaluation and monitoring mechanisms. Additionally, Romanian students’ families and teachers have very little familiarity with college and career trends in the most developed economies. These challenges, as well as a lack of local data, make it difficult for us in low- and middle-income countries to benefit from the successes, trials, and errors of the college and careers readiness community in more developed countries. As a result, this paper puts local and international research into conversation.

The second half of this paper is a demonstration of how our background-matched, individually-taught, and highly modular course meets international college and careers readiness standards. The 1-1 mentorship model eliminates the well-studied problems associated with high student-counselor ratios and understaffing in public schools. Connecting students with mentors on the basis of shared destinations, origins, and journeys encourages a relatable and motivated mentoring experience. Such matching also minimizes the role of personal limitations and bias, another well-studied problem that frequently arises in school guidance relationships, and ensures that every mentor has career and college information that is targeted to their students' needs. Designed from the perspective of international students and staffed by former international students who have graduated from top US/UK universities, our curriculum also pays special attention to visa and work permit processes, location uncertainty, and questions of diaspora and identity. With mounting evidence for personalized and student-centric curricula, we also experiment for the first time with an entirely modular curriculum is entrusted to the flows and ebbs of a robust mentor-mentee relationship.

The paper concludes with an overview of internal evidence and data on the strengths and weaknesses of the Upgrade methodology in plugging college and careers guidance gaps for Romanian K-12 students. The conclusion also makes tentative recommendations that schools can ‘borrow’ from our methodology and resources in a way that is both cost effective and scalable.

Keywords: College and careers guidance, Guidance counseling, Individual mentoring, careers guidance, school counseling, College and career readiness, Personalized learning, Future-self mentoring, Romania, United States, United Kingdom, Gatsby Benchmarks, Challenge Methodology, Problem-based learning.