Son’s GC has not been involved at all. If anyone has been any help at all I would say it would be his AP Eng 3 teacher. She has at least heard of a few of his schools even if she knows nothing about them. He’s our eldest so at least our little one will benefit from all the work I’ve done getting the older one ready.
Our kids’ guidance counselors were overworked. They did not evaluate or comment on my kids’ college lists. They provided a counselor’s letter. Their general attitude was that students shouldn’t apply to more than 3 or 4 colleges! Perhaps a couple of the major instate public institutions, plus one or two safeties, perhaps out-of-state.
My kids had relatively small lists: 7 for my son, 5 for my daughter. They made it easy on the counselors and other letter-writers! My son’s list included 2 in-state publics. My daughter’s included no instate colleges. She wanted to get awaaay. Both kids ended up going out-of-state.
DS had a terrible guidance counselor, who knew nothing of our situation and barely knew him. She basically said - well, he’s clearly much smarter than any of us, if he tells me I need to send ___ in by date, then that’s probably what I have to do.
DD had a great counselor, who tried to help her be realistic with her list of schools but she was also encouraging - go for it, but understand that you probably won’t get into most of these schools. Since D got into most of the schools she applied to, it worked out well.
My daughter’s GC was really helpful. We went in with a list of maybe 7 or 8 colleges and she had a list of about 20 ( some of our choices appeared on her list also) she thought we should at least consider. It seemed overwhelming at first but it made sense. At the time, my daughter hadn’t really told her GC what she was looking for in a school. We emphasised we were focused on what we now know is called fit ( we want her to go somewhere she’ll be happy) and not thinking about prestige. Logistically, we thought a six hour drive was the max. Also, my daughter hates the heat so the further North was seen as a plus.
Geography, removed several options from the list.
After selecting a safety she was very candid and told us out daughter was a great fit for some very selective schools that offered great aid for people in our income bracket. Phew…
In retrospect, I encouraged my daughter to apply to more schools than neccessary, but I did it with good intentions and a fear she might not get in anywhere other than the safety. I’m not the smartest when it comes to math but I understand percentages enough that admission rates scared me.
A second round of whittling the list down came about after my daughter told her her intended areas of study. Uunfortunately, this made her list top heavy with selective schools ( given her interests in Linguistics, Anthropology and Neuroscience and our lack of significant funds).
She was quietly confident our daughter would be successful.
She encouraged my daughter to take the SAT once more to try break 1500, she had a very respectable 1420 at the time, ultimately gaining a 1470.
I spoke to the GC one day outside the school, after all applications were in and she casually told me she had phoned several admissions offices at my daughter’s top choices. I have to say this totally floored me. I considered the phone calls above and beyond anything we might expect a GC to do.
Then the acceptances started coming in, accepted everywhere but Swarthmore. She arranged a meeting to compare financial aid offers and to explain them to confused parents.
With only the Ivies still to notify yay or nay she told me, without my daughter been present, that it wasn’t going to happen. Fine by me, I much preferred the LAC and all they had to offer, and she had acceptances from some fantastic LACs.
Ivy Day yielded one wait list and three acceptances out of four.
In this era of social media it wasn’t long before school friends and ultimately teachers heard the news. The GC was one of the first to phone and offer congratulations.
I don’t blame her for saying it wasn’t going to happen as I felt something similar, though I did think my daughter would be a good fit for Brown. I grew up with a mindset of not getting your hopes up so I totally understood her not saying she thought the chances were good. I felt it was a reasonable stance to take.
In truth, I believe the GC was a big part of my daughter’s success, given our total lack of knowledge of the process. Reading some of the horror stories on here I feel tremendously lucky.
They are only good to get paperwork done on time, no added value, knowledge or guidance.
When you say it was accurate how many of your targets did you get into or would you expect to get into? And how many reaches? I have 3 reaches, 5 targets, and 4 safety schoools.
And we are using a private college counselor who helped develop the list…
Our GC did nothing! Huge student to GC ratio. She knew nothing about schools outside our state other than Ivy’s and didn’t hesitate to tell kids that. We just talked to schools at college fairs, did our research and visited. Oh GC no longer works at the school.
