<p>Our school has 1200 students, grades nine through twelve. There are 3 guidance councilors. </p>
<p>All we asked of the councilors for our three children was to write recommendations, which didn’t amount to much since the councilor didn’t know anything about them. The GC’s contribution was just a list of activities that wouldn’t be found on the transcript. Of course, more meaningful recommendations came from teachers and others.</p>
<p>I don’t think we were shortchanged. Each child knew what they wanted, visited a few colleges and was accepted into every school they applied to. (Not bragging, we’re not talking Harvard, Yale etc.)</p>
<p>As much as I enjoy CC, I think many of us regulars seem to make the college selection and acceptance process into a more complicated process than it needs to be. </p>
<p>Of course, if more affluent public high schools and private high schools want to fund more comprehensive GCs, more power to them.</p>
<p>Generally, our guidance office (suburban, public high school) does a great job in shepherding all the parents and kids through the high school years, picking appropriate classes, and the college admissions process. There are two clerical workers whose jobs for most of everyyear is managing the college applications paperwork for the students and counselors. The guidance office runs a number of seminars for parents and students to help us understand what they need, what the colleges need, and when they need it. Our students are assigned a GC as freshmen and keep that counselor all four years. The summer between junior and senior year they meet individually with each of their rising seniors to talk about college apps. The kids are supposed to bring in a resume to help their GC write recommendations.</p>
<p>However, I can’t say that the GC who has been assigned to all three of my kids has any deep knowledge of them. They have never had a problem with… anything … requiring the help or intervention of their GC. Never even needed a schedule change. So without that resume the GC would have had NO idea what to say about them in his recommendations. My two oldest were accepted to 12 of the 15 colleges that they applied to, so I don’t think that lack of personal knowledge made any difference.</p>
<p>At my kids’ h.s. (large, diverse), it totally depended on which counselor your kid was assigned to. Luckily for us, both my kids got to work with a gem who was the college advising specialist within the department and who created and maintained the departmental website, which was a tremendous resource. She came to school early, stayed late, and worked her butt off for her kids. When one of my kids went through some emotional difficulties, she arranged for him to be allowed to leave class and come to her office at any time of day to decompress and get support. On the other hand, I heard terrible complaints about most of the other guidance counselors. Many of the parents would come into school during off hours in hopes that our counselor would be the only one available and they could get some unofficial advice, which she was always happy to give. A truly dedicated individual can overcome the limitations of a mediocre department, but such folks are few and far between.</p>
<p>I agree with the poster that said that the GCs are not there to shepard students throguh the college prep system, but rather coordinate their high school studies so they can go on to college. Frankly, I think this is a very important and time consuming job, and had absolutely no expectations of help from them in terms of colleges. Ours was a natural at her job, and our daughter LOVED her. She seemed to really “get” our square peg. That said, I would never have asked her whilch college to attend - how could she possibly keep up with that? We made the decision as a family that our DD would be forgiven from a portion of her chores for junior and first half of senior year. In return, she and I locked ourselves in the office for two hours every Sunday afternoon and did our own research. My job was to surf college confidential and other sites for ideas. Her job was to take these ideas, research them further, and tell me what direction to go next. I really worked hard to channel my “secretary” hat and not be bossy - usually it worked!! DD chafed at first when her friends were not even thinking about college, but quickly realized that we were right, and stopped complaining. I could never ever have done this process without CC.</p>
<p>At our school there are about 200 students per GC - but all things considered I think they do an amazing job. </p>
<p>For the parents there are at least 3 evening events:
A College night with 8 or so panels with admissions officers speaking on various subjects
A Night explaining financial aid and FAFSA
A Night explaining athletic scholarships</p>
<p>For the students
Group meeting January junior year - they get a packet with all the dates, advice and forms for brag sheets resumes etc. They also ask you to get two teacher recommendations that get sent to the GC to read and incorporate into her letter
Meeting with the parents and student spring junior year - go over schedule, have a list some suggested colleges (spit out by Naviance I think based partly on what you told her.) My older son’s list had the usual suspects, younger son’s list had too many huge schools for his tastes.
