<p>Pizzagirl…the adcoms would give your GC the time of day for sure. I agree with hmom that very selective colleges do not want to ONLY take kids from the same high schools but do wish to expand to more schools. I think the main difference, however, is that GCs from a school such as ours have NO ONGOING rapport with the adcoms at highly selective colleges and there is no former track record of lots of kids from the HS having attended that college. So, that “pull” (not sure what to call it) that those from certain publics or private school counselors have with adcoms is not gonna be there, but the GC from the unknown HS still can try to go to bat for a kid (how effective it is, is hard to say, compared to the relationships the counselors from the known high schools have with these adcoms). </p>
<p>I’ll give you an example…from personal experience…my oldest D applied to schools that rarely are applied to from our high school, though occassionally there are kids who apply to these colleges. D applied EA to Yale. I do not believe anyone from our HS has gone to Yale, or if so, not in a very long time that I know of. D got deferred in the EA round at Yale. I know that our GC did talk to the adcom (didn’t know one another at all) in an effort to try to be helpful in the winter, at our request. He spoke to us as having a very friendly conversation (they joked about the Red Sox in fact) and he spoke about our D to the adcom. D was denied in the RD round (not relating this call in any way to that but just explainin’). By the way, none of my D’s colleges (but Smith) had reps visit our HS. My D did go with her school to a college fair in our state and the GC went along too. At the college fair, the Brown rep was there. The GC made it a point to go talk to the Brown rep about our D (he told us about this…was his own idea). Now, there was ONE boy, the val from two years before my D applied) who got into Brown and kinda broke the ice. GC talked to the adcom who remembered that boy from our HS who got in and was at Brown at the time and my D was val in her year and so the GC had the very beginnings of a “relationship” (nothing like the private school counselors!!) and maybe it helped (D ended up at Brown). Subsequently, three years later, another girl from our HS has gone to Brown (this is rare at our HS…for example, in my D’s year, she was the only kid to attend any Ivy). So, maybe a rapport has begun with the GC and Brown (the GC just retired however). Not so with Yale…nobody has gone…same with Princeton (D was waitlisted there and others have been in the past too). </p>
<p>I contrast this with D’s roomie at Brown freshmen year…from elite prep school in Chicago…small…had 8 students go to Brown that year. Another contrast is one of my current advisees, who attends a private day school, who got a personal letter from the Brown adcom encouraging her to apply and I asked the mom how the adcom even know this girl was gonna apply and the mom said, the school counselor had called the adcom (they have a relationship) and told her my advisee is gonna be applying. Now, THAT would never happen at our high school. So, I do say it IS different but on the other hand, a GC from an unknown HS certainly can go to bat for a kid and call an adcom to support that student’s candidacy even if the adcom doesn’t know the GC at all.</p>
<p>In the year my daughter graduated (from the same DC-area school that Counting Down’s second son attends now), an impressive number of students were accepted at Northwestern, and some at UChicago as well. Yet many of these same kids were rejected at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins.</p>
<p>Being willing to get on a plane (even for a 2-hour flight from DC to Chicago) has benefits.</p>
<p>It’s the rep’s job to encourage more applications from more schools. No school wants to take 15 kids from New Trier (and they have lots of legacies at top colleges), they would rather get their quota of Chicagoland kids from a greater variety of schools."</p>
<p>Northwestern isn’t my kids’ goal, but I’m willing to bet Northwestern takes 15 kids from New Trier and from Evanston Township on a regular, ongoing basis!</p>
<p>I checked the profile and while it’s generally fine, there are some areas that could be fleshed out per wjb link. Any suggestions on how to approach without making it sound accusatory or “here, I found a project for you”? The last time I approached our head of counseling, it was to request a change in a policy and I just do t want to be THAT insufferable parent, if that makes sense. Should I go through GC? Principal? School board? (there are 2 Hs in district). Do I set up an appt? Email? I feel like it could backfire on me and more importantly my kids if I don’t approach it correctly. They already know that I’m a little frustrated with the local culture.</p>
<p>Cant hear much, the sound from the helicopter blades is deafening. Ive been reading these boards for a couple of years now. I’ve learned a lot here. Not sure why this thread struck a nerve. But all the good advice on this thread strikes me as over the top. </p>
<p>I guess we were just extremely lucky as our kids each got into very selective schools.
