This is better take. It makes sense.
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Call me cynical but I find this kind of lip service ridiculous when tuition is $50,000. There is nothing equitable about the very existence of prep schools.
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I agree with you - but it is a recent change I thought worth mentioning. I only mentioned when a poster in an earlier thread said their school still makes these calls.
I donât think ours does. They will advocate for a student on the WL if the student will commit to matriculating, but I donât think that is the kind of call they being discussed.
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They might as well stop writing carefully crafted recommendation letters. Unless, of course, they are just looking for a nice pat on the back.
I this really a huge thing? Are droves of prep school kids getting accepted to top schools because of a phone call? Then why do we always warn people the kids getting in are hooked and there is no such thing as a feeder school blah blah blahâŠ.
I donât really understand all the consternation here. Itâs a very small number and itâs a way for elite universities to stay connected with their alumni⊠If people donât like it, go somewhere elseâŠ?
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I donât think that the counselors are necessarily doing a bunch of advocating. But they might be gathering and/or conveying information like:
Getting off the waitlist at a preferred school because of a call is something that doesnât generally happen with counselors at public schools. Alternatively, if a student has been deferred and calling to see how likely that deferral will turn into an acceptance (vs. a noncommittal refusal) so that a student can make more informed decisions about ED2. (The latter is an example someone gave that their prep school will do.) Both of these situations are advantageous to the families paying for private schools that are usually unavailable to students attending public schools (who arenât paying for private college counselors). These are the types of calls that Iâm assuming the private counselors mentioned above will no longer be making.
But why should someone get special treatment (which direct advocacy is) â whether during admissions or when a kid is on the WL - just because they attend a private school? Private school students are already receiving the benefit of a great education, strong college counseling, personalized recommendations etc. Why should they also get the ability for someone to pick up the phone and make a direct intervention on their behalf?
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But thatâs not how the real world works. In order to be successful, you need connections and favors/etc. This will only make it harder for students once they get to the real world IMHOâŠ
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Why should someone get to go to class with 12 students, have office hours and plenty of extra help available to them and access to a professional quality lab?
I just find that âwe are not going to do that (one thing that on the grater scheme is the least of the advantage) to be equitableâ is disingenuous.
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Let me try to clarify my view.
All that is going to happen with the ânew policyâ is that the spot may go instead to another equally privileged kid from another school that grabbed the AOs attention for one reason or another. Anyone who thinks that spot will go to an underprivileged student has not been paying attention.
If the school cares about equity and changing the status quo, they would do a lot more if each counselor offered pro bono guidance to a handful of local high achieving kids from underprivileged backgrounds each year.
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All that is going to happen is that wealthy parents will hire private counselors, as has been the case in public schools for many years.
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That of course may explain why a bunch of independent schools would band together to institute such a policy. They may feel like the net effect of those efforts was not to get more of their students into these colleges, but simply to shuffle around exactly which kid at their schools ended up where. And so they may not see much harm to their kids as a group, as long as all their most direct competitors agree to back off too.
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What would be most effective would be if colleges no longer took those calls. Schools (and student beneficiaries) can justify it all they want, but it is an unfair advantage to be able to count on someone to pick up the phone and advocate for you directly while the little people get their applications reviewed with the masses. And why should it be necessary, anyway? Prep school kids, as a whole, are bright and motivated - AOâs at the most desirable schools are well aware of the strength of these students (and the rigor of their background) so youâd think their applications could stand on their own merits.
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The explanation I have heard is colleges build up relationships where they trust certain counselors to give them frank assessments for individual kids, rather than just doing whatever they can to advocate for each kid.
I think when parents really understand that, some become less fond of the idea. Like, Harvard might call about my Buffy, and you might not say she is the most Harvard-worthy student you have ever seen?
But of course the point is to make it effective when they do advocate for a kid.
Of course as usual, none of that is fair. But if colleges feel like they can get important information about individual applicants this way, they probably will not lightly give it up.
