Back in the dark ages, there were a couple folks affiliated with CC who did college advising. Now that I’ve read the rest of the thread, I recalled that we paid some nominal amount (maybe $75?) to have them look over the guys’ lists of colleges based on scores and a brief resume. It was helpful to get a reality check. Were their predictions accurate? Not for specific schools, but for the distribution of acceptances/rejections at reaches/targets/likelies, yes. They both got into reaches they didn’t expect, and both were waitlisted/rejected at others where they thought the odds were better.
I learned TONS about the whole process here – especially about EA/ED/RD, etc., developing activity resumes (someone here said to track all those activities and awards – OMG, it saved a lot of aggravation!), FA, etc. Others I know who hired counselors said that having someone outside the family working with the student on essays and apps helped to reduce tensions at home.
We had a good time with the college app process. We rehashed a lot of fun old stories and experiences, both put in a LOT of time and effort on essays, and had lists that made a lot of sense. The app process was actually a pretty happy time for us as a family. YMMV.
LIke sbjdorlo, I had a kid who was taking post-AP STEM classes throughout HS. I ran into one of S1’s middle school comp sci teachers at a Destination Imagination tournament for S2 during S1’s sophomore year of HS. He suggested S1 look at Harvey Mudd. Independently, a teacher at S1’s HS also mentioned Mudd to him. Another friend who knew S1 mentioned Mudd to me as well. Three recommendations for a tiny school on the opposite coast got our attention. Mudd wound up being the model of what he wanted, and he built his list from there. He didn’t attend, but it was a finalist at the end of April.
S2 used a similar approach – he had a preferred school, then worked on developing the rest of his list based on those things he liked about that particular school. Let your kid find one school he/she likes and then try to find others that share those characteristics, across a range of selectivity, FA/merit considerations, geography, etc.
Not to be facetious, but this sounds like a contradiction in terms. Writing out of one’s depth is a very 17-yr-old thing to do. And as to comparative literature dissertation, well, that is what some high-dollar consultants would advise
That is very sound advice. Alas, not sure how many consultants would honor it.
People hire outside counselors for all sorts of reasons, including being rich enough and not involved with their kids enough that paying $1000/hr for a glorified babysitter is actually a reasonable thing. Same goes for test prep.
What about those families who can not afford test prep other than a few solid books from Amazon?
Hopefully admissions reps can filter through all this.
If a student is applying for financial aid they are probably struggling with the financial aspects of AP tests and admission fees like we did.
If some folks are spending thousands or tens of thousands for an “expert” to motivate a kid or refine that student’s app it seems insane to try to compete with that.
That said, my kids have all attended a good high school with over worked counselors.
One attended UCB, one WUSTL and one at Vanderbilt.
Two to go.
I do think that to a certain extent admissions counselors can sniff out the applications that have received the “expert” and expensive consultation. They might also be able to suspect, based on zip code, which students were at least able to afford test prep. This year, my daughter’s more average public high school did very well compared with some other high schools in the area that are more affluent. Not sure if this was a coincidence or if the schools are starting to spread the wealth out a bit with their acceptances. I’m also not sure the top privates in the area are doing as well as they have been. (Again, only at the most elite.)
If you have only a certain amount of money to spend, I would recommend spending it on test prep vs. a private counselor (if you cannot afford both). The admissions committee knows that the students MUST take the tests by themselves, but they really can never know the same for the actual application. And the test score is objective…the rest of the application (other than grades/rank/class standing) is much more subjective.
And for the record, as a counselor (and I speak for myself and for some other counselors I know), we do a lot of pro-bono work. It’s actually quite rewarding.
@CountingDown : That’s great advice, and we used a similar model. Explore a wide variety of schools, keep an ear to the ground for schools that someone who knows the kid recommends, figure out a type or two, and work from there. My kid actually had two types, first, one based on an exciting visit to a wildly out-of-reach school (big techy university), one based on a subsequent visit to a very different but totally viable option (small midrange LAC), and we spun the list from there. So his application list contained an assortment of both types along a wide spectrum, and his final acceptance list contained several of each type, which allowed him to fully own the final choice.
