We’re at a big public school and our counselors are pretty hands-off unless a kid is very proactive about asking for help. My kids feel like they got a good one because he wasn’t a problem. He would just rubberstamp whatever classes they requested, while we’ve heard of stories where the counselor discourages students taking challenging classes or classes out of order (like Physics before Chem not Spanish 3 before Spanish 2). So I guess a counselor who phones it in could be worse. I worry about the recommendation he’s going to write though! He doesn’t know my kid.
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Our schools counselors basically have two paths of planning:
Top students - Pitt or Penn State?
Others - which regional (Edinboro, IUP, Kent State, Slippery Rock, etc.)?
Top students with more ambition are on their own.
Wow. I guess I really thought there would be some guidance from the guidance counselors, but it sounds like that’s pretty rare. That seems really unfortunate. I like to research and learn so can help my kids figure it out, but many will not have that.
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I’m feeling guilty for throwing shade on our counselors. At least at our school, they have big case loads and are stretched very thin! I will say that since covid has moved so much to virtual, our College and Career Center has been able to share a ton of college resources that used to be in-person during lunch or after school and thus ignored by my kids, at least. So I’ve been grateful to our CCC for that!
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We have 3 college counselors for 200+ boys. I think they do a very good job for parents who are new to the process, and on FA issues. They can also give us good info on the past placement history from the HS to certain schools (we are not on Naviance). I don’t think they are as effective recommending schools to which a particular student should apply, or helping them get in. But honestly, if I wanted that type of help, I’d be hiring a private counselor anyway.
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Same story at S22’s high school: 200 boys, but two counselors (we do love his school). Not a big deal for us. We’re very much managing the process as a family. Sites like College Confidential and Reddit are great for mining relevant information.
His school uses Scoir (Naviance competitor). But not enough students from his school have applied to his targets to show up on the placement scattergrams. However, the college counselor did tell us two students have recently applied to one of his targets, and based on S22’s stats he’d be very competitive for admission.
Same situation for S20 last year. 4 GCs for 600+ seniors. The GCs were great with helping the families with zero knowledge complete FAFSA, apply to in-state publics, and urge teachers to finish rec letters.
The GCs were practically useless if the students had questions about OOS schools, especially if the university was not in an adjacent state. My son’s GC graduated from an in-state public and seemed incredulous that he was applying to OOS schools she had not heard of. There’s no way she could have helped us with his list.
And as you said @vistajay , I didn’t expect her to. With that sort of workload, it didn’t make sense and the outcome was too important to risk on someone I wasn’t sure had the experience to guide us in our outside-the-box search successfully. At the end, she was very interested in the final results and I was glad to share - it might have helped her guide another student afterwards.
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We have 4 counselors for 1600 kids in the school. They are broken up alphabetically, so each have some of each grade.
I’ve poked around on Naviance, but have never found the scattergrams that are mentioned here. I did find a place that sorts colleges by your inputs, which was good, but overwhelming.
I guess I was just hoping for general information - what is common app, when to ask for letters of recommendations, etc. I can think of a lot of kids who will not have their parents helping with any of this, so something general would be really good for them.
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Common App and Coalition App are platforms/websites where students can enter their application information once and send it to multiple colleges. Each limits the student to 20 colleges. Not every university uses either platform - some use one but not the other - some use both - some universities are not on either platform.
I think the best time to ask for letters of recommendation is the first week of school senior year. Some teachers may respond quickly, but others will be slower, and still others may take a dozen weeks or more. The earlier you ask, the better. It’s not a good idea to spring the request on a teacher days before the application deadline, because the student risks the teacher not responding quickly enough. Teachers have many responsibilities, in and out of school, and should not be expected to deliver a well-crafted LoR in a couple of days.
Many universities have Early Admission application periods. This allows students to apply early (usually by Nov 1, but sometimes by Oct 15) and receive a decision earlier (some time in December.) Other universities offer Rolling Admissions, meaning you can apply as early as August and receive a response as early as Oct 1. For many students, it relieves some of the pressure to have an early acceptance in hand, even if the school doesn’t excite the student much. Just knowing you’ve already been accepted somewhere works wonders.
You’re right, this entire process can be very confusing to students whose parents are unable to assist much. Hopefully, those students find their way to CC and start researching and asking questions.
