<p>Last year, there were 5 students in S's suite. Out of the 5, 4 were full fare, 1 was full ride. Out of the 5, 4 were SCEA, 1 was RD. It was the same one.</p>
<p>mini, thank you for your response. But does it occur to you that <em>a</em> reason for less economic diversity is that portions of some ethnic groups now have a higher SES than 40 years ago? No question that there remains a sizeable A-An segment that is an educational & economic underclass. (How the size of that underclass compares with 40 yrs. ago I do not know.) But it is true that URM's look less uniform than 40 yrs ago, economically, & that is also reflected in higher test scores among A-An's as a whole, than previously.</p>
<p>Like JHS earlier, I don't entirely buy that poverty leads to lack of knowledge about EA (vs. ED). Neither his experience nor my experience supports that.</p>
<p>Actually, the confusion is not between ED and EA. It is between ED and SCEA.</p>
<p>FRom Harvard's point of view, it made sense not to be flooded with EA applications. From an applicant's point of view, SCEA was very restrictive. CC student posters discussed whether it was worth risking their SCEA on one of the several SCEA schools--an issue that did not arise with colleges that had open EA, such as Chicago or MIT.</p>
<p>And it is not the students who are confused: just read Zoosermom's post on the "geezer GC" at her private school. There are many more incompetent or overwhelmed GCs around.</p>
<p>I do not blame high schoolers not to be focused on college apps early in junior year (and again read posts from parents whose kids are reluctant to consider college well into junior year). It behooves parents and GCs to let them know about such things as PSAT, SATs, SAT-IIs, etc... If they have not done most of their standardized testing by the end of junior year, they will not be in good shape to apply early. But their parents and GCs are not as well informed as the parents or GCs of kids who attend prep schools or affluent suburban schools where everyone expects to go to college.</p>
<p>The RD kid in the 5-person suite comes from a school as different from Exeter as one can imagine.</p>
<p>New gang in town, StickerShock. (The "Crisps.") Oh, well, not any more amusing than what I thought for a long time their name was: The Cribs. That seemed just such an infantile image for such a menacing presence.</p>
<p>(I'm not entirely convinced here; I say tentatively that it's the Crips.)</p>
<p>LOL! I guess I need to bone up on gangs. I can't even blame it on a typo, because I intended to type crisps. Fortunately we don't seem to have a big gang problem in my town. Crisps brings to mind potato chips. Not much more menacing than cribs....</p>
<p>I think Crips wielded knives. What should Cribs wield? pens? or just google? :)</p>
<p>I agree with marite that it is up to the <em>parents</em>, primarily, to become informed about the college application process & the details thereof. This is the appropriate way to "be involved in your child's education," not to write their essays, not to do their homework, not to become obsessively adversarial (against the teacher or school) about every grade that comes home. In fact, it's amazing to me how often I see parents in real life & in virtual life (occasionally even here) quite involved in the day-to-day minutiae of their middle & high school students' educations, yet surprisingly unwilling or unable to take the time to do the above. (That's <em>parental</em> homework.)</p>
<p>Yes, no question that this is the GC's job, too! No high school, of any type or SES, should be allowed NOT to have a parent (or parent+student) college information night: the nuts & bolts, the differences between the various Early Rounds & RD, etc. But you can only Bring the Horse to the Water. In my community there are many opportunities outside of school, as well -- free opportunities well publicized within impoverished segments. These are sessions highschoolers are invited to come to -- in community centers, in libraries, etc. They exist for those students who may have ambition but no parental guidance for such matters. And I often teach in schools with 100% URM populations. In those cases the teachers often take interested students to local college campuses early in Jr. and/or Sr. yr.</p>
<p>New search engine: "Gurgle" ;)</p>
<p>Epiphany:</p>
<p>I recall my own baptism of fire regarding college applications. Having gone through the French education system where one waited until after the results of the bac were announced to make definite plans about college, I was taken aback by the need to learn about college in junior year. I attended an information session at S1's school, but don't recall that there was much information about ED, EA (SCEA had not yet been introduced) and RD. We did have a more personalized meeting with the GC, who was terrific, and she explained those differences. But I expect that in many schools, especially those with one GC per 1000 students, as is reported is the case in many CA schools, such individualized meetings are not the norm. Oh, and for some reason, the meeting was half devoted to financial aid, which turned out not to be about financial aid but about NCAA rules.</p>
