I think this can be a big difference if you are in a part of the country which is overrepresented in top colleges. For example in our part of CA there are some well known public schools in the wealthiest districts which seem to fill the quotas for “upper middle class ORM Californians” at many top east coast private colleges, and mean that what may be even stronger kids from our rather average HS (with <50% going to 4 year colleges) are shut out.
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This is a great thing to post. It should serve as a reminder to students that they are being evaluated in ways that they may not realize.
… and not evaluated in some ways they think they are.
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Some schools/counselors will ask parents for a brag sheet in spring of junior year (some will take parts of this verbatim for the rec letter). Some also get feedback from teachers. In my kids’ school they also ask the kids to answer a questionnaire.
Ask your school how they do this, because it’s important. It’s another way the better schools (be they private or public) have an advantage as their counselors know how to write outstanding, meaningful, relevant rec letters.
This is literally insane. Please just let your son live his life. Colleges dont discriminate based on high school. Just let your kid be a kid. This is crazy.
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I agree with Skiingislife. We live in a ‘top’ district, and you know what? It sucked! So we pulled our daughter out and homeschooled her. She’s been 10 times more successful in her admissions than the kids from out local high school and she’s much happier. Guess the school didn’t matter that much after all, huh? Life is short, let your kid be a kid.
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That assumes that a kid blooms wherever he/she is planted. That’s not always the case.
Our daughter wanted to be in a selective enrolment public school, perhaps because some of her good friends from middle school went that way and they liked it a lot. She loves the experience. The fact that it helped her get into her crazy selective dream LAC was just icing on the cake.
I’d say we “let our kid be a kid” - we didn’t push her.
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My D’s HS had each student fill out an 8 page questionnaire for the GC. Then they had a series of meetings throughout junior year so when the time came to write the LOR, they actually knew the kids. They had designated college counselors that were different from the GC that worked on course scheduling.
Wow, that is awesome. I did not know that some schools take college admissions that seriously. I am a senior and just finished apps. My guidance office was apathetic, to say the least. They could not wait to get me out of the door. College counseling was nonexistent. I learned the hard way with many things throughout this process. I had to fight with them for weeks to see my transcript. It was a horrible experience that I would never want to relive.
LOR’s are definitely one area of increased value of a very good private or public school. At a lot of private schools, they have dedicated college counselors that write the GC LOR’s. It is not uncommon for them to be former AO’s. Some schools even teach their teachers how to write LOR’s for highly selective schools. The College Counselor may even review the teacher recommendations. At a “normal” school, the teacher/GC may infrequently/never write LOR’s for highly selective schools. At a top school, they write many per year.
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There is a lot of good advice on this thread, and some of it contradicts other good advice. That is because what works for some kids and for some families does not work for other kids and for other families.
The one single piece of advice on which everybody agrees is that your choice of high school should not be determined by your, or your kid’s, college dreams, but by what would optimize your kid’s education and growth as a human being.
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