By Rachel Sincore, NACAC Communications
WASHINGTON, D.C. (July 31, 2026) — By the time Stanley Andrisse was in his early 20s, he was considered a “career criminal” with three felony convictions. Sentenced to 10 years in prison for drug-trafficking charges, he was told by a prosecuting attorney that he had no hope of change.
Now, Andrisse holds a doctorate in physiology, is an endocrinologist scientist and assistant professor at Howard University College of Medicine (D.C.) and is a visiting faculty member at Georgetown University Medical Center (D.C.). He also founded From Prison Cells to PhD, an organization that provides mentorship and educational counseling to currently and formerly incarcerated individuals.
At Guiding the Way to Impact (GWI) 2026, Andrisse urged the crowd of college admission counseling professionals to not turn their backs on those who have been labeled as hopeless.
“We’re trying to change the narrative about what society thinks and feels about people who have gone to prison,” said Andrisse, a GWI keynote speaker. Especially in our era of online education, the potential to earn a degree should be more readily to everyone, he said.
GWI was July 28-29 at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. GWI is NACAC’s annual conference designed for college admission counseling professionals who are committed to championing the needs of students from a range of backgrounds as they go through the college admission process.
Attendees also heard from Julie J. Park, professor of education at the University of Maryland, College Park, who spoke about research and findings from her book Race, Class, and Affirmative Action: College Admissions in a New Era, and Caroline Laguerre-Brown, principal and CEO of Designing Equity, LLC, who spoke about recent legal changes in college admission.
With more than 40 education sessions, attendees learned about a variety of other topics: the impacts of various standardized testing policies, how to serve students from rural communities, and how to improve workforce retention and international student recruitment, to name a few.
In a session designed for school counselors, attendees learned how they can advocate for students. In South Carolina, for example, undocumented students are banned from enrolling in public colleges and universities. So when Kimberly Brown, a co-presenter of the session and a South Carolina counselor, was advising an undocumented student, she knew she needed to advocate for her to help her achieve her dream of becoming a nurse.
She suggested the student look into private schools, and with the help of her co-presenter Maritza Cha, a California-based counselor, she suggested numerous scholarships she could apply to.
“She was feeling very low, and this gave her wind in her sails,” said Brown.
Brown and Cha also spoke about the importance of school-based advocacy and how counselors can make a difference. They gave a common example: gatekeeping in higher-level high school classes.
For example, a student who passed Spanish I must take Spanish II the following year to satisfy the college admission requirement at many schools. But it’s common, they said, for teachers to try to hand-select who gets access to their higher-level courses.
“If you do that, you limit a student’s potential to apply to a four-year school,” said Brown. “You can’t limit a student’s ability to apply.”
This is one example of how school and college counselors can advocate for their students. They also urged those in postsecondary admission to connect with their local high schools and CBOs, as greater awareness of what’s required for admission may help inform teachers and school practices.
“Things would change so quickly,” said Cha, if high schools were more aware of how certain practices were accidentally hindering students’ ability to go to college.
For more information about advocacy within college admission counseling, see NACAC Advocacy in Action. Plus, register for NACAC Conference 2026 to learn more about these topics and advance your professional development.