@dragonmom3 Maybe admissions reps can see through it clearly and give preference to those who need less financial aid.
We all need a fair system to operate in just like a safe neighborhood to live in instead of buying our own army gear to protect ourselves.
Many would love to spend big bucks on PCs to get into these schools especially for their full tuition scholarships. Many wonder why you still pay attention to the PC issue. I guess you wonder if your three dragons could be at H.Y.P instead if you hired PCs for them. All of us try to be good parents, some with more means than others, as always.
A lot of bright, lower SES kids are getting this same sort of pre-application support from local or national organizations or from individuals in volunteer groups.
Clearly, from CC hs comments, it’s possible for a motivated kid to successfully self-study.
About spotting a high level of “support” from paid counselors: sometimes, the main help is on the big essay and making ECs shiny…but not the other aspects.
We have two kids. One went to a public school and was a complicated case – exceedingly bright and severely dyslexic and suffering from sleep apnea. He found HS honors math trivial and found it painful to sit in classes that went so slow. But, he read very slowly and his writing when he entered HS was not up to his intellect by quite a distance. In his sophomore year, the HS suggested that we partially home school him and we agreed. For math, we hired a grad student at Harvard to tutor him. For English, we tried various things including tutors and a the basic freshman writing course at Harvard (EXPOS 10?) over the summer? The thing that worked was his desire to win Moot Court Debate competitions. I worked with him on his briefs – he had to be able to deliver them in 10 minutes and he also spoke with a bit of a speech delay – and within a year, his writing became very strong (albeit he still writes and reads slowly). Despite all this, he was in the top 5 in his class and had high scores (though we didn’t know at the time he was applying what his scores would be). My son also refused to visit schools. He said, "Why should I fall in love with a school that has a 10% or 5% probability of admitting me? I’ll apply to more schools instead.
Given the complexity of his case, I hired a counselor (and the guidance counselor he had was a very young kid without an understanding of elite schools). I wanted to get a sense of how to organize and present the kid given various college’s likely receptivity to / concerns about such a kid. But, I am very strategic (this is what I do for a living) and I don’t think the private counselor added much. Maybe suggested a couple of additional safeties. Reviewed the essays. I actually think I got equally good advice on CC on some questions.
It all worked out well, and he attended one of the colleges I thought best suited his situation.
My daughter attended a highly regarded Boston-area private HS. They wanted to be in charge of the guidance, but I didn’t find their guidance fit her well. She found the stress of holistic admissions combined with the angst about admissions among the students/parents (“I went to an Ivy League school. If my kid doesn’t get in, I’ll either commit suicide or kill the kid.”). I suggested she apply to Canadian schools (she’s a dual US/Canadian citizen) because Canadian schools for the most part would tell her given her grades and SAT/ACT scores whether she would get in. We toured 7 schools, she picked two to apply to, got into both and chose one.
I do some counseling and I had a client this year who has an IEP and we weren’t really sure how to present this at all to the admissions officers. Assuming @shawbridge that your son had some kind of documented learning disability, did you disclose this in the applications? By law admissions is not supposed to take any kind of LD or IEP or 504 or whatever into the equation in making their decision. Their advice is always to disclose the issue only if you are trying to explain something on the application. Just wondering what you disclosed. As for my client, we really didn’t address it but his HS GC might have put a little blurb in the rec about it, but really didn’t draw too much attention to it. Long story short, although he aimed much lower than the schools we are talking about here, he did extremely well and was admitted to almost every school, waitlisted at 2.
Also, @shawbridge I know some people with children at some top private schools in the north east and hear that their guidance departments are extremely controlling. It’s almost like you cannot look at the results because you don’t know if the kids got in to the schools conventionally or if their GC’s somehow controlled the situation. Almost seems like “horse trading”…they try to get everyone in to a top school, but they don’t let the chips fall and just see who would have gotten in where if they just let the applications go without manipulating things behind the scenes.