<p>What I'm trying to say is that, sometimes, you don't know what you don't know (sorry if I sound like D. Rumsfeld).</p>
<p>Just to expand on my post #287:</p>
<p>One of the many reasons for beginning charter site schools in my State, anyway, has been the neglect of college pathway information to poor & minority students, in traditional (& always underperforming) site public schools. At all of those schools -- & beginning often in middle school -- the site charter schools themselves are becoming heavily involved in college "talk," shall we say. It is not limited to a GC. It is an entire school focus, engaged in aggressively from the get-go. And many, many of these schools are 100% URM. They tend to break down to either 80-100% Latino, or 80-100% African American. Initially the focus is on in-State publics (which is realistic as a starting point), but some schools have higher goals than that, from inception. Some do take students to Northeast privates; some even prepare their middle schoolers for application to Northeast boarding prep high schools.</p>
<p>This is all obviously an attempt to fill an acknowledged previous void.</p>
<p>I appreciate what you are saying, marite, but perhaps I put more responsibility on adults as a group to provide information, than on a single function such as a GC. When it comes to other information & decisions in a teen's life, which have far-reaching consequences -- such as info about drugs, alcohol, anorexia, nutrition -- do we suggest that one person be responsible for disseminating such information? No. It's a multi-angled effort, involving reinforcement by teachers, peers, media, outside counselors & workshops. I think our site charter schools have come to realize this when it comes to publicity about college, & are immersing previously at-risk kids whose parents are conscientious enough to sign on to "involvement in their children's education." The immersion comes from many sides. Even the quite educated parental segment, such as represented on CC, admits to consuming huge amounts of time (supplementing or even replacing GCs' efforts), & admits to the difference that adult time investment made in admissions results.</p>
<p>Epiphany:</p>
<p>All what you say is true, but the site charter schools are not a reality in most places.<br>
Our high school has a large percentage of immigrant parents. Some of them are well educated in their own language. Many are extremely supportive of their children. But they do not have the knowledge that comes from having grown up in this system or having gone through an application cycle already--as I have.</p>
<p>I cannot help recall a Haitian father who came to a meeting held to disseminate important information (not college related, though) and asked whether there was a Keryol-speaking person who could translate for him, There was none. I don't think we should rely on the grapevine to disseminate accurate information. </p>
<p>Harvard is blaming neither parents nor overworked GCs. It is just acknowledging the reality as it exists now, not when schools, whether public, charter or private, will all provide timely and adequate information, or when parents will be better informed than they are now. And in commenting on Harvard's move, many deans of admission have said exactly the same thing.</p>
<p>
[quote]
As a guidance counselor at Rye High School, I rejoice!
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Well, it's good to see that Harvard's admissions policies have made the guidance offices in Westchester County, NY happy!</p>
<p>But wait. Isn't 150 years of favoring Rye High the reason admissions is so tilted to the wealthy in the first place?</p>
<p>The more things change, the more they stay the same. Truth be told, low income students probably don't give a damn about Harvard's single-choice early action program or lack thereof. But, the Westchester crowd certainly does. And, since more of their trust-fund babies get defered than accepted in SCEA, they are now vociferously "ag'in it". And trust me, when Westchester squawks, Harvard listens!</p>
<p>Remember the summit meeting roundtable with the dean's of all the "Ivies" last year? Where was that held again? It was in a low income neighborhood, right?</p>
<p>
[quote]
I agree with marite that it is up to the <em>parents</em>, primarily, to become informed about the college application process & the details thereof.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>It's all very well to say this, but it's not really realistic to expect that all parents in low-income families will have an easy time gathering this information. </p>
<p>There may be barriers of language and culture for recent immigrants. The parents may not have attended college themselves or perhaps they attended an open admissions college, where you can present yourself and your high school transcript at "Admissions Night" the week before classes start for "Instant Admissions." The parents may not be aware that planning for college admission to highly selective colleges requires thinking years ahead.</p>
<p>
[quote]
No high school, of any type or SES, should be allowed NOT to have a parent (or parent+student) college information night: the nuts & bolts, the differences between the various Early Rounds & RD, etc.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Many low-income students attend schools where very few students go to any college at all and most of those who do attend open admission colleges. Even at those open admission colleges, many of the students will require remedial work. </p>