There’s another meeting fall senior year I think.</p>
<p>While my kids’ GCs didn’t know my kids well, they did know them by name.</p>
<p>My nephew, who went to a very well regarded prep school in DC, ended up applying to Rice because his Mom’s dentist suggested it. He never heard about it from his GC. It was a great fit for him.</p>
<p>I came to CC because there was not much current/useful info to be found via the GC’s office. Hard to blame them – both my kids attended large high schools with a diverse population, ranging from kids who lived in $1M+ homes to kids who were sleeping at a shelter. S1’s HS was represented by some 30 languages. S2’s GC minimized his LD-related math struggles in a meeting because she was on her way form there to deal with a senior who was failing Alg I for the third time. From her perspective, S2 was a kid with two involved parents, in a highly selective program and had a C in a math class two years ahead of grade level, and she was on the ground battling much tougher problems. It was a good wake-up call for me, and have totally come to see and embrace her point.</p>
<p>The GC’s office was very efficient at getting out transcripts and rec letters and actually paid attention to the questionnaire responses requested from each S and from us. S1’s GC asked him for a list of schools he was considering and we had a discussion about them. She wasn’t familiar with Reed for math, but that was an out-of-the-box option anyway. S2’s GC never asked where he was applying, though she was pleasantly surprised by his results.</p>
<p>Both GCs had a presentation in junior year for students and parents. Noone really addresses FA in useful detail. Their avoidance is so universal that it makes me think they are directed not to discuss it so as to avoid any hint of bias.</p>
<p>I’m leaving my current job soon and I am considering volunteering at S2’s HS in the college/career office. There are a lot of kids who slip through the cracks, and whose parents don’t realize the landscape has changed until pretty late in the game. I have learned a lot here, and if I can pass it on…it would make me happy.</p>
<p>We are very fortunate. There are something like 7 counselors for a school of 1200, plus clerical staff and a director of guidance who is very engaged. They start holding meetings to talk about planning during freshman year, and they hold regular meetings after that. Junior year they have group meetings for parents and for kids to talk about the general process, then individual meetings to go over target schools. They have kids complete questionnaires and parents do brag sheets (working on that now myself) and they give them timelines for the next 9 months (eg when to ask for LORs etc.). They offer community service fairs and interview practice sessions. Of course, every year there is a huge battle about school taxes in our town, but as parents, we feel very lucky to have this support.</p>
<p>Here’s a funny thing that happened at my son’s HS. He was a NM finalist, and the NM folks sent a fat manila envelope to the HS to inform the principal of my son’s award, with the instruction to pass the word on to the boy and give him the packet. Well the secretary, having never seen a NMF packet (it’s kind of a mediocre HS), assumed it was junk mail and tossed it. About 5 weeks later, a small blurb appeared in our suburban newspaper congratulating the NMF winners in our county. A friend saw the article and called us with congratulations. That’s how we found out! By that time, my son had about 3 days to get his essay and recommendations in before the deadline. Needless to say, the school dropped everything to help him usher through the process. No hard feelings!</p>
<p>You know, I’m really curious what the people who say their guidance counselors don’t do enough expect from the counselors. If you know enough to have a spreadsheet of colleges full of research, what is a high school counselor supposed to add? There are scores of colleges of similar quality around the country; as other posters have said, there’s no way GCs can know more than the Internet does about that many schools. Their job is to handle students at the high school, putting them in classes, writing recommendations, and offering general guidance. If you’re intelligent to be looking into top colleges, you’re intelligent enough to know how to research and apply to them. </p>
<p>I say this not as a parent, but as a student whose counselors have done exactly as I hoped and expected: They’ve introduced ideas, helped with class scheduling, and pointed out opportunities like internships. My parents, my TAG coordinator (to a lesser extent; I didn’t even know where the TAG office was until junior year!), and I did the rest, because each GC is responsible for around 450 kids, sophomore through senior. </p>
<p>Also, to some extent, I think the student-counselor relationship is mutual. Students can do a lot to pass on information to their counselors, as a lot of kids looking into far-away colleges and universities dig up information that a GC would never think to look for, information that could be intriguing, arresting, or repulsive for a future high school student talking to that GC.</p>
<p>We’re 1 for 2…at my daughter’s small private HS, the counselor has been amazing–responsive, helpful, thorough. At my son’s enormous public HS, the counselor has been terrible–won’t send out materials even after my son provides him with postage-paid certified mail items (and right now Cornell says the school has one week to get the transcript out–months after we’ve been requesting it from the counselor). To make matters more frustrating, my son’s counselor will not use the online option for the Common App…and this is at a school with a magnet science/tech program. </p>
<p>It frustrates me that my son is working his tail off, but so much of his hard work can be undermined by someone else’s failure to do his job.</p>
