“It is no more time consuming to advise a student in regard to their in state options versus others schools that are out of state”
But they aren’t doing any customized advising to ANYONE (elite level or average) since they don’t have the bandwidth!! You’re not hearing that! Are you not hearing caseloads of hundreds of students? You’re still living in this fantasy world where the GC pulls out the file, reviews it, makes some notes and calls student in to discuss possible choices. My kids’ GC was a nice hardworking person but she just couldn’t physically do that. She had to react to students coming into her office and asking questions or needing help. And again I’m in upper middle class major city suburbia.
“I see a problem when Harvard is not perceived as prestigious and “useful” as OK state when it is otherwise in Kenya, Korea and Brazil.”
The vast majority of people don’t GAS what is prestigious in Kenya, Korea or Brazil and will never need to impress anyone in Kenya, Korea and Brazil. In particular, what is " prestigious" overseas is often the product of low Information so who cares.
Look, I am not doubting the value of elite schools. I went to one, married someone at the same school and my kids went to them. I see plenty of reasons to send your kids there vs U of Oklahoma, and the financial aid is icing on a very appealing cake. But I’m not everybody. And I try not to be so ignorant and wrapped up in my own bubble that I think everyone in every community thinks just like me or has the same dreams, desires or knowledge base. And I certainly don’t want to be the hick who assumes that because the H-bomb wows them in Boston or New York that it wows them to the same degree in Oklahoma City. Likewise, while (say) Texas A&M or Ole Miss don’t float my boat, I don’t want to be so ignorant that I don’t get that those degrees are the bomb in certain parts of the country. And not just among country bumpkins either.
I really have no dog in this fight. What I am saying is that is you are a guidance counselor and you consider yourself to be a professional there is a particular expectation on my part in regard as to what you will do for every kid that you serve who shows some inspiration and passion for what ever it is for them has them turned on. It is their responsibility to direct them and make them aware of their options.
There are no assurances with anything when it comes to things that are difficult to achieve, that doesn’t mean you don’t try! I have made no reference to a particular state in my conversation. I don’t think anyone should “accept” a particular place in life, if they aspire to other things.
@Pizzagirl to acknowledge the reality is one thing. To assume it’s all justified is another. Harvard shouldn’t be related to a US state (other than that it is geographically farther from people living outside northeast). People should be better informed. The same notion goes to people living in NE who don’t know the value of U Chicago and Stanford.
This discussion about GCs is very interesting to me. Two points -
If a student is aiming at very selective colleges, then some minimal planning and guidance should start even in 9th grade. If a student comes from an under-served area, then unless they are a true diamond in the rough simply getting all A’s from a mediocre high school and good SAT scores just isn’t enough to get in. Calling a kid into the guidance office at the start of their senior year and saying “Hey, you’re one of our top students. Maybe you should apply to Harvard because they’ve got great financial aid” is almost as clueless as not telling them about the option to begin with.
Let’s do the math. In many under-served areas, maybe one student gets into a very selective college every 5-10 years (e.g. there are almost 40,000 high schools in the US and maybe 12,000 spots at the Ivies each year). If there are 10 guidance counselors, then one of their students is getting in every 50 to 100 years.
Having a guidance counselor spend a lot of mental energy on what is almost literally a once in a century event falls squarely into the category of “Holy Waste of Time, Batman”.
It sounds like parents in this thread have had very different interactions with their public school guidance counselors than our family did. I am curious what others’ experiences were. Here’s ours -
Relative to others at our school, I would say our family had a great relationship with our guidance counselor - she was a nice lady who knew our kids by name, talked to them in the hallways, etc. However, when you boiled it all down, here’s what I expected from our GC and what we got (we were very lucky in that financial aid wasn’t a concern, but that’s also the case for most families in our community) -
i) do all the paperwork needed in support of our kids’ college applications, correctly and on time.
ii) write glowing recommendations for them
iii) when they got assigned to a class with a stinky teacher, get them re-assigned to a good one even if there was a “no-switch” policy.
That’s it. Any suggestions she made about what classes to take or what colleges to apply to were politely ignored, though of course treated with the utmost respect since she was going to be writing the GC recommendation.