Our GC: College what’s that?
We basically just told the GC what we needed her to do. She was really nice and helpful as much as she was able, but had no clue about colleges outside of our town or applying. It’s a small school with only one counselor, so she’s more a therapist type counselor than anyone knowledgeable about academics.
DD17 went to a school that had a very engaged college counseling staff that wasn’t overburdened and proved to be reasonably helpful. However, @intparent and @Lindagaf were better still!
I got appropriate and accurate recommendation on CC. DD got accepted to all, and received merit at most.
@mamaedefamilia , thank you. 
TBH, for my daughter, my best advice came from CC. For my son, who is much more clear about his list and and is not aiming really high, his GC has been fantastic. And of course, I’m getting wonderful advice on CC, as usual.
My daughter’s guidance counselor was awesome at giving finals for all of my daughter’s BYU high school classes (PE and Health requirements so she could do band and other science and foreign language classes), and helping organize all the recommendations for college apps and the gozilion scholarship apps my daughter did. Advising about schools? Nope. She had never heard of the school my daughter ended up attending. We are overseas though, there are no “local” options.
My D’s “guidance counselor” (unique situation) simply told her that every school was a reach for her (even a state satellite campus) and that she should get her GED (she’s homeschooled). We decided that I make a better GC and came up with an application plan together, on our own.
The kids in my Catholic High School start meeting with their College Placement counselor-- a different person from their regular guidance counselor-- in the spring of Junior year. The College Placement counselors focus on that one thing.
In my own kid’s public high school, they have one guidance counselor for 4 years, and one of the many jobs is college placement. So I can see how it’s a far lesser priority than the day to day real life issues that so many teens face, from eating disorders to divorce to child abuse to bullying to anxiety.
I did the groundwork. When each of my kids and I met with Mrs. F. for the college meeting, she could see that they had a number of schools where the numbers made sense. She suggested one or two more, and probably mentally took my kids off her list of kids to worry about; she could see that we had it under control.
She was unfamiliar with either of the schools they attended. But, in fairness to her, we live on Long Island. There are hundreds, probably more than a thousand, schools within a 4 hour commute. She recommended the appropriate SUNY schools, and a few others. Had I not done the homework, I don’t doubt that my kids would have ended up at one of the schools she would have recommended, and been perfectly happy— we’re big believers in “blooming where you’re planted.”
S19 is at a large public school with about 800 per graduating class. I really liked the GC he had until she took another job this year. D17 had her as well. She was on the ball about a lot of things and was very quick to respond to e-mails, even during vacations. Still, I learned that she wasn’t going to be able to give much advice about out of state colleges and for that CC has been incredible - I used it a ton to guide my D. When S19 and I met with the GC last spring, she brought up the idea of him being a big fish in a small pond. While I think that concept was worth considering for him, she suggested a school for which his ACT scores were more than 10 points over their average and it didn’t seem like it would be a good choice for him. So, we’re sticking with CC and my research.
D13 had a GC she liked that retired at the end of her Junior year, so applications were handled by her replacement - a newly graduated GC, who had interned with the original GC. Thankfully she was part of the CTY Scholars program, and got significant help from her counselor there. D16 had mental health issue, and is attending community college part time. The same high school GC didn’t really know what to do with her, but I suspect even a seasoned counselor would have been at a loss.
