Each year about now, my D’s high school sends out a questionnaire of sorts, asking where each student got accepted, and how much money each student received in scholarships. Of course the school will know (rec letters/transcripts) where each student applied, and where s/he decided to attend.
Every year they make a huge production that “our students won $3.8M in scholarships, were accepted to X,y,z college; we’re so great etc., etc.” I hate to be part of their spin!
Am I being churlish in putting my foot down and not transmitting the info?
No, it is the opinion of the subject, me. I will rephrase the post.
My question still stands, Do I fill out the questionnaire to be part of school’s PR campaign?
I think they might use the info for other reasons – like telling a kid next year whether they might expect merit or not, or keeping a list of local scholarships that might help future students. They also might use the acceptance info to update Naviance. I’d pay it forward and provide the info. Heck, if your kid needs to transfer, you might want their goodwill in the future.
I relate to what you’re saying about spin. My school likes to brag that their “in the top 6% of high schools in the nation.” Which sounds good, until you realize what it’s based off: AP tests… taken. Not passed, taken. It’s expressed as a ratio between number of tests given to number of seniors who graduate, so I guess we give a lot of AP tests. No word yet on our pass rate, though. As for the questionnaire, why not. Lacking the data of one student won’t stop them, and it can only serve to help future students.
I can do one better. Our HS principal’s contract provides him with a bonus based on AP course enrolment. Not AP scores, just enrolment. Much pressure to go into AP, even if not suitable for the student, and little expectation that such students will take test. Thus we can spin that over 50% (or whatever the % is) of our seniors are in AP CLasses!
Well, our kid’s HS collected that same data, and used it for the purposes I listed. (Also announced total scholarship $, which made me roll my eyes – the scholarships that aren’t used are irrelevant). But yeah. I think you are being churlish, since you asked.
I think it’s good karma to submit your information, especially if your kid’s counselor used their knowledge submitted by previous parents to advise them on chances and scholarships to try for. However, I roll my eyes whenever people make a big deal of whatever their scholarship amounts to in real money. The scholarships are worthless if they go unused, and often are not even real scholarships in the first place. Sometimes expensive colleges will make their tuition artificially high to offer tons of small scholarships that make prospective students feel valuable.
I had one kid who answered (but only listed one scholarship, not the merit one) and one who received a pretty big merit scholarship but didn’t list it on the senior questionnaire. First one was invited to the honors ceremony, second one was not. The whole honors ceremony was rather strange. I think the school did a very bad job of figuring out which schools the kids were going to and how much they were getting in merit money. We had a lot of military scholarships and only a few were announced.
In my nephew’s graduation program, they listed the schools they were going to and only if they’d received a scholarship but not the amount and not the amounts from schools they weren’t going to or using the scholarships.
Guidance counselor here- I ask all my students to submit that information, because it really helps me advise future students at my school.
Announcing total scholarship monies is kinda stupid, I agree! - but it’s what most schools do, because it is one metric parents use to measure how good the school is, along with AP enrollment and SAT scores. I guarantee you if we took that information out of the school profile, on the basis that a good school is measured by things like student engagement, percentage of teachers with PhDs, service hours performed by students, etc…we’d lose prospective families who need those metrics to feel validated by the school.
Most parents are not as informed as those here on CC, and that is why they are so swayed by the numbers, the percentages, the US News & World Reports rankings.
But in my little high school…it’s helpful to ME, and to my students. If a parent chose not to share that would be fine, too.
Our guidance counselors use that info to help the kids in the next class. It’s tremendously useful-- it opens next year’s kids up to schools that they-- or even the guidance counselor-- might not have thought of. And it can save some real ego bashing when a kid thinks his qualifications are stronger than they are. Kids sometimes tend to blow off a counselor’s recommendations as “She hates me anyway” when the numbers are harder to ignore.
To be honest, all the stats on scholarships bother me far, FAR less than the perfect attendance awards. I could write a book about how much I hate that particular award!!!
OP, that whole thing about “this student won XX amount in scholarships” and “our students won a combined total of XX in scholarships” annoys me to no end and I’m glad my D’s school does not do that. I think it promotes trophy hunting if they announce how much a particular student was awarded. That said, if it really is used to help future students then I’d go ahead and provide it.
We did it for my oldest because she had looked outside the typical range of schools when she searched (looking for her sport) so it broadened the list of scholarship schools beyond the usual suspects. That may be the only time some people read through such a list, so it can get people thinking. For example, even though DD didn’t attend Juniata they stopped by our school for the first time ever the next time they passed through our state. And the school she did choose just had an app from someone from her old club team, which would make exactly two players from our state, ever, on that team. So you never know how your search can inspire others.