<p>CC is invaluable to people going through the college application phase, but it should be used on top of a college counselor, not in a college counselor’s stead.</p>
<p>They get a new crop of seniors willing to blog their college app process every year. Surely at least one of these kids is using it as a resume item on college apps ;)</p>
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<p>If it relates to high school counselors, that is quite a debatable statement. It might reflect your personal experience, but it is hardly universal. For many, the best use of a GC is to be relied on to get the transcript and ancillary documents forwarded on time and … not much else. There are obvious exceptions but the incredibly lacking guidance and expertise is quite common.</p>
<p>As everything, it is a matter of personal interpretation and knowledge. One has to know to realize what bad advice sounds like. In the same vein, not all parts of CC are useful and on the mark. You have incredibly solid sections such as this one and the test prep area, and the absolute moronic sections such as the “chance” forum where the one-eyed myopic guru pretends to lead the blind.</p>
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<p>A college counselor?
Like the one you hire? Many people can’t afford those.
Like the ones in schools? Mine didn’t have one.
Like a guidance counselor? I saw mine maybe once a year- I don’t even think that often. We had one for every ~450 students.</p>
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<p>I disagree. In our case the school guidance counselors were woefully understaffed and had little knowledge or experience with getting kids into high-end schools back east. The normal limit of their vision was to get their smart kids into a UC, any UC. And sure enough, a few years ago one of the school college counselors asked us for advice on how to get her high-achieving daughter into a high-end college. </p>
<p>I suppose if you are a parent who can spare a lot of money but not much time you could hire a professional college counselor. But even then you’d have to spend time reading CC or some other website to figure out where to find what to look for in college counselor so as not to waste your money. Instead I spent the time figuring out what to look for in a college. And I did it for free - by reading CC, without any aid from any college counselors.</p>
<p>With my first child, I think I had found cc (the old forum) but didn’t have a ton of knowledge. Kiddo got into respectable schools but they were all safeties. Next kiddo had big dreams of small, cozy top liberal arts colleges. No one in my family had ever been accepted to one of those and I felt I had really butchered the process with kiddo #1 so I posted on cc. It honestly changed kiddo’s life. While all the posts were knowledgeable, I am particularly grateful to calmom who was very reassuring when telling me to aim high. So our experience with cc was quite the opposite as that mentioned above: we were encouraged to aim high.</p>