<p>Our h.s. has 8 guidance counselors for 1800 students spread across 3 grades. The role of the guidance counselors is educational and they do not get involved in disciplinary matters except as they impact on educational issues. We found that for both our kids, each of which had a different GC, when it came to college apps, the primary function of the GC was to suggest colleges and facilitate the school’s process for providing required application materials. The GC’s met with our kids in the spring of their junior years, discussed their interests and goals, and then suggested colleges to look at. In the case of our son, there really wasn’t too much for the GC to do in that regard; our son had decided that he was interested only in attending our 2 state schools with campuses in our area. Our son’s GC, however, needed to be prodded to get paperwork out on time when apps were submitted in the fall of the senior year.</p>
<p>Our daughter’s case was much different. She intended to pursue musical theater in either a BA or BFA program. In talking with other parents at our h.s. with students heading into other performing and fine arts, we found that our daughter’s experience was pretty typical. Our daughter’s GC, while well intended and interested in being helpful, really didn’t have a clue about how to find appropriate colleges. The GC, based on my daughter’s academics, found a few BA programs that academically were appropriate and which were reputed to have good performing arts programs but the GC really didn’t know much about the performing arts programs and whether they would meet my daughter’s needs. When it came to audition based BFA programs, the GC really had nothing to offer in terms of identifying appropriate schools or knowing how to navigate the admissions process. We also used a private college counselor for our daughter who, while good at the traditional aspects of the college application process, was equally clueless about the differences between BA and BFA programs, how to screen schools based on their artistic programs to find appropriate matches and how to prepare for and navigate the artistic aspects of admissions. In fact, she did not even have on the initial list of colleges she gave us the school my daughter ended up attending and when she found out we had added it to the list of schools to seriously consider was wholly unaware that it has a nationally very well regarded program.</p>
<p>For our daughter, we ended up doing all of the research with her and relied heavily on information available on the musical theater major forum on CC. We really had to navigate this “brave new world” on our own, educating ourselves as we went along. As I mentioned, for students at our h.s. interested in acting, music, dance and fine arts as majors, the process was and continues to be about the same as what we experienced.</p>