We come from a relatively large suburban district. Our district never makes the top x list in the metropolitan area. We’re pretty sure no one else from our high school attended either of these universities in 5+ years. Though, frankly, we never searched beyond our immediate friends and acquaintances. </p>
<p>We never evaluated our schools profile, never took a fine tooth comb to their transcripts, never worried about the names of their high school courses. Have no idea which colleges our kids GCs have or havent spoken to over the years. </p>
<p>Heres one piece of unsolicited advice. Your child is in a position to be selected by one or more great universities. Let them experience the pride that they accomplished this on their own merits. Not wonder if its because M/D edited the school profile or camped out at their school district’s superintendent’s office.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl - Have you looked under the “maps” section on Naviance? For our school it lists ALL the schools that accepted our kids vs just the top 20.</p>
<p>By using Naviance I found that a previous student from our school attended a college my son was interested in. It took some doing, but I got the GC to put me in touch with the other mother and it was great to hear their personal opinions.</p>
<p>RE: post 24
You are putting a lot of faith in your school district. What if Jr. <em>doesn’t</em> get admitted because there are numerous errors on his transcript and no one bothered to check? My S’s transcript had errors every year. </p>
<p>My S applied to several top 20 schools. No one from our small rural school had ever applied to these places. Our school didn’t even have a profile. Better yet, they refused to write one, saying they were just “propaganda” and “useless”. Even if they are trying, GC offices are often over-worked and important details get overlooked. </p>
<p>I wanted his application to be at least accurate. How can they be admitted on their own “merits” if the transcript is wrong and the adcom knows absolutely nothing about the HS?</p>
<p>My son got into colleges on his own merits. Elements like an accurate transcript and a comprehensive profile don’t get anyone into college. Nor do they augment an applicant’s accomplishments. They simply ensure that colleges will get an accurate view of those accomplishments within the context of the opportunities available in the local environment. For a parent to ensure that the transcript and profile are accurate is not helicoptering. It’s good sense.</p>
<p>goru, I’m not sure why you’d find this thread more objectionable than some others. I like that there is good specific information in here.</p>
<p>This past year, our smallish school, with a graduating class of less than 200, had more than a dozen Ivy acceptances, in addtion to all the other top schools – Stanford, MIT, top LACs, etc. The previous year, not a singly Ivy acceptance. I attribute this to a revamped HS profile. The previous one was way too long on narrative – lots of words that didn’t say much. The new one has a lot more specific detail – numbers, verbs.</p>
<p>I can understand not wanting to tell someone how to do their jobs. Thankfully, the GC was new last year and very open to suggestions. She already had identified that the old profile was a problem, principal was on board with changes and so I took the opportunity of my volunteer position to reseach other schools’ HS profiles and send the GC links to ones that looked interesting. I only knew about the importance of the profile because of cc. When I saw my opening I jumped in with ideas because our school’s kids were getting shortchanged – and I knew eventually my kids would benefit, too. Things like profiles tend to get tweaked year after year, but over time that leads to a really outdated document. Thankfully, the GC was ready for a change.</p>
<p>I recently complimented her on the results last year, crediting her for tackling the makeover. She thanked me for giving her good examples of what other schools were doing. I was sincere; I assume she was as well.</p>
<p>Checking one’s transcripts and school profile is not helicoptering! It isn’t even helping your kid get into college (mine got in on their own merits, thank you very much). EVERYONE should check their transcript…errors DO occur. Actually, my kids picked up their transcript and there were a few mistakes on it or things that were not clear or missing. I know someone at our high school who was one of the best students in her year and she got rejected at college and later found out that her transcript had a D on it even though she was an A student (this was a blatant error). As far as the school profile, it is not the student’s fault if the school has been lax and has not updated it in many years so that the profile does NOT match the current grading system, the current ranking system, the current course offerings, where the graduates have attended and so on. All these errors and more were on our school’s profile. Having these things corrected is not helping your kid get into college or taking over. The student should check these documents. It will hurt a student applying to selective colleges if their