<p>Jolynne, it is not intrusive in the least to see what is being sent out from your school to colleges. Many are surprised at what is and is not on the school transcripts that go out. You should know exactly what the procedures are, and if there is something that is not favorable to your particular case, ask if that can be changed. Sometimes it can. Certainly, incorrect and outdated info, for instance, on the school profile sholuld be changed. I have seen that too many times, just because someone did not thing of reading it through and redoing it. Other things are a matter of routine too. It is often not beneficial to send a true transcript to the colleges for example. Most schools just send out a transcript with the year end grades. That way a C for a quarter or less than excellent exam grade does not show up. Effort grades and other comments are also not there. It is a sanitized college version, and this is typical of many colleges. Also some high schools will send out a quarter report senior year for kids who bring up that gpa considerably that quarter for an upward trend even if that is not usual practice. Our hs will do this upon request. The same with a third quarter report to show the kid has been still steadily working hard senior year. It can make a difference in border line cases where early grades were lower and a definite upward trend is there. So it pays to know what is happening as a matter of course, so you can ask for additional info. It always is important to know as much as possible what your assessor has in hand. Some things are not possible to have, but the standard school package sans private recs is certainly within your right to see. Also , there could be a mistake in the danged thing. There was in my second son's final report.</p>
<p>I feel your pain but urge you to proceed with caution. I offered help to this year's counseling staff as I feel they are overworked and expected to be all things to all people. I am still stunned to learn (third-hand, of course) that they saw my offer to lighten their load as insinuating they don't know how to do their jobs. For instance, someone above said you should offer to get the PTA involved. Well, this is the exact route we took at our school, and instead of a helping hand, they saw pointing fingers.</p>
<p>When you jump in to help the very years your kid is in the process of applying, there is good reason for suspicion of motive. Lots of pushy people out there wanting every single advantage for there kids. I helped for several years with no kids in the school, and my kid already well out of the picture at S1's high school. I bowed out because I could see then why the counseling operated the way it did. It was a matter of providing what most of the families and kids wanted.</p>
<p>Treetopleaf: "What's the vibe on North Central? No one from hereabouts goes there, and it's not farther than Elmhurst."</p>
<p>No real vibe on North Central other than I drive through it every now and then when I go through Naperville. I've heard of exactly one person going there. I think the name hurts it. It sounds like it's directional but it's not even a directional university. Elmhurst does have an attractive campus; dh took courses there over the summer while home from NU, and that's where the kids take SAT's, ACT's, etc.</p>
<p>I had the same experience as Youdon'tsay. But I also saw other parents get preferential treatment for children as result of their involvement, so it may be a matter of personality and/or approach.</p>
<p>What can truly be parentally remedied is the student's knowledge of his/her options. The GC may not know about colleges that might interest your S/D, but the parent can certainly address that.</p>
<p>Owlice: "Does your school have a gifted or honors track? Does it have AP or IB courses?" Yes, they do; next year my sophs will each be taking 4 honors (weighted) classes, including AP Amer Hist; they've recently upgraded the language offerings so that there are regular and honors tracks unlike before where it was all together until senior year AP; they offer AP Calc and Stats and all of that. Not quite the full breadth of some neighboring schools, but certainly decent. It's not like I am unimpressed with the teachers / staff / offerings themselves.</p>
<p>Marite: One of my kids' 8th grade teachers had a BA from Yale. There are some NU grads among the teachers, particularly linked into the theater and music departments.</p>
<p>I love your suggestions and you are giving me a lot to think about!</p>
<p>You should make an appointment with the college counselor at the HS as soon as the students go back in September. With some of your own research, you should be able to get a grasp of whether this person's advice is worthwhile. If not, look into your other options.</p>
<p>I know your school's setting, and wonder if the problem lies in that it was traditionally a very middle class area which has more recently become upper-middle class, with an influx of more educated parents. You can certainly reach out to these folks, and do it informally, to everyone's advantage. </p>
<p>You are right in that students should be looking beyond state schools. Be sure your district's policies aren't holding them back (like the districts that cancel senior exams if the kid scores well on the ACT, etc.) You have to have everyone involved to make the upgrade to the better college opportunities, and I'm sorry to say that changes in the administration probably won't happen in time for your sophomores.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl,
We are in your same boat, just in a different state. Almost no one goes out of state from public hs, they don't even aspire to. Public education here is in a very sad state. We have the lowest spending per student of any state in the country! GC's have way too many students to do more than the bare minimum for any of them, but most students only wish to go to the very religious U here anyway. Even our "flagship" state U is only third tier. I don't think there is much that one person can do to change a situation like this. My d is a college soph. now and she and I did her entire college search and selection on our own. No school support. She only knew 2 other people who were planning to go to an OOS private. Very lonely time for her. I did all that I knew for her at the time, but since coming on CC I have learned so much more how I can help my S along his path. We just realize we'll be on our own. </p>
