Malia Channing holds a B.A. in English from Brown University and an M.Ed. in Higher Education Administration from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where her research examined the gap between independent school college counseling practices and the actual predictors of long-term student success. Before joining Clarebourne she spent six years as a senior college counselor at the Winsor School in Boston, where she built a reputation for honest, relationship-centered advising and an unusual willingness to challenge students whose college lists reflected other people’s ambitions rather than their own.
She joined Clarebourne in 2015 and has led the counseling program since 2019. Under her direction the program was restructured to begin formally in Grade 10, the counselor-to-student ratio was reduced to its current 1:28, and the school’s practice of publishing its full matriculation list was formalized.
Malia is equally at home advising a student aiming for a highly selective research university and a student making a financially careful decision about in-state options — and she is known for the precision with which she distinguishes between what a student genuinely wants and what they have been told to want.
She maintains active relationships with admissions offices at selective institutions across the country and is a regular presenter at the National Association for College Admission Counseling annual conference, where she has spoken on the relationship between self-knowledge and application authenticity.
“The students I worry about are not the ones who don’t know where they want to go. Those students I can help. The ones I worry about are the students who are absolutely certain — because that certainty is almost never theirs. It belongs to someone else. My job is to find out who.”
Clarebourne since 2015