<p>“people who go to these elite schools seem to have a difficult time accepting others do not care to be like them and do not actually care about their existence, so they turn it into a negative.”</p>
<p>Can you at least make this SOME people? Ivy Leaguers are not any more monolithic than any other group.</p>
<p>Many high school counselors are overworked, underpaid, AND underinformed. They all have a very hard job, and some don’t do it well. It’s not either/or. Students who want to stay close to home should be making an informed choice after weighing options. Too many cannot because of a lack of guidance from any knowledgeable adult.</p>
<p>Management consulting. Investment banks to a lesser extent. It’s harder, but you can start off in the back office and work your way to the front office with enough smarts and drive. There doesn’t seem to be a similar path in consulting. Only alternative if you want to break in there seems to be to go back to (a better) school. Or amass a ton of experience.</p>
<p>fzehigh))))))))))))I am a silent lurker and don’t post much, but I kind of agree with decca17. Here is an ancedotal example, last year my DD’s counselor suggested to look at local community college and local & state universities instead of looking for colleges outside of our midwest state. Had I paid attention to the counselor my DD would not have been attending MIT this fall. Some GCs in average public schools are really not equipped to guide high performing kids. Again this is just an ancedote.
)))))))))))</p>
<p>My story is the same. I came from a suburban NJ town, but my parents were lower middle class at the time I was in HS. My guidance counselor said go to Rutgers, you can go tuition-free, and don’t waste your money applying anywhere else. He practically ordered me not to apply to any Ivies. I got into both I applied to and went to one. Fact is, even now, talking to applicants at alumni interviews, it is abundantly clear that the “poor kids” or rather, the kids clearly from urban public high schools, were NOT supported by their guidance counselors, teachers, or parents. The reverse was true about those from elite private schools, they practically thought they were the moon, sun, and the stars per their guidance counselors, teachers, and parents. </p>
<p>QuestBridge will help, I hope it will help a lot. I would love to see participation rates increased, and I’d even love to see how mandating QuestBridge in certain districts (Abbot districts in NJ for example) might increase acceptance rates of lower income kids. </p>
<p>High schools with many students from low-income families, who often live in problematic home situations and are not likely to have parents who are knowledgeable about college, have a lot on their plates besides college advising, and the number of students under their advisement can be huge. If only they all knew about Questbridge, which will do the educating for them. Many top colleges use Questbridge to recruit low-income students (Vassar for one).</p>
<p>@rhandco and @fezhigh - you are a different group than who some are addressing here. In my case, I am talking about kids who do know about the elite schools and choose not to apply or attend. This is why I have no issue with Questbridge etc. because they inform kids and those kids who go through the program have decided that is here they want to go.</p>
<p>This is where (18 year old?) naiveté comes into play. </p>
<p>All of the “top 30” do not meet full financial need. Moreover, no student can borrow $10k/yr. Even if they could, that is a foolish amount to borrow for nearly every teenager.</p>
<p>My kids attended a top high school, and I never thought that our counselors were ambitious enough on behalf of the kids (speaking generally…my kids didn’t need the counselors help). They had a little bit of a coach’s bad attitude, I thought, which was that they were going to do their job, but they didn’t feel that they had that much influence over the result. They actively discourage things like taking the PSAT as a sophomore, and certain other things that they thought smacked of over-involvement by parents. Maybe it came from being abused by parents who didn’t get the admissions results they expected for the kids. But I think it was there, and its not uncommon. </p>
<p>Given that as a baseline, I can only imagine what a counselor is like in a rural KY or TN district, or the south side of Chicago, or the Bronx, where possibly most of the kids aren’t even going to college. Add to that the syndrome of people not wanting to believe that there might be a bigger, better world than they know about, and it is an uphill struggle for talented kids. But if you have the scores that are showing up in the Questbridge data, you have all the brainpower you need to figure out what’s available. You may not get much encouragement though, and I think that’s the crux of the issue. </p>