<p>Owlice, you had some really good suggestions. Thanks for the post.</p>
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I offered help to this year's counseling staff as I feel they are overworked
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<p>I got ignored (effectively discouraged) when I offered to help out with a very low priority extracurricular at my kid's school. I think overbearing parents make the rest of us look bad. It's ironic that we expect the kids to (over)commit to community service when the schools are sometimes reluctant to accept assistance from well meaning parents. BTW I ended up helping anyway by being present and in the end they were glad to have the help. But based on their comments my usefulness surprised them.</p>
<p>Thanks for the comments on North Central. I know of it only because a friend of my fathers went there, but it (and Benedictine) might as well be in Siberia based on matriculation from our school. I sometimes think there is fashion/popularity involved with these choices, and some schools are perceived as unattractive choices. And some are essentially unknown, even though they are very nearby.</p>
<p>BengalMom,</p>
<p>Most of the students in my high school are not considering out of state. The other day, while waiting for the bell to ring for lunch, my son said they discussed colleges in his AP English class. He is the only student looking seriously at out of state schools. Why? Because all the kids have ever heard is in state. Don't look at out of state or private. They are too expensive. That is all that the kids hear, and yes, that scares them. The problem is that they have not researched enough to learn about the opportunities all schools have.</p>
<p>The other reason why our kids want to stay in state so badly is that they have grown up together. Some of them were in the same play group as toddlers. Some of our kids are afraid to go out of state, because they won't know anyone. My son said that he is glad that we've moved several times, because he really does not have a true connection to any place where we lived. Instead, he has lots of friends all over the country. </p>
<p>We've had to do a lot of research on schools. We've done all the tours (up until this point) together. He's all right about being the only one to apply here or apply there. And if no one from his HS goes where he goes, that's all right. It will be a new adventure, he tells me.</p>
<p>I mentioned earlier the useful information on the Belmont, MA high school. Here is the link to the college planning discussion. There is more useful information on the website. On the PTO forum, there is an interesting compilation of responses to a survey of parents of college freshmen.</p>
<p>>>></a> College Planning. Values Clarification Questions <<<</p>
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Jahn1012 -- how might you suggest I "do something" to change the culture? I want to make them aware of how I feel and how mediocre this is, esp compared to some of the surrounding school districts that are just more open to better schools, but I don't want to be offputting and shoot myself (or my kids) in the foot.
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<p>I understand your concerns, and they are valid.</p>
<p>For starters, I would recommend getting involved in a PTA/PTSA as others have mentioned. This will give you a channel to other parents and school staff. Spend some time in this organization, work your way up the ranks, and gain some influence.</p>
<p>Once you have some leverage, try to get some college fairs going. I went to a public school as well. The administration and counselors would invite different colleges to come on what seemed to us (the student body) to be a daily basis. There were about 2-3 representatives from schools in the lobby on any given day during the lunch hours when the lobby was most frequented. Teachers were instructed to excuse anyone interested in attending these informational "sessions." By having it constantly in our faces, announced on the loud speaker, and made part of the daily routine, discussion about college became natural. The HS from which I graduated and of which I now speak sends kids to a wide range of schools: many to Ivies, other Top 50s, and tons out-of-state. Of course, it's a public school, so state schools are the norm, and most people do end up at these institutions for a variety of reasons. This is unlikely to change completely, and you would do well to accept this to a certain degree.</p>
<p>Also try to get your school to update its website. GCs are great resources, but they're busy. A lot of the basic information can and should be easily available online so that answers to basic questions can be provided for families that may not have the time to come in for a chat. This is also a great way for students, who may be otherwise intimidated by and unlikely to request a meeting with their GC, to do their own research.</p>
<p>Change will be very, very slow, and the results may be disappointing. However, if you're willing to put in the effort and do some work, you may bear fruit for future generations of students and improve your children's HS profile in the process.</p>
<p>The key is to get both students and parents thinking about college with open minds. The more options with which they are presented, they more likely they will be to reach for new opportunities. GCs are--and should be--only part of the equation. Experiment with new approaches.</p>
<p>momreads,
Our high school situations sound very similar, except that we also have the heavy religous overtones as a reason to stay here.