transcript or school profile has blatant errors on it. I work as a college counselor and I recommend that everyone check these documents. I did bring the profile to the principal’s attention and showed her the many errors on it that did not reflect the current practices at the school and how this could hurt applicants from our school (any applicant, not just my own kid) and she sincerely acted concerned that this was in error and had all those corrections made on a revision of the school profile. It is hard to believe that the school or guidance counselors never noticed this or maybe are not tuned into selective college admissions but this kind of incorrect information would be detrimental to applicants from this high school whose transcripts would be incorrectly interpreted. </p>
<p>To the person who calls this helicoptering…do you think you or your student should not check to see that their report card is correct? If incorrect, should all stay silent? Do you think that the documents sent into your child’s college should be correct or should you stay silent if the HS is sending false information to your child’s college? A parent’s involvement in these matters does not equate helicoptering. I don’t believe in overinvolvement of parents and I don’t believe in NO involvement by parents. There is a happy medium. By the way, as a former teacher myself, and now a counselor, and seeing it from that end, I again prefer a happy medium of parent involvement. Parents should not do things FOR their kids. But parents who are not involved at all is not a great situation either. The issue of making sure your child has checked to see if his/her documents that his/her high school will send into the student’s college are correct, is not doing for the child and it is not sitting back and ignoring, but rather an example of ONE time where it IS appropriate for a parent to be involved. Our principal thanked me for pointing out the errors in the School Profile that went out for so many kids from the school applying to college. This helped ALL children, not just my own. </p>
<p>This is different than a parent trying to change policy, for example. My own child worked for two years to change a policy at her high school and it involved her researching policies in our state and nation, writing a proposed policy for our high school, presenting it all to the administration, the faculty and eventually the school board, as well as public hearings on her proposed policy. The school board voted to adopt her policy. It was a policy to implement a weighted graded system. I was not involved AT ALL. My child was instrumental in effecting change at her school for many kids. Did she benefit? Nope…the policy was going to take effect after she graduated and she knew that from the get go but wanted to help students who came after her. She made a difference for many kids (btw, her recs spoke to how as a student she effected change in the school). It was appropriate for a student to lead that charge. But for the school profile which is simply “mistakes” on an important document, surely a parent can point it out to the school to effect change for ALL children. It wasn’t about my own kids. </p>
<p>Parents are important to the educational process. It is not as if they should not be seen or heard. What they ought NOT to do is do things FOR their children. Having a school profile corrected at a school is NOT doing things for the child. It is for the school and all children at that school.</p>
<p>“I can understand not wanting to tell someone how to do their jobs.”</p>
<p>This one gets to the heart of my reaction. Checking your transcript is valid. I still contend that redlining your school’s profile and interacting with the GCs to the point you know who/how often they called is excessive. i also am skeptical that such actions make that big a difference. </p>
<p>Sorry it came off smug. tried to add a little levity. obvisouly failed. i truly realize how lucky we are. </p>
<p>i’m just a big believer in letting them find their way. just a personal philosophy. never confronted coaches when playing time seemed unfair. never pressured school officials when not 100% happy. oops, probably going down the smug road again. </p>
<p>Goru, our local HS listed AP Physics and chems as courses that were offered, even though the advanced science teacher retired years ago and was not replaced. And then other teachers wondered why the top math and science kids couldn’t get into engineering schools- duh, if the kid states in his app that he’s interested in math and science, and the adcoms see that the kid topped out at college prep chem and physics (“why would a kid interested in engineering take honors basket weaving instead of the AP Physics class that was offered?”) it surely isn’t the kids fault. And although I am not an advocate for helicoptering, it is ridiculous to assume that kids know what is on the school profile and whether in fact, the data there coincides with reality.</p>
<p>Sheesh. You are lucky your kids were accepted where they were. There are legions of kids whose school profiles and transcripts are riddled with errors- both stupid and significant- and it’s not fair to the kids (not just your kids, but the whole community’s kids) when the school administration resists efforts to make the documentation accurate.</p>