Yes, extremely true in my experience. At our school, each counselor is responsible for over 200 students (50 in each class). Maybe 1/3 of their time is spent on college related stuff. And that’s at a school that has over 95% of its graduates going on to 4 year colleges.
The provincialism isn’t just about our regions. It’s about limiting our thinking and can apply to any of us. Whoever first said, “The GC’s are looking at their transcripts, kids who are crushing it should certainly stand out,” has to realize it takes more than stats and being pres of some club to get into a tippy top. And that there are more reasons to choose any particular college than it’s rep as an elite.
Panpacific, if domestic kids weren’t interested in Harvard, the school wouldn’t be getting 40k apps. This isn’t just about being “ambitious, curious and adventurous.” They can be that at plenty of places. Harvard offers unique opportunities and my own complaint is that too many applicants don’t know what that is, what it means, beyond the selectivity and prestige. The box they are not climbing out of is in their own heads.
Let’s also not forget that GCs and college reps are not the only ways kids can be exposed to college choices. The number of mentor programs reaching qualified low SES kids is growing and providing strong support. They fill a gap the high schools and families can’t, for the best of those kids.
But not every top college is right for every top kid. There are many solid reasons kids choose to stay local. It’s ridiculous of us to make flat pronouncements.
Anyway, no, I’m less worried about Harvard being free than the state schools radically lowering their costs. Few states make college truly affordable for their residents.
“To assume it’s all justified is another. Harvard shouldn’t be related to a US state (other than that it is geographically farther from people living outside northeast). People should be better informed. The same notion goes to people living in NE who don’t know the value of U Chicago and Stanford.”
I did this exercise a year and a half ago with data provided to me by bclintonk for the top 20 unis and top 20 LAC’s. With very few exceptions, every single elite college overindexed heavily to its own geography. This surprised even some of the boosters who thought these schools were more national in nature. They really, really weren’t.
If I had some way of putting this spreadsheet online without compromising my identity, I would. But it’s pretty abundantly clear. The only 2 exceptions off the top of my head were Duke and Oberlin, which were more developed in the NE than in their home regions of the southeast and midwest respectively.
Just to pick on the Ivies specifically, here are their indexes to the northeast:
Brown 242, Columbia 247, Cornell 302, Dartmouth 231, Harvard 208, Penn 271, Princeton 227, Yale 214
No school was truly nationally representative, but the least skewed ones out of the bunch were MIT, U of Chicago, and WashU.
Now of course they are far less regional than all state schools! But yeah, this is precisely why you have people on CC from California who say “tell me about the prestige of the UC’s!” without realizing that beyond Berkeley and LA, few people outside California even know of the existence of the rest of those schools, and the people on CC who confuse Northeastern and Northwestern, and so forth. It’s still very regional.
Al2simon’s experience is similar to mine. I would no more expect a public high school GC to personally advise my kids on what colleges to apply to, any more than I’d expect the bank teller to advise me on where to spend the money that I was withdrawing.
We’ve got some posters on here whose kids apparently go to elite boarding schools who don’t get that the GC situation at super affluent publics or affluent private / boarding schools is VERY different. And hey, nothing wrong with that - you’re paying the big bucks for that kind of advising.
My D’s one of these kiddos who recently got into one of the lottery schools. We’re in the Midwest. The average GC at her HS carries a load of 300 students. The GC doesn’t know most of the kids in her class. It’s just too many kids to handle. My D did this mostly all on her own, though it helped to have a dad as a professor to help her navigate. She looked up the requirements, did a fair amount of research about fit, majors, campus culture, etc. I handled the financial aid - ran the NPCs, etc. My D is the first kid in her HS to be accepted to this lottery school, EVER. She was told several times when asked where she was applying “good luck with your applications – we’ve never had a kid get into that school.” The GC is working on getting the kids into the big state school, the local directionals, and the community colleges. She’s dealing with truancies, positive drug tests and suicides. She has no bandwidth at all for any kind of coaching, hand holding, or disseminating information about any schools outside of the normal schools that almost of all of the kids move onto. There is no Naviance at the HS. This is a large public school in an affluent suburb in a rust belt state. The other kids who don’t get into the lottery schools may not even be aware of these schools – but they go on to be successful, contributing citizens wherever they go in college.