I'm glad your son is strong enough to not get stuck in the "afraid to move on" mentality.
Best of luck to both of you!</p>
<p>Thank you Jahn for your thoughts and advice. We do have those info sessions that students can get excused from class to attend; they are just heavily tilted to either the state schools or privates within state regardless of tier (like Millikin, Bradley, etc). It is not that college is not on the docket for most kids, and I totally understand that the vast majority are going to go to an in-state public u and that's totally fine; it's just that I'd at least like to see a handful of the smarter kids explore other options. I'd be excited to see kids going to Oberlin, Middlebury, Colorado College, Rice ... kwim? Because I fully believe there are kids smart enough to get into these places.</p>
<p>Given the costs of private colleges, as a parent I would have been delighted if my kids had limited their choices to our in-state options. And I take some issue over kids being "smart enough" to get into the private colleges listed. OK -- I'm in California, my kids were both admitted to (and turned down) Berkeley -- but the reality is that there isn't a kid on the planet who is "too smart" for our best in-state offerings. </p>
<p>My son wanted a smaller college - LAC -- so even though he had great test scores and top grades, his college application strategy was to apply to the in-state publics and a bunch of small, very similar LAC's, with the hopes of getting good financial aid from an LAC. His rationale was that even if he could get into an Ivy League college or Stanford, he didn't think those schools offered him anything that he couldn't get at Berkeley -only the LACs offered something different enough to be worth pursuing, in his mind. He went off to a college that was roughly in range of the schools you have listed. There were a variety of reasons he didn't finish there, but one was that he outgrew the environment. In other words, the attraction (small, personalized environment) also proved to be the chief failing over time. My d is technically at a LAC, but I honestly don't think that she would be happy there if it were not part of a larger university (Barnard/Columbia).... and as happy as I am with the education there, I know that academically she could have gotten an equivalent experience at Berkeley, though perhaps without the personalized attention & advising she gets at Barnard. But $$ is a constant, year-to-year worry.</p>
<p>In other words, I'm happy with my d's choice, and my son's choice seemed right at the time.... but I wouldn't be inclined to push other families to make it. I'm not at all convinced that it is worth the money -- In my mind it would be like pushing the merits of vacationing in the south of France on families who like to go camping every summer in local regional parks. Of course the French vacation is wonderful and opens up a whole new world.... but who am I to tell the happy campers that they should drain their bank accounts that way? I'm far more comfortable looking at my son's ultimate outcome at the smaller state college he attended -- certainly for kids whose stats don't put them in the running for substantial merit awards it's worth knowing that that our state does offer a few low-cost options for students in search of smaller, more intimate college environments. </p>
<p>What are the financial demographics of MOST of the families at your school? You may be pushing an agenda that really is out-of-sync with the financial realities faced by most students, especially if you are in an area where culturally the parents are not willing to go into debt to finance an education at some small college they have never heard of. Learning more about the colleges might not change the financial equation.</p>
<p>My son and I are still paying off the debt from his first college, which he left in 2003.... he paid his own way at college #2, and has no debt from that. If my daughter is able to get into the Master's program she wants, she may very well end up with debt of $30-$50K by the time she finishes her 5th year of schooling. Is it worth it? To her, yes --- but personally I'd rather spend my energies working to improve public education and financing options in our state than to encourage more students to buy into the notion that they need the luxury option. </p>
<p>Just my two cents .... but I can see why some parents might be very happy with the status quo as their kids go off to public colleges within easy driving distance that fit within their family budget.</p>
<p>Ok. This was the same at D's HS, except out of the top 10 in her class, 1 Rice, 1 Stanford, 1 Amherst, and the rest to state schools. I had a student that I knew was so incredibly fantastic, that I took her aside as a sophomore and asked her where she thought she would be going. She said the state flagship. I told her I thought it was a wonderful school, but I thought she had other options. She shouldn't just settle without checking out others. I took what I learned at CC and my own research and worked with the kids in the EC I sponsor. I told them about FA and merit aid, etc. Turns out the student applied to (and I wrote her rec) P and was accepted ED. Didn't need the FA. So even though her family had the money, she didn't think about anything else, because the state u's were all anyone around here even talked about. And that's all the counselors really knew about, as well. Become informed and start talking to other parents and your friends' kids. Once they see other possibilities open to them, they may try.</p>
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We do have those info sessions that students can get excused from class to attend; they are just heavily tilted to either the state schools or privates within state regardless of tier (like Millikin, Bradley, etc).
