<p>For all the yammering on CC about the unfairness of giving preference to (pick your favorite) URMs/legacies/athletes/kids from Montana/kids with no social skills/kids with great social skills/yada yada, it strikes me that this is one of the most “unfair” practices. I don’t have a problem with anyone taking advantage of it; I believe you play the cards you’re dealt, and as hard as you can. But come on - it doesn’t strike the colleges as blatantly unfair to talk about Muffy and Biff with their GC while knowing that Susie’s GC wouldn’t know Susie if she tripped over her? This is exactly the reason I think GC letters are so stupid - they just reinforce what you already know, Muffy and Biff attend a great private school and Susie doesn’t.</p>
<p>Some Susies out there hire private counselor for $$$$.</p>
<p>Very true. I don’t have a moral problem with it - like I said, you play the cards you have. It’s just interesting to me. Because there’s no way any adcom can truly have a relationship with more than a handful of GCs in his/her area.</p>
<p>And trust me - I would have absolutely played a GC/adcom bestie card if I had it :-)</p>
<p>I agree with Oldfort; my son (the worm) got 3 acceptances off waistlists by sending a note, and in 1 case, adding new achievements and LORs from people who knew him well, but not at his HS. No one from his HS had ever gone to his UG, so there was no relationship with GC.</p>
<p>Had I’d chosen to pay $25,000 for local private school, I am sure we could have had more help. My friends’ children have been exposed to schools like Wesleyan, etc., off the typical Southeast track. They have help with essay writing and crafting an image. Most still seek out private counselors, but that is not necessary. They have a low student to GC ratio. I am sure that these GCs have a relationship with certain Southern schools.</p>
<p>Mind you, I have no regrets. I paid for some 13 classes at local U, and then at private college. For my son, the local U had the classes he wanted in math, science, and econ, which the best private school could not have offered.</p>
<p>The amount of time many parents spend on CC already put their kids ahead of others. I have freely shared a lot of information on CC, as other parents have. </p>
<p>There are some parents who make fairly decent living, but they would rather spend the money on second home, boat, vacation, car, rather than on their kid’s education. Is that fair?</p>
<p>Would Susie’s private counselor have the same “in” with the adcoms, though? And how about the Joes and Janes who don’t have good GCs or private counselors, like most kids in the U.S.?</p>
<p>Perhaps, when weighing the advantages, one could add a “numbers” perspective. Taking the Ivy League plus Stanford and MIT, you have about 305,000 applicants and fewer than 27,000 admitted students. From this number, close to 8,000 were admitted in an early round and just above 19,000 in the regular decision round. </p>
<p>While the number of waitlisted students might appear staggering, the number of students who emerge from a waitlist is incredibly small in comparison. Guess what it will for the Class of 2017! Then one ought to consider that there are 30,000 high schools in the US and probably 32,000 valedictorians. Even we reducing that number to the most plausible public and private high schools with “chances” to send one of their students to the above schools, it remains that the number of successful students who came from the WL is a minuscule fraction of the applicant pool.</p>
<p>We all know that schools such as Collegiate Prep can rely on guidance counselors who were hired because they were a Harvard adcom to increase the chances of the graduating class. Same for plenty of tony private high schools on the East Coast, or the Harvard-Westlake or St. Mark’s of this world. The real question is really about the advantages from focusing on the early and regular decision rounds versus the ones found in the very small realm of successful WL conversions.</p>
<p>We guarantee free public education from 1-12, but even with that we don’t guarantee same quality of education or equal opportunity.</p>
<p>My cousin worked at Harvard admissions and is now a GC at a private school. I suspect her relations with a certain college are pretty collegial.</p>
<p>The advantage is about so much more than guidance counselors. For example, teachers at independent schools with maximum class sizes in the 15-17 range who may teach four classes a day as a full time load are more likely to be able to write persuasive recommendation letters. Seeing just 60-75 kids a day (rather than 160-200) makes it much easier to actually have a close relationship with the student in question. In addition, there are fewer letters to write, and more time in which to write them. Believe me, counselor recommendations are not the only letters that can be generic. “Joey or Suzy is a nice kid who never causes trouble in class and always turns in homework on time” isn’t going to do much to strengthen an application.</p>
<p>That small class size (the number one reason for high tuition at independent schools) also means time to work one on one with students who are struggling, time to write lengthy comments on papers, etc. I taught public school for many years and still remember one of my students visits after she started at Stanford. She was a top student with great grades and test scores (and is a professor at University of Virginia today), and she told me that she found it very frustrating trying to compete with the students who had attended private schools because they could write better and with more ease than she could.</p>
<p>Yes, students at schools that play the college admissions game well have an advantage when it comes to getting off of the wait list, but that advantage is miniscule compared to the other advantages they receive as a result of their enviable schooling.</p>
<p>I wish they’d just put the waiting list places up to public auction.</p>
<p>A point of clarification - the comments I made yesterday about the relationship between hs counselors and regional adcoms were not at Ivy League schools or the equivalent. Good colleges, but not top 20. Sometimes I forget how focused many posters on CC are regarding the elite universities and LACs. Not my area of expertise.</p>
<p>I’m glad you mentioned that rockvillemom. Those schools are not my focus either. My D is the type that can be happy nearly anywhere. She doesn’t have her heart set on a school yet and I hope she doesn’t. Being adaptable is an important skill that can make one’s life journey much easier.</p>
<p>Life isn’t fair at all, so I don’t understand the ourage that there are “tips” in this area. And tips they are rather than hooks. To get into one of these top high schools, a kid has to have the right parents. Yes, they do accept very few fin aid kids, but not a one of these schools are need blind and meet full need when it comes to admissions, and getting into the top ones is often as difficult or more so than getting into all but the very most selective colleges. So these kids are preselected already. It’s not like it’s an auto feed either to the top schools, considering these kids have the parents/savvy/profile to get into a highly selective high school, and not all of them do go on to the most selective colleges. For many of them, going to the local high school might indeed have been an advantage. I’ve known kids who have 'beaten their peers" in college selectivity by leaving a high school of this sort to the local public, excelling there, and getting into a better school than they would have likely gotten with their grades at Prep School. Many of these schools have steep grading curves, rigorous academics, strict rules and high standards. Many don’t weight the grades either. A 3.5 in those schools is mighty good. Those colleges who know and take this into consideration will give those kids a bump in admissions, but a lot of schools don’t. They are NOT feeder schools, in most cases, to the most selective schools, but they can give a definite tip in. And when you are talking about the competition to get into HPY, any little tip can make a difference as there often are not that many things distinguishing the accepts from the wait lists. By the way, the tip usually gives a reject a WL status , not an accept from WL. It’s not a huge bump. Not like recruited athlete status, URM status, legacy, development, special talents situations. But throw in a prep school that is well known with one of the special hooks, and it does give it a punch.</p>
<p>But seriously, the unfairness begins long before this and in far more important areas. And continues throughout life. My son has found out that there are kids out there who have jobs waiting for them. When dad owns a big business, well… even his 22 year old son right out of college and still wet behind the ears may have a position already waiting for him and he can take 3 weeks to go to Tibet or whatever and have a lot more leeway than the kid who has to earn his stripes and pay 100% on his own.</p>
<p>I think many, if not most folks, would use a tip, a contact, whatever, if they had it.</p>