<p>It would be a waste of most students' and parents' time to go into nuts and bolts of ED vs EA vs RD for the vast majority of students at such schools. Most students at predominantly low-income schools have no use for this information, so it's reasonable for GC's to spend their time at the mass info sessions on the nuts and bolts that apply to them--like graduating from high school, passing the exit exam, preparing to make the most of the college experience and hopefully heading off as much as possible the need to take remedial classes in college.</p>
<p>The overwhelming majority of students in some schools simply do not need to take SAT II's, for example, and many would find them demoralizing if they did take them. There are high schools filled with students who will graduate and still not have a grasp on basic algebra or even adding fractions. There are high schools filled with students barely reading at the eighth grade level. It's not especially helpful for a GC to tell all students and parents at such a school about the SAT II's and ED.</p>
<p>Such schools do have occasional students like the young man who went to Brown a decade ago (subject of an award-winning book by a WSJ reporter), but such students really deserve one-on-one outreach appropriate to their particular situation, not a mass "college night" info session. </p>
<p>If anyone saw the movie "Akeelah and the Bee" (now out on DVD), I think the analogy is telling. Akeelah attends a poor inner-city school where there's no money for books or even doors on the toilet stalls, but she dreams of making the National Spelling Bee. </p>
<p>She works hard on her own with a dictionary and a computer, but doesn't really have a roadmap. She gets befriended by a speller from an affluent school in a rich suburb, where they have a "spelling bee club" and prepare together. That school has been sending kids to the national bee for years and the kids have accumulated a lot of collective knowledge about strategies for preparing, studying Latin and Greek, etc. She's inspired but discouraged. She lives so far away from that school with the club and it's an impossibly long trip on city buses.</p>
<p>Her mother is a widow raising four kids in a dangerous neighborhood, holding down a tiring job as a nurse's aid. An older sister is a teenage mother. An older brother has gotten involved with gangs. She has no time to help Akeelah with her dreams.</p>
<p>Fortunately, Akeelah makes a connection with a kindly English professor on sabbatical, who agrees to coach her individually on a volunteer basis. He thoughtfully comes up with a individualized preparation system and ultimately gets the whole neighborhood (including the gang members!) helping Akeelah prepare.</p>
<p>I think the one-on-one outreach efforts make even more sense for college admission preparation than for spelling bee prep. I applaud the efforts of selective schools who provide workstudy jobs to students to do those outreach efforts one-on-one in schools filled with low-income students.</p>
<p>There's nothing like a recent successful college student from a similar background telling you "This is what you need to do," in terms of course selection, timing of test taking, etc.</p>
<p>When I think back to my own college admissions saga decades ago, I did not get useful info from my parents (too busy with their jobs and raising lots of younger kids) or from my overworked gc at an urban high school (only met him once when I transferred into the school early in my junior year--literally never saw him again.) There were no "college info nights." (And by the way, many urban schools are located in places where it's not particularly safe to go at night. Neither parents nor gc's may be enthusiastic about nighttime meetings.)</p>
<p>Where I did get useful info was "osmosis." Fortunately, the school had a large number of students who applied to and attended highly selective schools each year. My classmates had older siblings and older friends who'd been through the whole thing successfully, so they knew the drill and passed it on to me.</p>
<p>Everyone else was signing up for SAT's and Subject Tests during junior year, so I did too. Everyone else was sending away for brochures and info at the end of junior year, so I did too.</p>
<p>I had no idea ED would be helpful, but it looked like a good idea to get everything over with as quickly and painlessly as possible. Thanks to the fact that my testing was all done with, I was able to do it.</p>
<p>But I attended the most successful public school in my city, where a large chunk of students went to college and a significant fraction to schools that required subject tests and offered ED.</p>
<p>All across the city, there were other schools where most students dropped out before graduation, few graduates attended college of any sort, and essentially none applied to highly selective schools. Those students simply did not have the opportunity to "learn by osmosis" about what to do, as I had.</p>
