I read on this forum quite a bit that a student’s school counselor should help them compile a list of safety, match and reach colleges. My oldest son is a senior this year, and to my knowledge, he did not get any guidance from his counselor about where to apply.
For reference, his school is a public school with 2200 students, 64% of which are identified as economically disadvantaged. He is enrolled in the IB Diploma program.
Fortunately, I am a former high school counselor and I think I did a pretty good job of guiding him to research, visit and apply to a variety of schools. I wonder/worry about students from families who don’t have the knowledge/experience I do and if they are missing out on opportunities that may be available to them.
I am curious: Did your child’s counselor help them compile a list of colleges to which to apply?
Public school – neither of my kids got much useful guidance. My son actually had to teach the guidance counselors how to fill out one of the apps (he learned about it here) and they were using him for advice/info for other students.
My family learned a lot more useful information on these boards than we got from guidance counselors.
No, and I think it sucks that guidance counseling at many public schools totally sucks. It’s one more way that low income students (who have no funds to pay for college counseling and who are more likely to have parents that don’t have much experience with selective colleges or researching) are disadvantaged.
Public schools often have a huge ratio of student to counselors. It is pretty common for public school students to get little help in developing appropriate college lists.
This is neither here nor there in response to your question, but might be interesting to some of you. A friend of mine works for a non-profit that goes into select public schools in poor neighborhoods to meet with a certain number of kids selected by the school to enter this program. Basically my friend meets with kids starting in either 7th or 8th grades and helps them select HS courses and activities and stays with them all the way through HS and then helps them with all aspects of the college application process. I’ve heard of several different non-profits that are doing this in different areas of the country.
We have a very good guidance department. But the kids and I did a lot of research on our own and walked in to the GC meeting with a very reasonable list of reach, match, and safety schools that met our kid’s criteria. The GCs had a few comments on individual schools on the list and maybe had an another school or two we could consider but they didn’t change our original list that much.
My eldest kid had a heavily involved counselor and the spent hours and hours in class talking about options and throwing around ideas. My middle kid, the one who applied this season got nothing from his school… at… all. We had to hound them to do things like send the initial paper work to the common app. There response to their lagging so much S missed the EA due date on one (all his stuff was in) was that “most kids go to state schools.” I was really surprised considering the school has this great reputation and the brag about where their kids go to college but if we hadn’t been through it before, we would have been lost.
We have a “college planning meeting” with the student, parents and counselor in February of junior year. She/he asks about what the student is considering, what the parents thing and gives her own suggestions. She/he also makes sure we know our way around naviance. Both the student and the parents have to do brag sheets for the counselor as well so she is well prepared for her LOR.
Overall, our counselors do a really good job. 2000 kids, public high school. All of my kids had the same counselor. They divide up the class and each counselor has about 110 kids. I know our counselor met with everyone of those kids to talk about choices very early first semester senior year. They had already had an assembly on the college process and a meeting the second semester junior year about “Life After High School”. With a lot of kids staying in state, our counselor had set recommendations for kids based on their stats, rigor and financial situation (if the kid shared the information), but she was willing to help research other schools she wasn’t as familiar with and reach out if asked. She also provided us with data that showed where the prior class applied and what their outcomes were. That was incredibly helpful.
We had good guidance at our public school. Students meet individually with their GC twice during junior year, and then again individually during senior year. That being said… we did a lot of our own research.
For both of my older kids, we arrived at the first college meeting with a list of schools prepared. The counselor was happy to see it, and suggested one or two to add.
But, in her defense, she was great when my daughter had anxiety issues. I think that people here tend to forget all the incredibly urgent non-college issues that guidance counselors are dealing with.
I almost posted about this yesterday! I am always amazed when I see this.
No help selecting or discussing but they did give her a list of all in state colleges. Our school does not do naviance (sp?) or any of those extras. Our counselor did do the common app stuff when my daughter requested it, but when Brown wanted a midyear report literally no one at our school knew what that was. None of the counseling folks, no admin, no one. DD had to call Brown to ask them.
We are a public school with 400-500 kids per grade. I believe each counselor has around 450 kids divided by alphabet and we mostly worry about standardized testing here (the state one, not the SAT/ACT).
It shows in where our kids attend. Last year’s valedictorian with a perfect ACT applied to only 1 school. An out of state state school (not a directional, but not the flagship). For scholarship there she received only enough to make it in state tuition and she is responsible for room and board. She is majored in a common major that she could have gotten anywhere.
I think our high school does a pretty good job of giving the kids the tools to put together a list. They have a college night every year where admissions officers sit on panels and talk about their schools - there’s usually one on NY schools, one on highly selective colleges, one with smaller LACs, one for engineering schools and one for SUNYs and CUNYs maybe a couple of others. They do a whole separate night for sports and recruiting. There were some group meetings - that may also have discussed the different kinds of colleges. My recollection was that they asked the kids for some general parameters and then had the Naviance software spit out a list - it was probably 30 or so colleges that were banded into reach/match/safety. They were a perfectly reasonable starting point. I think both my kids applied to one more school that wasn’t on the list. Older son to a New England tech school that my brother respected, but was not much on anyone’s radar at our school. I seem to remember it didn’t have enough applications to show up in the scattergrams.
We live in a suburban, middle to upper middle class district where almost every graduate goes to a 4 year college (a few choose 2 year or vocational and very few choose military or work). Our GCs come up with a potential list of colleges that they present at a meeting in winter/spring of junior year. They also go over what the students and parents need to do for the applications (brag sheets, resume etc) and timing.
They came up with an OK list in each case, but no real surprises. It is really up to the student and parents to go from there (we already had preliminary lists at that point) and come up with their own list. It is certainly much easier now with so much online information.
I remember my first such meeting trying to get the GC (who had been doing this a long time) to talk about cost and how to weight whether it was “worth it”. He had no interest in discussing. Our school also has financial aid night for juniors and their families.
In districts where going away to college is unusual, it is probably even harder to get good information. I am surprised, however, that the IB program did not provide some guidance to the top students.
Small private school. My counselor had 60 students and I met with her once a week during the time when I was doing applications and she read every single essay. I even had her cell phone number lol
Large urban high school in major city. We had no help at all from counselor outside of making sure everything was done for graduation and sending in stuff for the common app. We knew this would be the case. We did all our own research and my daughter chose her own schools. The school has a fair amount of low income families so there are plenty of seminars on applying to college, FAFSA etc. There are also a few volunteer groups that help first generation kids with applications and essays. No complaints about counselor as it is a huge job just managing the process from a common app standpoint with so many students.
The kids meet with their GC a couple of times junior year to hash out some sort of plan, get used to Naviance, etc. The GC populates Naviance with some choices that she thinks fits the kid, although in our case for whatever reason the GC has suggested an enormous amount of catholic schools for which neither of our kids would ever consider. Then she added some super reach schools and some mediocre state schools that we have no interest in either. Out of her whole list there might have been a couple of suggestions that would be taken into consideration.
So, the GC involvement was not really all that important other than she gets to the know the kids a bit better, get the kids thinking about the whole process, and to formulate a plan.
The GC department does a good job, and I’m not complaining. I think their suggestions and feedback really help the families that don’t know a lot about the whole process. For parents who have been thru the rodeo once or twice before we don’t need to rely on the GC for info.
Our public high school counsellors are great, but you have to seek them out, not the other way around. Also, they are highly motivated to get everyone in somewhere, so they tend to encourage very safe choices.