@gettingschooled : "I don’t know how you approach a kid and say “Did you know you have a 5 percent chance of getting into a school that will give you a substantial need based scholarship?”
How do you tell the same kid that other kids with their profile applied and are now part of the 5% who were accepted, but, btw, I didn’t think you should have put your name in the hat, so I never mentioned it to you?
@al2simon : " Any suggestions she made about what classes to take or what colleges to apply to were politely ignored…"
Are you suggesting that parents pay NO attention to anything the GC says in this area? That is ludicrous. In your scenario, even if a counselor were to suggest to Johnny Snowflake that Yale, or Harvard, or Elite University X, were a possibility based on the student’s profiles, parents would do better off to just file that comment in the trash?
“The GC is working on getting the kids into the big state school, the local directionals, and the community colleges. She’s dealing with truancies, positive drug tests and suicides. She has no bandwidth at all for any kind of coaching, hand holding, or disseminating information about any schools outside of the normal schools that almost of all of the kids move onto. There is no Naviance at the HS. This is a large public school in an affluent suburb in a rust belt state.”
Exactly. I’m in a school system in an affluent suburb; in my kids’ classes, there were kids who got into Stanford and Yale as well as a few other elite schools, but this was exactly our experience as well. The school had just gotten Naviance. And it was my experience in an even more affluent suburban high school when I was in high school. I really don’t think people are getting that GC’s don’t just do college advising, they have big loads, and the vast majority of their kids are NOT Ivy-or-similar bound, and yet they have to serve them just as much as they have to serve the tippy top of the class. To suggest that these hardworking and well-meaning GC’s aren’t “professionals” if they aren’t sitting down with little Jimmy’s file and thinking through the finer points of Dartmouth vs Brown vs Cornell vs U of Chicago is just ludicrous - when they’ve got Billy on crack, Susie having to go to foster care, and a hundred kids who can’t afford ANY college without her dedicated time and guidance.
I think, though I am not 100% sure, that my D was the first ever to apply to Wellesley (much less get in) from her high school. How did it get on her radar screen? Through us, her parents, especially with a mother (me) who grew up in the northeast and was much more attuned to a lot of those schools.
@al2simon Our experience is similar except our counseling office publishes that they do NOT write LORs unless the school requires it. You line those up from teachers on your own.
My oldest son is a senior and he is on his third counselor. She does not know his name and could not pick him out of a line up. He is near the top of his class and holds a very visible leadership position at the school. He is low maintenance for her so he is just a number to her. If he needs her. She is there but if he doesn’t she has more pressing problems.
In addition to the things you mentioned she advises kids in all grades on course schedules, deals with students who she is preventing from dropping out, deals with behavioral issues (with the vice principal), deals with IEPs (there are a ton of these and those parents know they have to demand attention or they won’t get it), along with counseling the juniors once on college and then once again at the beginning of senior year. Never mind the suicidal kids who she gets to appropriate resources and those who get evicted from their homes or suffer a fire or death or hospitalization of a parent and need help getting food, shelter, clothes or transferred to a new school. Some kids get sick as well and end up in he hospital and she helps them figure out how to catch up.
She really does not have time to worry if my kid is going to expand his horizons enough by choosing the right selective four year college.
I am not suggesting anything of the sort. I merely shared what our family’s personal experience with our GC was, and I asked others to share their experiences because I was curious. I certainly am open to the notion that our experience was atypical, but judging from the responses I’ve seen so far it appears it might be more typical than I thought.
If your experience was that your GC was an invaluable help to you and your kids - perhaps they opened your eyes to an entirely new set of colleges that weren’t on your radar screen - then please feel free to share that. It’s always good to learn about how things are done at other schools; that’s why I asked the question !!!
On the other hand, if most posters’ personal experiences were like mine, then this further underscores why it’s not realistic to expect GCs (in general) to guide students from under-served areas to Harvard.