This seems like a very weak argument. Iâm not sure why schools would require direct advocacy just for prep school students in order to identify the âbestâ candidates - they seem able to admit the rest of the class without someone picking up to the phone. Given the academic background (outstanding rigor, high expectations, little grade inflation) youâd figure AOs would need more information about kids who come from little known backgrounds as opposed to those who come from well known prep schools.
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D24 is finally officially a Senior! First day of school is today, and Iâm hoping she and all of our 2024s have a memorable year!
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Given the premises of the argument in question, they would presumably love to be able to get reliable comparative assessments for all applicants of interest on demand. The issue is more they donât trust most counselors to be willing and able to do that for them.
Again I suspect it would ideally be for both. Because highly selective colleges are making decisions at the margins everywhere.
Like, suppose a certain college typically admits 3-5 kids per class from a certain high school. It has identified 3 kids it is comfortable admitting without further information, knows a bunch more it will not be admitting, but has 4 it is considering based on the information in their applications. But it has some questions that will determine which, if any, of those 4 to admit.
So it calls up a trusted counselor and starts asking some questions. Based on what that counselor says, it might admit none of the 4, or 1 or 2.
But this only works if the counselor is willing to give frank and informed assessments. If the counselor insists all 4 are equally great, that isnât useful to the college. It also isnât useful if the counselor does not really have any experience in who has gone on to do well at that college.
And in fact, if the counselor expects this to happen year after year, sometimes they might well end up indicating to the college none of the marginal 4 that year are really up to the collegeâs normal standards (maybe not explicitly, but by clear implication). Because being willing to do that in years when it is a fair assessment means in other years, the counselor will be able to promote 1-2 successfully.
OK, now suppose the college has similar questions about 4 other applicants, who are at 4 different high schools that have not provided any admitted students to that college in the recent past, and where the college does not have such a trust relationship with any of those counselors. It could call up those counselors, but even if they each advocated for their kid, how could the college trust that? Those counselors are not familiar with who thrives at that college. They donât have the same incentive to give very frank assessments. This is a rare opportunity to get someone into that college, so logically they would just do whatever they could to help that specific kid.
So I donât think it is so much a case that these colleges would not love to have the same sorts of relationships with every HS counselor in the country. But practically, the conditions necessary for such a relationship to form require a high school where a lot of students are admitted to that college.
Of course what then happens is the âfeederâ schools get those bonus 1-2 marginal admits per year, and the non-feeder schools get none. They only get in kids who would have been comparable to that easy-to-admit original 3.
Which is not fair. And yet at the same time, the colleges have obvious incentives to use whatever reliable information they can get to make decisions at the margins.
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Already the waiting is the worst part. I cannot imagine how the wait until March is going to be.
Right now we are waiting on SAT scores, which will be Friday from the August 26 SAT, and then the additional couple of weeks for them to be sent and received by the colleges. That will finish out a number of application files.
The other piece we are waiting on is the teacher recommendations. They are only required by one school (but will submit to those where they are ârecommendedâ as well) but thatâs a piece that we have no control over.
Biggest frustration so far is several wonky portal issues. She wants to get started on some Honors applications that should be available, in that the website says click here to apply, but then it just sends you to a portal black hole. Sheâll be emailing a couple of AOs this week, but I figure thatâs a good contact point for a kid that does not generally require any assistance or attention to get things done.
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Maybe this would be true if the threshold for thriving at top colleges was a lot higher than it actually is. In reality, it is far more difficult to be admitted than it is to do well once there. As it is, the schools already admit some students (often athletes) that have lower academic qualifications than the norm, but they still succeed. The schools themselves say that they could fill their classes 2-3 times over without a change in the overall quality so the idea that personal advocacy is really necessary seems pretty spurious to me. It seems especially irrelevant at schools where kids are super well prepared, have great counseling available to them and who receive detailed, knowledgeable letters of recommendation.