Then there’s D20. She attends a smaller STEM magnet school. Her half of the alphabet is on their 4th GC since she started HS (she’s been there since 6th grade, and everything was stable until her freshman year. Sophomore year they only had one GC (the one for the first half of the alphabet, not hers) from January until March, then hired a wonderful man who owned his own private College Counseling company. He was good, understood every question I called with, knew what he was doing. Then there were the budget cuts, and the district laid off 10 counselors. Last in, First Out. So even though our kids had already been through 2 recent changes, they lost their GC because he wasn’t tenured. There we major issues with her schedule this year - last year saw her taking 3 AP and 4 honors classes (including 2 engineering classes which should be AP equivalent). This year she has 2 AP and 1 honors class, because of scheduling conflicts (and was force into academic level psychology and philosophy classes she didn’t want, rather than another STEM class, because “she doesn’t need it - she took an extra last year”). Oh, and her transcript is messed up, and missing honors credit from 1 class freshman year, 2 last year so her Weighted GPA is wrong, and the paperwork is missing to show she took those classes with honors contracts. New GC has her hands full, don’t know if she’s up to the task of fixing everything. When D20 when to see her the first time to see if her schedule could be changed (wasn’t allowed to see her until 2 days before drop deadline, because priority given to kids who “needed” classes), her first question was how long this new GC plans to stay. She was a bit put off until I explained the number of recent changes - nobody had bothered to tell her what she was getting into - and we all know we got her because she was low man on the totem pole at her last school. Bodes well…
We will see what happens when D20 uploads her application list to Naviance. Not coming from a STEM background, I fully expect the GC to be unfamiliar with at least half of the schools (particularly small schools like Kettering and Olin).
A note on behalf of my colleagues: the term “guidance counselor” is disfavored, and the professional organizations now prefer “school counselor.” I still like the old term, but I aim to call people what they want to be called. Unless your school’s counselor requests otherwise, it’s a good practice to call them your school counselor. No matter what term you’re used to, you want to be on this professional’s good side!
https://counseling.steinhardt.nyu.edu/blog/difference-between-guidance-counselor-school-counselor/
My D’s is amazing. Very fortunate for us that she has a high achieving, ambitious senior D as well. I can still vividly recall our first college planning meeting with her in the middle of D’s junior year. The look on her face when I told her that UCB, UCLA, and Cal Poly Slo were my daughter’s safeties was a huge wake up call for me in how the admissions game has changed. But she is truly amazing and has submitted everything on time. She’s gone above what we have expected. We are very thankful.
@Hanna I just went to check the HS’s website, because I don’t like to call people by the wrong name and title. On the staff directory it says “Guidance Counselor” under the names of the people help the kids with a wide variety of issues including college apps
Our first real contact with our son’s (currently a HS junior) GC was last year when we met to discuss class selections for the rest of high school. It’s a very good HS, good size (2000 students). To be honest, we didn’t get a food feel from her that she has good guidance for strong, advanced students. She didn’t have a whole lot of input on strong computer science programs. He’s been double-accelerated in math since 6th grade. I’m kind of surprised she didn’t have a ton of knowledge, given the rigor of our HS’s programs and classes. It was also kind of like she was selling him short. Granted, she barely knew our son other than looking at his transcript and schedule. Well, we just found out he got 1600 on the SAT, so we’ll see if we hear from her once scores get reported to his HS! Most of our researching schools has been from our own efforts. All she provided was a photo copy of “most selective” CS programs. So, I don’t hold much weight in her input up to this point. We’ll see if there’s more input from her in the coming months.
In neither case did we get much useful guidance. In ShawSon’s case, he was highly unusual (severely dyslexic and brilliant) so we had partially homeschooled him. The guidance counselor was probably 23 and had no knowledge of the kinds of schools he should go to and which, while highly ranked, wouldn’t work for him. Fortunately, I knew that tier of schools pretty well.
In ShawD’s case, we made a list and the guidance counselor thought it was too full of safeties. Not clear she was right, but she had a real bias for liberal arts colleges, which would not have been a good fit at all for ShawD. As she later said to me, “I’m not that academic” by which she meant that she wasn’t interested in learning for learnings sake and only liked two courses in HS: Human Biology and Statistics. ShawD hated the holistic admissions process and decided instead as a joint US/Canadian citizen to apply only to Canadian schools. She applied to two, got into both, chose one, and then tried to switch from biology to nursing after a week and discovered she would have to reapply as a freshman. So she transferred at the end of the semester to a school with a strong nursing department and got into a BSN/MSN program. So the GCs guidance to go to LACs reflected a lack of understanding of ShawD.