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<p>Right, and that's the norm. Your burden is to increase the frequency with which these events are held and the variety of schools invited. Regular info sessions are simply not good enough. If you want visibility, have representatives come, no more than 3-4 at any given time, and make their presence known. The more routine this becomes, the better. Announcements, posters, bulletin boards, newsletters to parents via snail mail/e-mail, and so forth, are all great methods of communication and promotion. Your frustration is likely shared by others, whether they admit it or not.</p>
<p>And like I said, encourage your school to make more of a Guidance <em>Center</em> and resources rather than simply increasing the load on the Counselors themselves. Have brochures from tons of colleges in the office; let the district purchase a few Princeton Review books for student/parent use; put easy links that we all use here on a district/school website.</p>
<p>I know this is a bit repetitive, but I cannot stress this enough: if the information is easily and readily available, and the "college thing" feels natural and routine, attitudes and goals will change over time. The problem at your school seems to be that the only "norm" is that everyone is pushed towards state universities. This means that people aren't thinking enough about their options because, quite frankly, this is 2008, and if you really want information, you can find it. Since they are unwilling or incapable of doing so, your task is to push your school to put it in front of them without overburdening the GCs.</p>
<p>Calmom.I too do not have issues with kids going to state schools, especially when there are excellent choices. Berkeley is as fine of a school as any. Some states, however, do not have the choices that California has. Also, even if the state schools can cover all students, it's nice that everyone sees what else is out there so they can make the decisions themselves.</p>
<p>I often cited the story of our good family friends who met at State U and have been extremely successful and happy. They got everything they wanted from college at State U and felt that as long as they were in a state with a good flagship school, which they were, there was no reason to spend for a private school. Maybe they would make an exception for Harvard, they would joke. Until their third kid went into high school. It was pretty clear that he would have a lot of trouble at State U from the onset. By the time he was half way through highschool it was also pretty clear he wasn't going to get into State U. The choices fell in quality drastically in the state school system from that point. Most of the other state schools tended to be poorly funded, had poor grad and return rates, and were largely commuter schools. Not the right environment for the kid. Like you, they discovered the advantages of the LAC. In truth, a small school was the only way he was going to get through, and that he did, even then with difficulty. </p>
<p>But there are many choices out there that are not LACs that are better alternatives for kids than the state schools. They can also be less expensive than the state schools if the financial aid is good, and/or the child is a good enough student with stats to get merit money. It's also an opportunity to meet different people. Our state schools are good, not the quality of yours, but has some LAC type options, however, the big disadvantage is that they are more than 90-95% in staters. So it is with most state schools that are not the flagship. </p>
<p>The choices that were the most prevalent in the high school where I tried to bring in some variety, were catholic schools and expensive local private schools. For the money spent, it would have been possible to go elsewhere, without a doubt. It was just a matter of breaking out of a mold, which is difficult if not many kids are doing it. In my other kids' prep schools, it is expected to cast a wide net, and you hear talk of kids going to many places looking at schools. It really widens the horizons even if the kids end up locally. My son applied to 5 state schools and two private schools within hour of home, but also looked at schools cross country. It really opened up his world. And fell in love far from home. My other boys too ended up hours away, but only because they allowed themselves the possibility of doing so. Even within our state system, there is a tendency for kids to go to the state school nearest to them. Not many kids in our area go to the state school where my son is. It's a shame if the GCs do not open up these possibilities. </p>
<p>Also, I will add that prep schools often do not know the state school processes well as most of their kids go private. A shame. Also, kids going to such high schools may be at a disadvantage in getting admissions to state schools because of the grading system and that the school does not toe the line for such unis' requirement. This is not just a matter of public schools being too narrow. I see Catholic schools with the same narrow vision, and prep schools that are not looking carefully at state school advantages.</p>
<p>This is such incredibly helpful info! I'll def ask to see 1) what the HS sends to colleges and 2) the school profile.</p>
<p>I checked out a few profiles recommended...I'm assuming these are all available on a section of the schools websites? I checked our HS & there was nothing under 'profile' (doesn't sound good...).</p>
<p>Thanks much!</p>
<p>I really like that H.S. has the profile it sends to colleges posted on its website, which is maintained by the district. This way we know from time a kid enters the h.s. what colleges will hear about our h.s. (I like the profile.)</p>