Exeter states explicitly that if you get into your SCEA school, they won’t allow you to apply to other schools RD. To wit:
Phillips Exeter assumes that a student admitted under an early admission plan — whether Early Decision, or Restricted Early Action or Early Action at a college or university with a national admit rate of less than 10% — has been admitted to his first choice school and therefore has completed the application process and will file no further applications. This philosophy parallels the spirit of the Academy’s motto of non sibi, and allows the greatest number of Exonians to be considered favorably at the most selective colleges. http://www.exeter.edu/sites/default/files/documents/EBook.pdf
Horse trading aside, I’d say this policy, at least, is understandable, because these tippy-top high schools have so many hooked applicants, and so many highly qualified applicants, that they have the rather unique problem of running into the hard (or soft) limits that the most selective colleges may impose on the number of students that can be admitted from a single high school.
@keiekei I don’t disagree with you. I get it and many parents that send their kids to these top private high schools are truly expecting that their child get in to a top elite school. So I think the schools are doing this because they want to keep their parents/students happy (and maintain their reputation). I think for the most part it works out well and if you compared kids with equal stats from a public school or non-elite private school to a student from a school like Exeter, the kids at Exeter will receive more elite offers because of this, for lack of a better word, “manipulation”.
The problem is that it can backfire and I know of some students that ended up a schools that were NOT among their top choices and didn’t feel that they had a fair shot at HYPSM because of the way the counseling department controlled things. I think they truly wanted all of the students to be happy, but even at the top schools, not everyone can get in to HYPSM and then some may feel they were denied a good look because HYPSM took other students from their school and their application was dead on arrival.
The top preps have relationships with top colleges. They know and are realistic about app success factors and fit-thrive. In return, the colleges know the GC will push for their best fitting kids (which is more than grades, titles, affection.)
No, they don’t just “let the chips fall,” treat it like some crapshoot. Parents could be this sort of realistic, too, about match.
And no, look deeper, they do not aim all kids for a top elite school. Not at all. They do, however, manage expectations. And that’s what a good private counselor should do.
@collegemomjam, my son had an IEP since grade 2. I would not disclose if I did not have to. I think it can hurt in admissions. At the kinds of elite schools that ShawSon applied to, they have 15 to 20 kids per slot. One Adcom member may say “This kid is amazing” but another may say, “Well, yes, he did really well at his HS, but can he really cut it at Seriously Self-Impressed University with those LDs?”
In his case, he had to disclose because he was partially homeschooled and we needed to explain why. He did very well – got into some but not all elite schools – and got into the school I thought would be best for him.
I think that the relationships between preps and colleges was a lot stronger earlier than it is now. But, I have heard about the allocation of kids to schools and it is hard to get around the GCs.
I did go to three of the most elite universities but I saw/see my role as a parent was not to get them into the best schools but to help prepare them to lead successful, happy, productive adult lives. In both cases, the kids are works in progress but I’d say it couldn’t be going better given my criterion.
That is a myth that should be more actively dispelled. Exeter makes it easier to get into Middlebury, not Yale. Unless your kid is a one in a million genius or hooked, don’t go to Exeter as an elite feeder school. Go there because it is a great school and you want to spend your childhood away from your parents
The reason I mentioned that particular policy is that it is a tacit acknowledgment that the SCEA schools will only take a limited number of students from a given school, and this constraint induces a number of reactions, the most virtuous of which (and therefore made public) is this sort of non sibi policy.
More murkily, one can imagine scenarios where, at some random elite boarding school, e.g., this year there is a big crop of Yale legacies, including some big donors, so maybe steer an academically strong but unhooked kid elsewhere, like toward an “exclusive” merit scholarship at the sort of school that gives merit scholarships. If you don’t know who the sucker is at the poker table, it’s you.
If the implication is that a GC sabotages a kid’s chances with a weaker than deserved LOR, I’d say that’s a damn shame. I wouldn’t think GCs are paid well enough to compromise their integrity like this, but who knows…
My preferred method is to follow Occam’s Razor, and as opposed to GCs deliberately sabotaging an unhooked kid’s chances, I would tend to think that the kid was just up against really long odds, what with all the hooks at these tippy-top boarding schools as well as some off-the-charts geniuses, competing for a limited number of spots.
