<p>An interesting new paper from Christopher Avery of Harvard.</p>
<p>Very interesting, particularly the comments about how many of the students did not follow the counselor’s advice on schools to consider, even when the counselor felt strongly that the student was very likely to be admitted.</p>
<p>Overall it reaffirmed my belief that kids who manage to be high achievers despite attending high poverty, weak high schools are a remarkable bunch of students with much to contribute to whatever college they attend.</p>
<p>I also wonder if the help would have been more effective had it started earlier, in junior year.</p>
<p>An interesting concept, indeed! I just PM’d a student about this very concept…</p>
<p>Yes, I think earlier is better, particularly for high school course selection. I think my son’s distance learning high school should have given class of 2010 students more counseling earlier. Maybe that’s something they will improve in future years.</p>
<p>It’s outrageous that the one student’s HS guidance counselor made him write his own letter, then would not send the letter the college counselor helped write and sent a poorly written, canned letter instead! Maybe they should have taken steps to explain the process to the GC’s as well!</p>
<p>Very interesting, given that this is what I spent my lunch hour doing today.</p>
<p>Why should poor kids be any different from rich kids? They all ignore my advice at times. :)</p>
<p>But do they usually ignore in the direction of not applying to “most selective” schools like Harvard? That had to be painful for the counselor, thinking that the kid had a good shot of getting into a school that would also provide a really comprehensive FA package.</p>
<p>I think college advising should start in 9th grade when all grades suddenly count. It gives the counselor 3 years to coach. And it gives the students time to calculate what classes they will need to get into college.</p>
<p>The problem I face here in a large urban area is that students don’t put college on their radar until Senior year - too late to correct any deficits and way too late to start thinking about ACT and SAT prep.</p>
<p>Before the recent spate of layoffs, I used to work with a counselor at middle school who brought in reps from a variety of colleges (community, Ivy, local, state, etc…) to start priming kids to think about colleges at 8th grade - with better results than we see now that he’s gone. :-(</p>
<p>MANY years ago I described the role of the parent of a college-bound teenager to be “providing possibly disregarded advice,” and some of the disregarding has been wise on my son’s part. For the lowest-income students, I do think it is important to have the full range of advice to regard or disregard that students from wealthier families get routinely.</p>
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<p>That makes sense to me, but my son’s start-up high school didn’t even have a counselor during his ninth grade school year. The counselor the school eventually did have provided some helpful advice in September of senior year, and then left the school during November of senior. That wasn’t very convenient for the members of class of 2010, and that showed in some of their college results.</p>
<p>Our local high school does a great job in helping high achieving, low income minorities get into tippy top colleges. Unfortunately, there just aren’t many of these students around. :(</p>
<p>My high school has a student to counselor ratio of about 450:1, these counselor are so busily bothered with demands from students with course changing(a weirdly popular phenomenon at my school - ppl switch courses to be with their friends all the time) and other negligible problems that they don’t advise students with college application at all, not that they’re overly knowledgeable though…</p>
<p>A few of the regular school counselors in that study didn’t seem too helpful, and one was downright dangerous.</p>
<p>I’ve seen cases like that.</p>
<p>I attended a high school in a county where the average household income was around 30k. Well here is the issue.</p>
<p>The high school I went to actually selected students based on how they did in middle school, AND</p>
<ol>
<li>Some of the students that made it in, you always asked yourself, “how in the world did this kid get in?”.</li>
<li>The guidance counselor we had knew little to nothing about college admissions, according to her a 3.1 GPA at our high school made our state flagship university a safety. </li>
<li>We were royally screwed, we had to do dumb intern classes which lasted two periods, we couldn’t take many APs (4 or 5 max), we had to take a year long EMT course which was SUPPOSED to be an elective but our guidance counselor didn’t know that.</li>
<li>RARELY did kids from our school get into Ivies, we had one kid get in but he had outside help.</li>
<li>At the end I found out the only reason the high school I attended was good is because the kids actually went off to A COLLEGE (tier 4, tier 5, tier 6, tier 7 or tier you name it), RARELY did kids get into the state flagship university. </li>
</ol>
<p>Our high school had 98 percent of its kids going off to colleges, about 2 percent of the kids went off to a tier 1 school and that is because they were URMs. Parents, please, do not let the numbers confuse you.</p>
<p>Currently I am a second year college student at a university in the same town in which I went to high school. Fortunately, I have been accepted into some Tier 1s as a transfer student to spend my final two years.</p>
<p>The top colleges need to do a better job advertising financial aid initiatives and guidance counselors need to get to know their top students and start giving them advice or pointing them in the right direction (this is something I noticed; it seems GCs can be bad at helping students find their own information and it seems like a lot of kids only end up knowing what the GC has on the top of their head and don’t know where to research for themselves) BEFORE second semester junior year.</p>