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Naviance can be confusing when discussed here because I believe different schools purchase different “packages” (data sets) from them and so it differs from high school to high school. On ours, you search for a school and then once you are on that school’s page, a small font menu comes up sort of in the middle of the page. Then you click on Admissions in that menu and then the bar charts and scatter charts appear. Here is what that menu looks like on ours:
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Do you all think Naviance is better than CollegeConfidential and some of the other sites who shall remain nameless? My dd22’s school is a small charter school and they do not have Naviance. The guidance counselor is okay, but she’s stretched pretty thin, too, and unlikely to know about school dd22 is interested in.
Our HS did not utilize Naviance, so I can’t speak to its usefulness. I can say that my son and I were able to navigate the process and have a successful result without Naviance. However, we did a lot of research, including CC and many other nameless sites.
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I think Naviance is much more accurate than CC, but only if you have access to data specific to the high school.
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Our High School is probably too small to have a data set that would be that helpful. There will be about 50 kids in dd22’s graduating class.
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We (my kids and I) only use Naviance for one purpose, which is something no other site can provide for us because Naviance has an exclusive with our high school. It shows us outcomes by (unnamed) student specifically for our high school for the past 10 years. So I can look up a college and see a scatter chart plotted by GPA and ACT/SAT and coded by acceptances, waitlists, rejection by decision type (ED, EA, RD). Pre-Covid this was solid information and could give you an idea for your student’s GPA and scores from your school, what might be realistic and what isn’t. Of course it is missing a lot of context (ECs, Recs, Essay quality, hooks, etc), which makes it harder for schools like SLACs and tippy tops who rely on more holistic admissions. So it isn’t a guarantee by a long shot - it is just interesting data to see. For my D21, we could see that everyone at and below her stats had gotten in her chosen school ED so that felt good (and she did end up getting in). That all said, it is generally not useful at a small school because there just isn’t enough data - so it makes sense that your school wouldn’t pay for it.
Just about everything else I learned about the college process I learned through CC!
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I think the other parents explained the common app really well. My son is 2021, but I did promise to check in with this class to provide input whenever I could to give back since my parents group helped me survive the app round this year.
My recommendation for LOR is to ask the teacher before this school year ends. If your kid is going to major in STEM, try 2 STEM and one humanities teachers. And vice versa if they’re going to be a humanities teacher, although you can’t go wrong with two STEM. I would give the teachers a heads up that you’ll ask them for a LOR. Ask them what info they would need from you (resume) in case they want to write it over the summer. And then tell them you plan to apply early September and will request through the process that they submit the letters. I would just set expects and alignment on deadline so that there’s no last minute heartaches and there can be some.
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My Ds hs class is about the same size (64). They use scoir which is like naviance and also collegekickstart
Data from the last five years are entered and most colleges have sufficient applicants from her hs to draw general info on how she stacks up to past applicants. I suppose this is because kids tend to apply to the same colleges. Collegekickstart uses your personal stats and the high school’s historic data to help make a list. It calculates whether the student has enough schools within the sweet spot , a safety or two, and a reach. If they need to add a safety it can help filter on colleges that would be considered safeties for your student, based on various criteria like size, geography, city vs rural etc.
Her guidance counselors have already started soliciting letters. The students request their top three choices for recommendation letters and the counselors coordinate so one teacher doesn’t end up with 60 requests. The teachers write the letters over the summer, and will meet with the student prior to writing.
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Your school sounds on it! You probably already know this but be very careful trusting what the system decides is a safety or match. Many '21 kids got burned on this during this odd Covid year and there is a good chance the higher apps/student pattern could remain for our '22s and the extension of Test Optional just makes analyzing safeties and matches more tricky.
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Yes. The counseling department is pretty on the ball and we are very fortunate to have them.
This year in D22’s HS, there were many acceptances into highly selective colleges for a class that has about the same stats as every other has had. There are always a handful of ivy bound girls, but this year, wow! We have not seen data in Scoir or Collegekickstart as to whether these acceptances took advantage of the test optional route, but I would be very curious to know! The HS is very well regarded academically, and perhaps this boosted the cohort into most girls getting into their reach. So yes, we will definitely be wary of trends, especially when drawn on atypical admission cycles.
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I wonder how they’d plot no SAT/no ACT applicants on the scattergrams?
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