I don’t mean to be a snob, but there is nothing, absolutely nothing, our GC could have advised us about that I didn’t already know. What was she going to tell me about Wellesley, Smith, Bryn Mawr and Mt Holyoke that I didn’t already know from taking my daughter to those places? What was she going to tell me about Northwestern - where my H and I went! - that I didn’t already know? Please.
No, the GC did no invaluable work for my family, but she did her job, and she was, merely a college counselor (private school).
Where the GC and my family did part ways was with the sheer number of schools (under 10, total) that we were told, in the end, were reach schools, and about which we were warned (too late) few kids get accepted to. But my child changed the conversation because of the demographic he falls into, and then his top scores, so there was no experience in “placing” a student with whom, quite frankly, the office had had no experience.
Had I come to CC earlier than this present school year with any questions on college, or had the conversation been “lottery,” (a term I never learned of until CC) I would have dutifully followed the advice to add what I now understand to be reaches and safeties.
I would not have politely ignored the recommendations, though. I would have taken them under advisement.
“You don’t think a kid who qualifies for an Ivy would get a combination of merit and need based aid at Illinois?”
I know it for a fact. and it’s not only true at the flagship – it’s generally true of Illinois at Chicago, Illinois State, etc.
If we’re imagining a well-informed GC, whether in Oklahoma or at Exeter, they are NOT encouraging kids with a 5% chance at Harvard to apply to Harvard. They’ll support those kids, sure, but you don’t need a lot of experience to distinguish the kid with an average chance from a kid with a 30% or even 50% chance. I volunteer at a high-need public high school in Chicago. The top 3 or so kids in each class have an Ivy shot (though they tend to prefer a local elite).
It’s true that grooming a kid starting in 9th grade is useful, but it isn’t true that a kid in rural Oklahoma or inner-city Chicago needs to have the kind of activities that are expected of CC kids. They need prompting in 11th/12th grade to write about their job at McDonald’s, church choir, and raising their cousins, but Harvard eats those stories up with a spoon when the kids tell them.
I just googled my kids’ high school’s counseling department.
They offer a presentation of “College 101.” Guess when it’s dated? October 28. Guess when ED applications are due? Typically November 1. Now, how is that remotely helpful to tell the parents of seniors on October 28 about early decision?
Then they offered a list of what they called “Holy Grail” schools.
“Holy Grail” 1: Amherst, Brown, Caltech, Chicago, Columbia, Dartmouth, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Harvey Mudd, U of Illinois, U of Michigan, MIT, Northwestern, UNC- Chapel Hill
“Holy Grail” 2: Pomona, Princeton, Rice, Stanford, Swarthmore, UVA, WashU, Wellesley, Williams, Yale
It’s completely unclear to me what is the definition of Holy Grail 1 vs Holy Grail 2, why (of the Ivies) Princeton and Yale are on the second list, why there aren’t other top universities on there such as Notre Dame, Rice, Vanderbilt or USC, why there aren’t other elite LAC’s on there beyond Amherst/Pomona/Wellesley/Williams/Swat, and why they have UNC - Chapel Hill on there at all (but not U of Wisconsin or Berkeley).
Yeah, our GC identified the perfect college for D1. And insisted we take a look. But we were sort of rare in that D1 knew exactly what she wanted to study, the environment/flavor of the school, some particular opportunities that would be important to her, etc.
As part of a later focus group on college counseling at that hs, I was surprised most parents complained she hadn’t done enough. Their kids were at what I considered great matches for them.
Do folks see how some are pointing fingers at GCs? It’s an odd game. For most of us, had our kids ended up at a different name, but similarly matched college, they would still grow and accomplish.
As far as aid goes, I don’t expect GCs to become aid counselors.
And, I cannot say this strongly enough: don’t get your basic advice from CC. It’s a help, in context, with approach. It can be very supportive, point to some less known schools, advocate looking for merit, talk about their own experiences, etc. But most folks know little about what it takes for a holistic- and bandy words like lottery, standing out, passions.
Don’t add reaches without really knowing what they look for. That’s on the kid and parents.