<p>And don’t get me started on schools which put the results of IQ tests administered in the 4th grade on HS transcripts… talk about poor use of bad data.</p>
<p>I think that’s why you have to be careful about how you approach it. In my case, the GC was new and already had identified the profile as a problem, so I just gave an assist. Not sure how I would have approached it if not for this opening. But, really, I can’t stress how much better the new profile is. And this year, she’s made it even better, explaining some of the crazy transcript idiosyncracies we have.</p>
<p>My kids went to a fairly small rural public school (there were 600 kids in grades 9-12). Our guidance counselor was my kids’ counselor starting in seventh grade and knew my girls very very well and same with us (example, he just retired and moved 3000 miles away and took my husband and I to dinner before moving…my girls are both out of college already…but he felt a kinship). The principal knows us. The teachers know us. The reason I know that the GC spoke to the Brown rep at the college fair is because he volunteered the information to either my D or us (was a long time ago). He also told my D that he called Yale after her deferral. He communicated often with my girls. Our kids’ high school and GC had very very minimal contact with the schools my girls applied to compared to either private or public high school GCs where it is normal for kids to apply to selective colleges. It is not the norm at our high school and our school is unknown. My girls applied to extremely competitive colleges and programs coming out of a high school that typically does not send kids to these colleges except in rare exceptions (one or two per year). My younger one applied to the top BFA in Musical Theater programs which all had acceptance rates in the single digits (worse odds than the Ivy League) and came out of a HS with no drama program which has rarely ever had a student attend a BFA for MT. She was up against kids coming from performing arts high schools, for example. Our HS is not known AT ALL. Only 2/3’s of graduates even attend four year colleges. It is funny to me to think anyone thinks this was a lot of involvement, LOL. It ain’t nothing like what I know takes place between well known publics or privates whose GCs have a rapport with adcoms that is ongoing. Our GC had NONE. I was just saying that our GC still cared about my girls and did his best to help them. He continues to this day to stay in contact with them as well even though they are out of college. </p>
<p>I do agree, goru that students from unknown high schools should never hesitate to apply to top colleges even if students from their HS do not typically apply or get into those colleges. Worked for my kids who ended up at top choices which were highly competitive colleges or programs, as well. In the end, it is the kid who gets in, not the high school from where he/she comes.</p>
<p>D is applying to 2 colleges where no one from her school has ever applied. The GC in charge of the college process had never even heard of one of them. However, D’s school is in the US news top 100 so I am pretty confident that the colleges have heard of her school.</p>
<p>Agree with you, Blossom. I forget the many errors on our school’s profile (this was back in 2003) but your example about the school profile saying it offered AP Physics when it did not, was very similar to just one of the many errors on our kids’ school profile. And so when you have a kid who took the most challenging classes the school offers (and then some), but the profile says it offers something more advanced than the school currently offers, that example is one where it would hurt the candidate unfairly. This type of correction on the profile benefits many kids, not just one’s own child. Parents should advocate in schools around issues that help the entire school. This is one example. It is not helicoptering. I am not into helicoptering in fact. But there are appropriate times on the K-12 level where a parent might have some involvement in the school and this is one of those examples of when it is appropriate.</p>
<p>My kids attended a high school that I have a gut feeling that many CC parents here would not opt to send their children. My kids made out just fine in the very competitive college process in which they entered. While one ended up at an Ivy (though her goal was not “Ivy” in particular!), and is now in grad school at MIT, one of the two top schools in her field, the other ended up at one of the top BFA programs in her field, with a very substantial scholarship, as well as one of a handful of selected Scholars there. I am merely mentioning this as an example that you can come out of an unknown high school where hardly anyone has applied to or gotten into the colleges you are applying to and do just fine. And perhaps when you do get into these types of colleges, you have broken ground for the kids from your high school who might come next and apply there. :D</p>
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