<p>I know more than one kid from a poor family whose parent(s) was rejected a for ParentsPlus loan because of bad credit and was therefore entitled to borrow an extra $4k as a freshman. Plus many colleges offer Perkins loans to their students on top of the Staffords.</p>
<p>“I can only imagine what a counselor is like in a rural KY or TN district, or the south side of Chicago, or the Bronx, where possibly most of the kids aren’t even going to college.”</p>
<p>They are busy with the kids in desperate circumstances, and they likely went to a local directional school themselves.</p>
<p>I attended a public magnet HS, and while I believe the teachers there are stellar (one of the best liberal arts educations anyone can receive anywhere, IMO), knowing what I know now, I probably could provide someone with better college admissions advice than my guidance counselor. It all worked out well in my case, but that was also 20 years ago, when it wasn’t nearly so difficult to get in to the elites. With less room for error now (so to speak), good guidance is even more critical. I agree that guidance at a more typical public HS is probably downright bad compared to the private prep schools (the college guidance counselors being probably the main and maybe only advantage that the prep schools provide for what parents are shelling out money for). Luckily, these days, there are resources like CC for the motivated kid in a public school.</p>
<p>@oldmom4896 and @decca17 just because a student can borrow that much doesn’t make it a good idea. Employment and income are hardly a given, let alone graduating. @decca not sure what you mean by “modest” means, but that wouldn’t describe most lower SES students. That sounds more like lower middle class to me.</p>
<p>@PurpleTitan thank you for understanding my point. So many here seem to think that the top poor students have it so easy when it comes to admission to the top colleges, and that is so far from the truth. It’s wonderful that some of the top colleges do support those in need and programs like GM and QB are great as well, but there is a limit to the number of students they can help. Hopefully the QB program will expand to more colleges which would likely increase the number of students getting the QB advantage, but the reality is that most colleges can not afford to meet full need. </p>
<p>And I do think that the costs for transportation and others are a barrier to some families, so the local university is more appealing due to proximity. </p>
<p>@pizzagirl how many students were involved in the protest? I can’t imagine students upset at having to pay so little and with work study to cover even that. Hopefully those students were in the minority of those receiving aid.</p>
<p>SoMuch2Learn, I don’t think it’s a good idea either, not at all, for a student to borrow so much. But that’s what happens to a student who wants to go to a top school that doesn’t meet full need or meets it but only with a ton of loans.</p>
<p>@oldmom4896 thanks for explaining. We are in agreement. In some cases this may be a good option, but for many it would create stress for the student and might require them to make unhealthy spending choices during their time in college as aid tends to decrease in later years.</p>
<p>One of the problems that questbridge has, I think, is that only 18% of their finalists have boards above 1400. That’s not a big problem by itself, since a lot more have scores of 1300 and above. But if you take a look at their partner schools, the vast majority of them are places where a 1300 board score puts you far down in the overall entering class. And about 1/3 of those partner institutions are either very small or not so well endowed, which will give them a big problem in taking many of the available questbridge kids. </p>
<p>The program could use some additional partner schools from the state school side of things, but maybe it doesn’t make sense for the UMs and Ohio States of the world to partner with them. I’m not sure what it entails. </p>
<p>Poor kids can’t do the kind of extensive, effective test prep (or any test prep) that wealthier kids do. So their test scores can be misleading.</p>
<p>@decca17, I was asking you why a parent from the northeast wouldn’t encourage his or her children to go to college in a different part of the country to “broaden their horizons.” There is narrow-mindedness everywhere, and you are amply demonstrating this right here. There are provincial people in NYC and DC and LA.</p>
<p>Yes, that is an issue for sure. I assume its issue is the same as every top school - there are but so much high scoring candidates from poor school districts.</p>
<p>Yes, but I’m not sure at all that it’s entirely score related. If you look at the link I posted, there are a lot more applicants to QB now than in 2006. It may be that there are more under-qualified applicants as the program has become more well known, or it just may be that the partner colleges can accept only so many needing full aid.</p>