<p>I will also sing the praises for our private school counseling department. The kids actually have one counselor (that is with them all 4 years) who they meet with at least 2 times a year to discuss anything academic but mostly to make sure their schedules match up with their potential college choices (APs, honors, etc). Junior year they are assigned a separate college counselor - there are 3 for 200 kids. They meet with them at least 2x junior year by themselves and there is also a mandatory parent meeting spring of junior year. The parents and kids are assigned “work” - parent letters, teacher rec questionnaires (kids), common app essay (kids), etc. All must be handed in by end of junior year.</p>
<p>By fall of senior year, the kids (and parents) are fairly deep into the process. We are very grateful for their hard work!!</p>
<p>Our high school is always ranked in the top five in the state for academics. There are always more than two students with perfect GPAs, so the valedictorian must be chosen by drawing straws. Yet the counseling office leaves a lot to be desired. For example, they don’t keep track of scholarships, instead saying to look at finaid.org. It’s a matter of school finances – the number of employees vs. the number of students they must serve vs. the amount of regular work they must do, such as sending out transcripts.</p>
<p>The reason my expectations were filled is because I expected exactly three things: Letters of recommendation, help maneuvering classes in high school (within reason), and basic, basic information about local internships upon request. These are things that the vast majority of GCs can provide. The ones that can’t are incompetent. My point was that this thread puts forth unreasonable expectations of GCs.</p>
<p>I agree. Anyway, if 90% of the kids are going on to the state schools, and many need significant help with finding scholarships / aid to do so, it would be rather in poor taste to think that the GC’s should waste their time learning about a multitude of elite private out of state colleges just to help me and my precious pumpkins. Like anyone else, they need to allocate their time where it does most good - and helping the kid without parental financial support make his way to Northern Illinois <em>is</em> a far better use of their time than helping my kids agonize over Wellesley vs Bryn Mawr or similar first-world problems.</p>
<p>Anyway, unless they are well traveled, how are they going to know anything about these schools that I couldn’t easily get myself? Many of my kids’ colleges were in the East Coast; I grew up there, have friends and connections there, travel there – I have a MUCH better feel (augmented by the helpful connections I’ve made on CC) on these schools, communities, etc. What’s the point of having a GC google (as this example) the pros and cons of Wellesley vs Bryn Mawr when I can actually visit there and talk to people who have attended both?</p>
<p>hkobb7-there are a lot of parents out there that did not go to college, have no idea how the process works, and don’t know that there are sites like this to help. That is where the GC should assist. Even parents that do know the process, there are still going to be questions that come up. Our Dd’s best friend is in that spot right now. She’s a pretty good student, can probably get into a pretty selective school (not highly selective but well above average school). Her parents “don’t believe” in going to college. They think she will be just fine with her high school diploma and maybe a certificate course at a community college. How much help do you think they are for her…none. Luckily for her she practically lives here and we are helping her. Little things like taking the PSAT—she wasn’t going to do that because she really didn’t know what it was. At our school you pretty much need to get on a teachers “list” in the spring if you need a letter of recommendation in the fall. A lot of kids end up not getting those letters done because there are just so many hours in the day for the teachers. This is where the GC’s come in and help, etc.</p>
<p>How many people do you know that say “my kid will never go to a private school because it costs too much”? Do you really think they are well informed parents? The process, if you have been through it before, is not complicated, but if you have never navigated the system, it can be confusing…and even more so when you start with the scholarship applications.</p>
<p>No, I don’t expect them to know every little detail about every college in the country but they certainly know our kids and what they are capable of doing and can make suggestions for the types of schools various kids should be considering.</p>
<p>I think it’s ridiculous to think that one counselor who has 500 kids and who may also be dealing with things like kids in abusive situations, or kids who have had a parent die or some other social stressor, “should know” our kids. That’s just ridiculous and unfair to them. It’s physically not possible.</p>
<p>Well Pizzagirl, she does. She is very good at her job. I’m actually amazed at how well she does know the kids seeing that they haven’t really had to talk to her all that much. She is amazing to work with and genuinely cares about the kids and making sure things work out for them. Also, in our school the school psychologists would be the ones working with the kids from abusive situations, dealing with emotional issues, etc. It’s a common misconception that the GC’s are there to work through problems like this. If you ask any of them they will tell you that is NOT their job. Some may be there for the kids as a sounding board, etc. but for the bigger issues they pass those on to those trained to deal with things. The GC’s job is to help kids navigate the school process.</p>