<p>I hope Harvard follows through on their stated plans to use the time freed up from fall application-reading to do increased outreach efforts to disadvantaged students.</p>
<p>Right, marite, but perhaps I miscommunicated. My bringing up the charter schools was a way of illustrating that, whatever site or format a school has, immersion in information about college, from many sources (mainly adult), is essential for understanding, & for (at least better) access, whatever the student's and parents' background. Same for homeschooled, same for private schooled, same for anyone. I didn't think that H was blaming GC's, but I also don't think that eliminating a particular admissions round will necessarily provide greater access. Information is needed for RD, too -- similar information, just not identical. Complicated, far-reaching information of any kind needs reinforcement, repetition -- whether a major change in tax-filing procedures, a change in airline security regulations, etc.</p>
<p>Being a recent immigrant does not prevent one from taking initiative to find information -- possibly through an immigrant advocacy group, etc. </p>
<p>I certainly didn't suggest that we should "rely on the grapevine to disseminate accurate information." Quite the opposite, in fact.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I hope Harvard follows through on their stated plans to use the time freed up from fall application-reading to do increased outreach efforts to disadvantaged students.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>That was actually one of the most disingenuous arguments presented. Come on. Does anyone really think that Harvard is going travel the country doing outreach programs starting with the week of Thanksgiving vacation and continuing through Christmas holidays to New Year's Eve?</p>
<p>Epiphany:</p>
<p>I feel fairly certain that most students know about the RD deadline and requirements. I feel far less certain that they know about the differences between EA,ED, SCEA. Heck, posters on CC and journalists can't keept these straight! Nor do they know, because their parents come from different cultures, that it pays to begin focusing on college applications in the junior year and take SATs then, with possibility of re-take in the fall of senior year.<br>
This is the sort of information that is easily available at top schools. Many prospective college applicants are like Akeela, about whom Wisteria wrote so eloquently (thanks, Wisteria).</p>
<p>ID: Harvard strongly encourages students to send their SCEA apps by October 15, so I assume that they have to deal with incoming applications as early as that. Even if they do not begin to review them until after Nov. 1 (not Thanksgiving), they have to sort them. Even Harvard has limited staff!</p>
<p>wisteria, in the immersion model of which I spoke (regarding emphasis on "college talk," in school), peers are also used. I don't see it as either/or -- peers vs. adults. I see the whole effort as collaborative. I wasn't suggesting that peers be eliminated as an influence. Many of the programs that these schools in question link up with, are bridge programs where students buddy up with current college students as their mentors, too, and where peers (often current college students or recent graduates) come to speak at assemblies.</p>
<p>I am well aware of the limitations on low-income parents, since I teach to their students all the time. I'm merely suggesting that it is unrealistic to expect that eliminating an early round of an admissions stage will result in immediate increased access for those families, WITHOUT an increased involvement of adults in the information stage. High school students with uninvolved parents have a high failure rate in high school academics. The exact same thing is true when it comes to college admissions. The GC's cannot do it alone (usually); one peer reaching one student is a drop in the bucket, an inefficient way to go. And it's been shown in results, that a community effort is more successful when it comes to individual outcomes, in poor communities. The fact that there are many levels of support seems to be an important psychological factor in outcomes.</p>
<p>epiphany:</p>
<p>I agree with your post 298. That is why Harvard is trying more outreach, including through students like Xjayz.</p>
<p>but marite, I agree with wisteria that for low-income folks, very often refinements such as you describe (between EA, SCEA, etc.) are a level of information that they may not even be ready for, again, depending on the sophistication of the parents. (Some low-income parents are actually more sophisticated than seems apparent.) I am not arguing either for or against H's decision, by the way. I'm merely following their own stated argument that eliminating EA will somehow open up admissions to greater access. I don't buy it, because it's not enough, & it's not the main reason for supposedly less access.</p>
<p>Student competency, student preparation, student access to information (including about financial aid -- which is too-often not addressed in general information sessions by GC's), & practical support during the application process -- these are all combined reasons for small low-income numbers at upper-level colleges. Eliminating EA is not a single magic wand redressing these issues.</p>