This year’s
Barnes was motivated by college admissions counselor Denise James.
It is a shame that the counselor doesn’t have some type of license that can be revoked for professional misconduct.
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“I submitted college applications in August, with an eye on raising the bar high for college admissions. Decision letters were an overflow in my mailbox and hundreds of scholarship offers,” Barnes said.
This attitude is nothing to be proud of in my opinion. It’s actually kind of jerky. Was he sincerely interested in and considering attending all the colleges he applied to? Probably not - he was apparently just playing a game. Did he potentially take away a spot from a student who really wanted to attend one of the schools that accepted him? Maybe not, but possibly. At any rate, seems jerky to do this.
“His goal is to reach $10 million in offered scholarships by the end of the month.”
Why? Does he need $10 million to be able to attend college? Again, seems just to be part of an elaborate, self-indulgent ego-trip of a game. Jerky.
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And how much time did he spend doing applications…and requesting application waivers. Where is he attending college?
And the Guinness Book of World Records counts these admission records? 
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The amount of time spent by AO’s reading those applications, the amount of time it took for someone to process his waivers and, as 180 or so of those apps weren’t on the common app, it required some kind of effort from those that sent out transcripts and recommendations.
Nothing but a vanity project.
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The vitriol when I pointed out the vanity aspect and the poor college counseling on WWLTV’s FB post is quite humorous. Mostly from recent high school students or their parents that are convinced that the average guidance counselor actually knows a lot about college counseling.
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Guinness will certify just about anything as a record these days as long as you pay them. Some of the latest:
- fastest marathon dressed as a knight
- longest charcuterie board
- most continuous cracking of different joints
- largest afro on a living person (female)
I would bet very few of their “new records” had a “previous record”.
One of my project teams was planning a client outing to set the “most simultaneous egg toss participants” record, or something like that, but the costs/logistics became too much to deal with.
Fwiw, last year’s previous “record holder” went to Wingate University
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Fun fact about me: I was part of the Guinness world record for the largest human flower.
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Not sure how one can do 200 apps - there must be some kind of program or something to allow this.
If the young man is driven and ends up in the right place, then good for him.
I don’t begrudge the path he took if it is what he wanted to do and he put in the effort.
But i’m guessing he didn’t apply to 200 the old fashioned way. That would seem impossible.
Weird hobby. There are about a million other things I would rather do with my time but to each their own.
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Many colleges are part of shared application arrangements*, so the number of forms to fill in may have been significantly less than 200. Also, that many colleges presumably includes many which are only moderately selective and do not require lots of extra essays for admission or scholarships. (Avoid the notion that every college requires several unique essays like the highly selective ones that most of these forums focus on.)
*Common, Coalition, Universal, CBCA, ApplyTexas, UC, CSU, …
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understood - but a UC is only so many, the common app is 20.
I wonder if there’s some crazy association with like 50.
would be interesting to learn more.
I believe the HBCU colleges have one app where you can apply to around 65. It was mentioned on a similar thread last year.
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Yes, and some of those on the HBCU common app are automatic acceptances. I wish it required them to do a little research on where they were applying to.
Our students have no idea where Wilberforce is, but they are in.
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i wish the kid luck and hope he ends up a place that he likes and is affordable.
but from the backend, it seems like such an incredible time-waster. setting up portals for all the scholarships, having to send transcripts, having admissions spend time looking at his info, setting up spreadsheets to compare the info, emailing asking for waivers, etc. If he’s looking for real scholarship money, i hope he honed in on some places that will work for him.
And this is perhaps why some school guidance offices limit the number of applications/transcripts they will process for each student.
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I suspect in cases like this the school/GC is very much in on the game / publicity stunt or whatever you call it. It’s publicity for the school, and in any case this wouldn’t have been possible without their assistance and cooperation.
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Yes, it was done for publicity. I can see this being a negative or a positive. Negative would be if the kid and school did it just because they wanted to be in a record book or be on tv. Positive would be if they wanted to make people in their community aware that scholarship money is out there, and that a kid who looks like them can get it.
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