<p>“My high school has a student to counselor ratio of about 450:1, these counselor are so busily bothered with demands from students with course changing(a weirdly popular phenomenon at my school - ppl switch courses to be with their friends all the time) and other negligible problems that they don’t advise students with college application at all, not that they’re overly knowledgeable though.”</p>
<p>My school was something like that too. I think our ratio was more like 250:1 or 300:1, but otherwise the same.</p>
<p>Though like 15% of our graduating class goes to UMich, and probably 4-5% go to Ivys or equivalent, so people still do well. This was a fairly high income area though.</p>
<p>What I did not see in the paper and I will admit that I have not read it in depth was the level to which counselors reached out to parents. I think that it is important to also educate parents on the college process and bring them into the loop (preaching to the choir here). I notice that there is more buy-in when you are also bringing the parents along the journey.</p>
<p>In addition to my regular work, I teach weekly advisory classes to my junior caseload where we spend the year go throught he whole year doing the college process. It helps me to see them in a classroom setting and gives me another perspective to work from when it comes to writing their recommendations.</p>
<p>In our advisory, we spent a couple of sessions reviewing common data sets. I remember giving my students an assignment where I had them all select a state out of a bag. </p>
<p>They had choose a college in that state and pull the Common Data set. For the initial assignment they could not use SUNY/CUNY and the CC usual suspects (that will come at a later date). They had to find information on retention rates, 4, 5 and 6 year graduation rates, financial aid information, admit rate, yeild, how they were going to get to this school and the associated cost with traveling to the school.</p>
<p>I had some students go straight to the college board website where they simply copied and pasted information. There were parts of the assignment where they did not get credit because they did not use the common data set. I did not have a problem with the college board site because it does give a great overview. However, I wanted to teach them how to use multiple sources to get information and to dig deeper.</p>
<p>I am working collaboratively with the english teachers and they are working on the essays this term. We have covered brag sheets, annotated resumes and some students have already setting up meetings with teachers to get recommendations. There are students who I have failed in advisory because some come to class and do no work. there will always be some students who we will have to drag kicking and screaming through the process.</p>
<p>Sometimes it is the ones you least expect that suprise you. The great things is when the seniors pop in to my classes and they say “listen to her! it will be so much easier for you to work through this senior year!” I am excited about seeing the kids today as we return from spring break as the seniors celebrate (and comiserate over) the outcome of the admissions process.</p>
<p>This is really one of the aims of the QuestBridge program. As Matches and finalists, we went to local schools to either speak with students or guidance counselors about the prospects of high-achieving, low-income students. It is amazing what guidance counselors don’t know. My old high school guidance counselor, for example, had never heard of the SAT Subject Tests.</p>
<p>I would like to humbly ask that people stop assuming that “someone” got into a top college because they are a “URM.” I’m a college interviewer and my hubby is an Adcom - both for competitive colleges and we wish people would give colleges more credit than that.</p>
<p>If the person got it, they had to have a lot more going for them than just being a URM - and given the complexity of an application - there may be a lot of factors people outside of the system won’t be privy to.</p>
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<p>Also - I concur with the insufficient numbers of low income/high achievers. Problem is - the child isn’t often the problem, it’s the system that failed to educate them. No doubt, even with lots of “gas” there will still be cars that won’t “go” because of external situations (family, IQ, motivation.) But I contend we’d have thousands more if the educational systems adjusted to meet the needs of a child rather than shove them in underfunded, overcrowded classrooms where the teaching method is “one size fits all” and often than one size is the lowest possible level of academic content because someone has already decided based on historical data that doing more is a waste of time.</p>
<p>I say that after walking into a college prep school in jeans and a hoodie to inquire about my daughter’s poor instruction (even the homework instructions were mispelled, or technically incorrect). I was told that I wouldn’t understand the complexities of the subjects (algebra and science). Then my husband pointed out where we were educated and that we had four science degrees between us and what about Blooms Taxonomy would we not understand? At which point the admin and teachers choked, backtracked and said “Well, that’s different. You’re not like the other parents.” To which I replied “Two minutes ago, I WAS one of THOSE other parents.”</p>
<p>So sometimes it’s the kid’s APTITUDE that keeps them back. Sometimes it’s the school’s ATTITUDE that does it.</p>
<p>Combine that with college counselors who are mis-informed, overworked or absent and the data becomes self-fulfilling.</p>
<p>Hence, our decision to switch to private schools with a college prep focus.</p>