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Great line. To me the parenting trick is to figure for each child what growth is needed and which environment will best nuture that growth.</p>
<p>I want to take a moment to appreciate the tough job that the people at Choate have. Because, yes, they know that public universities are a good option for their students, often the best option, and they know it’s the right thing to do to promote them, both to students and families. And they know that not everyone in the class is going to get accepted at Harvard or Dartmouth, or Williams, either. But they also know that none of the parents sent their child to Choate because they were dreaming he might get into UMass Amherst, or the University of Maryland - College Park, or even Wisconsin. What’s more, the parents with the means to send their children to Choate are by and large not a group that is shy about expressing its opinions or throwing its weight around.</p>
<p>Managing those expectation is a hard, hard thing.</p>
<p>^Yes, I can imagine not all the parents are as lovely and reasonable as ChoatieMom…</p>
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<p>Safe and except that there is little correlation between attending a smaller school and NOT being pushed out of your comfort zone. In a way, this stems from the faulty (and typical) narrative that a LAC environment is automatically seen as a hand-holding environment where the college experience is an exercise of coddling and spoon-feeding. </p>
<p>Fwiw, it it really more comforting to sit in a classroom with a dozen of peers well-armed and prepared to “argue” to death than having the luxury of sitting in the back of an auditorium going through the Powerpoint presentation that will be available online? </p>
<p>The bottom line? Gross generalizations always fall short of conveying the reality. Few students ever have the luxury of attending BOTH types of schools. And few parents have much more than hearsay and third-party accounts to form a valid but recent opinion.</p>
<p>PS Fwiw, speaking about opinions, it so happens that Malcom Gladwell is known to be really long on opinions, and very short on verifiable … factual evidence. A huge grain of salt is needed when digesting his contributions to the world of higher education.</p>
<p>JHS, I see the same phenomenon with private college counselors. Nobody is paying the big bucks (and in some cases, extreme bucks) to then see their kid trundle off to Hofstra or U Conn or Adelphi, even if those schools turn out to be the very best fit for their kid (where the kid thrives by every measure.)</p>
<p>It’s a hard message to tell a parent who is a Dartmouth grad that the “Dartmouth lites” (Colby, Bates, Hobart, Colgate) are impossible reaches for their kid and they need to be looking at other options. And some parents don’t want to hear it until April… and then they are scrambling for a college, any college.</p>
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<p>UConn is actually a highly respectable flagship popular with many Tri-State students for both academic and sports-related reasons. A former post-college roommate told me if he hadn’t been admitted to an elite private college in the mid-Atlantic with a full-ride FA/scholarship package, he’d have been happy to attend UConn which was in-state for him. He still cheers on the UConn Huskies during basketball season. </p>
<p>On the other hand, I wouldn’t blame those parents for being upset if their big bucks counselor told them Hofstra is the best fit for their kid. Considering the high tuition…especially if one’s full-pay, academic level with most except a few strong programs, and the bureaucratic hassles there, if that’s the best fit, then that kid’s also highly likely to find good fits with many mid-lower-tiered SUNY/CUNY 4-year colleges. </p>
<p>Public colleges which would not only be at-above the academic level of Hofstra and have similar/lower levels of bureaucratic hassles, but also at a much lower full-pay price…whether OOS or especially if one’s in-state.</p>
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<p>… a team known for its stellar graduation rate and related academic prowess.</p>
<p>cobrat, the point is not whether U Conn is or is not a fine institution (and I believe it is.) The point is, does a parent really need to pay a private college counselor to “discover” a flagship state university, craft an application strategy to said state university, figure out how to massage an essay or present a kid’s high school transcript in the best possible light, etc.</p>
<p>I think people are crazy to be paying big bucks for private counselors anyway- I think most of them do a terrible job of editing out a kid’s “voice” in their essays, and advise things that I’ve heard Adcom’s say make them crazy (like attaching an addendum to explain what the Literary Prize is at their HS, or explain how rigorous the criteria are for national honor society at their HS.) Most adcom’s can figure out what a literary prize is for goodness sake… and as they like to say, “the thicker the application, the thicker the kid”.</p>
<p>But I digress. Show me a parent who shelled out big bucks to hire a private counselor to get their kid into their own (or a neighboring state’s) university???</p>
<p>Best not to look at California where many parents do pay big bucks to get their kid into one of the mid/upper tier UCs.</p>
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<p>This might hinge on the definition of big bucks. For some, big bucks might equate to 15 years of private tuition. A sum that might easily surpass cost of four years at the most expensive college in the country. For others, it might be the cost of several years of tutoring to keep up with the “ranking games.”</p>
<p>Although not universal, I believe that you will find a number of parents who shelled out plenty of shekels or buckaroos to merely ensure that Little Suzy or Little Nathan cracked the top 7 or 10 percent to attend a flagship in Texas. </p>
<p>This said, I do understand the overall spirit of the post, and that big bucks is more akin to the fees collected by outfits with names that include Ivy (think Shaw’s Ivysuccess or Cohen’s IvyWise) than the more pedestrian Dillard in North Texas. ;)</p>
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Pls. explain.</p>
<p>I was responding to Blossom’s post in which she argued that there weren’t parents who would hire a private college counselor to get their kid into a state school. I personally know three people whose parents paid hundreds to thousands of dollars to do just that (admittedly, CA has a much different system of higher ed than most states).</p>
<p>Thanks for post #382, JHS; it is so spot on and was very much behind my chuckle over the not-so-subliminal PowerPoint message at college info weekend. Kudos to all college counselors who have to deal those not-so-shy parents who fail to understand that their tuition dollars are buying their child an excellent high school education, not entrance to a particular college or type of college.</p>
<p>Whenwhen- thanks for the clarification. I’m not sure admissions to U Conn or U Mass or U Maine is so opaque that it requires anything besides a careful reading of the website to figure out if your kid is likely to be admitted or not. (Likely, not a sure thing.) But I freely concede that life is different in other states.</p>
<p>You do not need to hire a private college counselor to get into a mid or upper tier UC. Unless I guess you are paying the counselor to write your UC personal statements.</p>
<p>Perhaps those who paid private college counselors and then eventually ended up applying mainly to not-super-selective private and state universities were those who had dreams and aspirations of HYP, but were brought back to reality by private college counselors who told them to apply to more realistic schools for a student with a 3.0 HS GPA and 1500 SAT CR+M+W.</p>
<p>I do know of someone who hired a college counselor and the son got into Penn State. I don’t know his stats so I don’t know if it was his reach or match school. The family was from NJ, so I was kind of wondering why they were going to pay for OS tuition.</p>
<p>I also know someone who paid a private college counselor for their son’s application process. He ended up attending WVU out of state and his parents are very pleased with their results. The perspective on CC is sometimes so narrow and doesn’t account for the fact that people have all sorts of different reasons for the types of schools they prefer for their kids.</p>
<p>I agree no one really “needs” a college counselor. No one really “needs” to look all over the country for a college. No one really needs to select an uber-popular college. Need and want are two different things. But I will say that the “happiness” in the spring of senior year high school that your kiddo found a college is far surpassed by the happiness of writing the last tuition check which is surpassed by the happiness of taking that photo of them with (generally empty because they mail them) diploma in hand.</p>
<p>I agree. College counselors often coach families to add best fit options to the list and to follow a prudent process timeline (including scholarship apps). They don’t necessarily just chase to uber-competitive colleges.</p>