Boy, I am so glad my kids were never locked into a philosophy that says you must go to your SCEA school if you get in. My oldest applied to Princeton SCEA and got in. MIT got on his list in October, and it wasn’t until April when he revisited Princeton that he realized it was not at all for him (a distant third behind Harvey Mudd and MIT). He graduated from MIT and met his wife there. His understanding of what he really wanted in a college evolved over the course of many months. I guess if you attend Exeter, you play by the rules, but I sure wouldn’t want those rules.
I think test prep is definitely overrated. One study found the average boost from professional test prep 1-2 points composite on the ACT, and similar gains on the SAT, compared to no preparation at all. If your kid has the discipline, self study and the Khan Academy can be fine. Even to someone well informed, it can be bewildering, trying to decide where to use the single ED/EA bullet. I’m sure there’s an art to shape the essay into what the adcoms want, while avoiding the edited to death, overly professional look. For those with the money, I can see the advantages of a skilled consultant.
@sbjdorlo I assume Exeter applicants who are undecided can skip early application and apply to all the schools they want in RD. This wouldn’t be the thing keeping me from sending my kid there. As for preferring MIT and HM to Princeton, those are such different types of schools, good that your son had a choice in April. My daughter visited HYPS in advance and had a clear favorite for SCEA, got in and was one and done. No college distractions for the rest of senior yr, which is nice. But of course depends on the kid.
@keiekei “Exeter makes it easier to get into Middlebury, not Yale. Unless your kid is a one in a million genius or hooked, don’t go to Exeter as an elite feeder school.”
Really? So do you really think that going to a school like Exeter (vs. a run of the mill average public school?) makes it no easier for a student to get in to an Ivy and that it’s a “myth” that MANY (I never said all) parents are expecting a better shot at an Ivy? We might need to agree to disagree on this one. Maybe these are the “suckers” you are talking about, but I know of some parents that are still devastated and distraught by the fact that last year their kids (with Ivy stats, but so many kids have Ivy stats…) had to settle for schools like U Chicago, Georgetown, and Northwestern and how unfair it was that their kids didn’t get in to Wharton, Princeton, and the like. Yes, they were unhooked. But there were unhooked kids from their schools that “got the spots”…for whatever reason. But these parents all had special meeting with their GC’s the day after the ED/SCEA results were released…they marched right in to guidance and demanded answers. In these cases, they were expecting different results, for sure.
“If the implication is that a GC sabotages a kid’s chances with a weaker than deserved LOR, I’d say that’s a damn shame. I wouldn’t think GCs are paid well enough to compromise their integrity like this, but who knows…”
There was DEFINITELY no implication that the GC’s sabotage a kid’s chances…on the contrary, I truly think the GC’s in these top private schools make it their main goal to help these kids get in to top choices with nothing but good intentions. However, I do think that they only have so many “spots” that they can reasonably expect to get so if your child happens to not be one of the kids that doesn’t get one, you might end up at a non-Ivy. I don’t think that these kids are necessarily weaker or less-deserving…they just weren’t the ones that the GC’s pushed for and the unfortunate consequence of this is that, they likely won’t get in. Yes, they were up against long odds like the rest of the world. But the parents truly believe they would have had a better chance if they were at t different school that didn’t get so many kids into these top schools.
I’m a public school parent (northeast, above average public school, but certainly not the top) and my kids have done very well…my current senior is turning down an Ivy for a different school that we consider elite, but some others might not.
Oh, so you are talking about the parents with more money than brains, then? Well informed parents know that UChicago is ranked higher and more selective than at least half the Ivies and that Duke and Northwestern is more selective than one or two.
There are many good reasons to attend a great private school, but in terms of elite college admissions the child is likely to do just as well coming from a highly regarded public school system than from a private school.
By the time D was in 8th grade, we were financially comfortable enough to send our kids to private schools if we thought it made sense. But with about 10% of our school system’s kids getting into the Ivy League or equivalents (which I consider as MIT, Stanford, Chicago, Duke, Northwestern, Williams, and Amherst), and about 25-30% getting into the top 30, it didn’t make sense. And it worked out just fine for D, who will be joining her first choice college with a single digit admission rate this fall.
