Future Tense is a speculative fiction section. The following interview was conducted in the spring of 2043 at Cypress Falls High School in northwest Houston, where Marguerite "Midge" Pellegrino has served as lead guidance counselor for nineteen years. The hallway outside her office smelled like industrial adhesive; the school had just finished replacing ceiling tiles damaged in the previous October's rain event. A framed certificate from the Texas Counseling Association's College Access Program hung on her wall, slightly crooked. It was issued in 2024. Nothing in its curriculum mentioned flood factor scores, regional insurance availability, or climate geography.
This interview is, of course, entirely fictional. Midge Pellegrino does not exist. But the professional gap she describes between what counselor training covers and what students now need is extrapolated from real and documented trends in counselor education, student migration behavior, and climate risk data.123
You've been a guidance counselor here since 2024. What's changed most about the conversations you have with students?
Midge: The spreadsheets. I'm being a little glib, but only a little. Kids used to come in with a list of schools they liked. Vibes. Campus feel, the football team, a cousin who went there. Now they come in with comparison matrices. Columns for selectivity, financial aid, average summer wet-bulb temperature, county-level insurance non-renewal rates. One kid last month had a column labeled "municipal water bond rating." She was seventeen.
Where are they getting this information?
Midge: Everywhere. Redfin's had climate risk scores on property listings for years now.4 There are half a dozen "climate-safe city" rankings floating around, and they don't agree with each other, which is its own problem. But these kids synthesize. They're pulling thirty-year heat projections and overlaying them with job-market data for whatever sector they're interested in. I had a junior, sharp kid, wants to do hydrology, who'd already mapped which Great Lakes universities had the strongest water-systems programs and cross-referenced that with the cities' own climate adaptation plans. She knew more about Toledo's stormwater infrastructure than I know about my own neighborhood's drainage. And I've lived here twenty-six years.
Does that make your job easier or harder?
Midge: Oh, harder. Because my training... look, I have a master's in school counseling. I did my practicum in 2023. The climate piece back then was framed as a mental health issue. Eco-anxiety. We learned to validate students' feelings about the future, help them process the dread.5 Which is real, and I still do that. But what's happened is the students moved past the feelings part. They're not anxious in my office anymore. They're calculating. And the calculation involves variables I was never trained to evaluate. I'm the one with the feelings now, if I'm honest.
Can you give me a specific example?
Midge: Sure. Last fall, a student I'll call Ana came in wanting to talk about her college list. She'd narrowed it to three schools, all in the upper Midwest or New England. Good programs, reasonable aid. I said great, let's look at your applications. And she said, "I need to know which of these states is still going to have a functional homeowner's insurance market when I'm thirty-five."
I just sat there.
Because that's a completely legitimate question. And I have absolutely no professional framework for answering it.
What did you say?
Midge: I told her that was a great question and that I'd look into it. Which is counselor-speak for I have no idea. Then I spent my weekend reading about insurance market fragmentation in different states, which is not something they covered in my continuing ed. I can tell you that Vermont and Minnesota have very different regulatory approaches. I could not have told you that in September.
You mentioned the college fair earlier, before we started recording. Can you talk about that?
Midge: The fair. Yeah. I've staffed the same college fair for fifteen years. And the booth traffic has just... rotated. Schools in Michigan, Minnesota, Vermont, Maine, they're mobbed now. Lines. Meanwhile, some of the Gulf Coast flagships, schools that used to be the default choice for half my students, they've got recruiters standing there looking at their phones. Nobody says the word "climate." The kids just flow in a direction. And I watch it happen and I don't have a professional vocabulary for what I'm seeing. It's like watching a slow-motion bank run, except the currency is enrollment.
Is there a class dimension to this?
Midge: That's the part that keeps me up at night.
My students with resources, the ones whose families can afford to relocate, who have college funds that weren't wiped out by storm damage, they arrive in my office with the calculation already done. They're choosing between options. My students without that flexibility? Some of them are in ZIP codes where a disaster during their senior year statistically makes them less likely to enroll in college at all.6 They're not choosing between Michigan and Vermont. They're choosing between the community college down the road and nothing.
And I'm supposed to give both groups the same quality of guidance using tools that don't account for any of this. I have one Naviance login for a kid whose family just closed on a house in Duluth and a kid whose family is still fighting FEMA over a 2041 claim. Same dropdown menus.
Your credential on the wall, the College Access certificate from 2024. Does it feel outdated?
Midge: [laughs] It feels like a museum piece. It's a perfectly good credential for a world that doesn't exist anymore. Everything it taught me about career advising was organized by sector. Healthcare is growing, tech is evolving, manufacturing is shifting. Labor market stuff. None of it was organized by geography of risk. And that's what my students are actually navigating. They're asking "where will this degree still be worth something in twenty years," and they mean that geographically, not professionally. My credential doesn't have a row for that.
Do you ever advise students to stay in Houston?
Midge: [long pause]
Houston is complicated. The energy transition jobs are here. Climate adaptation engineering, retrofit work, offshore wind logistics. This is a hub for all of that.7 So I have students who want to work in exactly those fields, and the jobs are right here, in a region they've already decided is too risky to live in long-term.
That contradiction sits in my office every single day. The place that needs the most climate work is the place they're most afraid to build a life in. I can't resolve it for them. I'm not sure anyone can.
What would help you do your job better?
Midge: Honestly? I'd settle for a version of Naviance that has a climate column. Just put the data where the other data is. Right now my professional tools rank schools by selectivity, major offerings, financial aid, and campus culture. My students are filtering by heat factor and water security before they even look at those things. I'm working off a map that's missing the layer they care about most. It's like advising someone on apartments but the listings don't show rent.
Last question. A student walks in tomorrow and asks you, point blank, "Should I leave Texas?" What do you say?
Midge: I say, "Let's talk about what you're actually deciding." Because it's never just that question. It's a career question wrapped inside a family question wrapped inside a risk question wrapped inside a money question. And my job, the part of my job that still works, is helping them see all four layers at once. I can't tell them where to go. I don't think anyone should be telling seventeen-year-olds where the safe places are, because I'm not sure we know. But I can help them stop pretending it's just about picking a college.
[She paused.]
I will say this. When I started, maybe one kid a year asked me something I genuinely couldn't answer. Now it's most of them. And the strange thing is, that's made me better at the job. Not because I've caught up. Because I finally stopped pretending I was ahead.
Midge Pellegrino walked us to the parking lot afterward. The asphalt was soft. It was 10 AM.
Footnotes
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ASCA, The School Counselor and Career Development (revised 2024). https://www.schoolcounselor.org/Standards-Positions/Position-Statements/ASCA-Position-Statements/The-School-Counselor-and-Career-Development ↩
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LendingTree / Newsweek analysis of U.S. Census Bureau Gen Z migration data (2024). https://www.newsweek.com/map-reveals-states-where-gen-z-is-moving-to-and-leaving-12547070 ↩
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OECD, Enhancing Green Career Guidance Systems for Sustainable Futures (2024). https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2024/07/enhancing-green-career-guidance-systems-for-sustainable-futures_f8f91cac/e6ad2d9c-en.pdf ↩
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Redfin climate risk data is currently available on property listings as of 2026; the story extrapolates continued public availability and student use of such tools. ↩
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Association for Counselor Education and Supervision (ACES), Climate Change and Environmental Justice Competencies for Counselor Education (2025). https://acesonline.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Climate_Change_and-Environmental-Justice-Competencies.pdf ↩
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NPR, "The Unexpected Links Between Climate Change, Student Debt and Lower Lifetime Earnings" (2024). https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1230002959 ↩
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LinkedIn / World Economic Forum, "Green Job Vacancies Are on the Rise" (2024). https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/02/green-jobs-green-skills-growth/ ↩
