School Guidance Counselor - Seeking Guidance!

Parents Forum
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Your list would be fine if you were generally advising students, but you are not, you are specifically advising them. Are you in a school where 95% of the students go to 4 year colleges? Where 50% go to community college or no college? You may have one or two students who are Ivy caliber or you may have 50. If you are in Texas, you can advise students to go to UT-Austin, but if they aren’t in the top 7%, their chances are low.

Can you even ask about finances? I know you can tell them about NPCs and how to find out about FA, but some places don’t allow the counselors to know or ask about the financial situation of the family (although you’d know about free/reduced lunch).

If you give general talks, make sure your students/families know about instate deadlines, scholarship programs available to all residents like Hope, Bright Futures, TAG, hidden ‘gems’ in the state system, local scholarships and how to apply to them. I still can’t believe that our GC never mentioned the grant for going to a private school in the state, never really highlighted some of the different types of state schools (Florida schools run from tiny New College to super enormous UCF).

22

Not for now, but for future years,

make sure there is prep for PSAT in junior year.

identify students who qualify for free/reduced lunch and help them get fee waivers for SAT or ACT.
They will qualify for application fee waivers later as well.

our school offered a field trip to a regional college fair every year.

23

Even if you can’t ask them about finances, you can have ALL juniors in and show them how to run NPCs + advise they have a talk with their parents, explaining you’re available if they have any question. Give them a deadline by which they need to know what their parents can afford for college.
Senior year, all colleges they want should have been put through a NPC and they should be able to tell how much each college will cost them “net price”. This way you’re sure they’ve “done their homework” there.
If your school has a mandatory financial literacy class, involve the teachers and plan something “fun” for the whole (segmented) junior class and their parents - a large-group/team challenge or a quiz show/game complete with buzzers and stuff?- where they figure out the flaw in the reasoning; “I have an ACT 33, so I’m going to get merit aid (scholarship) at Harvard”, “my instate flagship will be the cheapest”, “you can work your way through college”, “my parents’ income doesn’t matter, I’ll just take on loans” “it’s easier to get an athletic scholarship than an academic scholarship”, “if you don’t have an ACT 32 and a 4.0 there’s no hope for merit aid”, “I have high stats but I don’t know what to do, so, to save money, I’ll attend a community college and I’ll figure it out later”, “I’m lower income so I’ll qualify for lots of financial aid”, “Questbridge is only for kids whose parents earn less than 40K a year”, “my parents have a lot of credit card debt, so they’ll have a low EFC”, “Fafsa will get me scholarships”, “if it’s a college I’ve never heard of, they’re probably a podunk college with no endowment for scholarships”… those are the most common mistakes :stuck_out_tongue: but if it’s presented as “stuff other students have said”, it’s not as personal. Yet it provides them with the information they need and should clear up many misconceptions.

Show them their stats as they compare to admitted students as presented on collegedata or in the CDS or any other information site with numbers.
They should know that applying to a public flagship OOS will generally result in zero financial aid and that merit aid varies greatly so they have to do their hw, keeping in mind most merit scholarships have due dates by December 1st senior year.
Equally, if they’re determined to go OOS, they should apply to private universities and especially LACs ranked 40+, since their “national” ranking also depends on their attracting students from accross the country and an application from farther away than 400 miles is likely to generate more interest, often resulting in a boost for admissions and sometimes resulting in preferential packaging (ie., more scholarships).
If you live in TX, their rank percentile will rule where they can attend for public universities but does not apply for privates.
Use the NACAC fee waiver form and check the “fee waiver” without being stingy about the number you grant. If the kid can’t afford the fee, check the box - if income is within federal guidelines even if for religious reasons they don’t eat at the cafeteria, don’t refuse to check the box because they “don’t receive reduced lunch”, don’t assume ONLY students on reduced lunch are eligible (there are actually several other categories that give you a lot of leeway). Selective colleges WANT lower income students to apply -keep in mind that up to 65K Harvard is basically free and up to 180k they offer free tuition. So even if in your community 65K seems like a lot… keep the top colleges’ demographics in mind when determining whether a student whose family is in the 45-65K bracket can get a fee waiver or should stick to the 4 college fees they can afford.

Majors: they only need to know if they want to go into engineering or nursing, depending on the state teaching because those have special, fixed programs.
If they’re really good at something (ie., math or music) and want an appropriate college, that’s something else.
You can use supermatch here, the collegeboard’s bigfuture website, princeton review.
Make sure your school library is stocked with Fiske Guide, Insiders guide to the college, colleges that pay you back, and colleges that change lives.

24

First of all, have you looked into any of the professional associations out there for college admissions counselors? I know they have resources for high school guidance counselors; maybe even the exact checklist you’re trying to develop. I know that my son’s GC is a past president of NACAC; I don’t know much about it but it’s one of several such organizations.

I don’t see the point in making them list 3 majors and all those safety/match/reach schools. IMO, you’ll be lucky if they can pick one major and maybe 3-4 schools. I doubt most of them understand the concept of safety vs match vs reach. I think most kids are going to choose schools based on whether they “like” it and based on our experience, that comes through visiting the schools, which will be local for many.

My son is a senior in HS, and is one of the few among his friends who knows what he wants to major in, and has some definitely ideas of where he wants to go/apply. Even so, he doesn’t have anywhere near 12 colleges on his list. Keep in mind that the application cost of applying to 12 colleges won’t be an insignificant amount.

Most of all, I would say don’t turn yourself into their third parent. A lot of these kids are getting enough pressure at home about college admissions, choosing schools, testing, etc. From the kids’ perspective, I think it would be the most helpful to have a GC who is their advocate. JMO.

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You might also have other questions first…they might not know what majors there are or what ones are needed for a profession.

Like which are your favorite classes in HS?

What kind of job can you see yourself in?

Or have them do an online major quiz like the one at: http://www.luc.edu/undergrad/academiclife/whatsmymajorquiz/ and use the results as a starting point.

26

I agree with the suggestions to ask about finances. When D2 was applying to colleges we were searching for merit aid & the guidance supervisor (also her counselor) contacted me about the 17 schools on her list. The first thing out of her mouth was “I understand that finances are a concern for your family” I interrupted her & explained that the district is full of middle class families like ours & that finances should be important to most of the students. So many of both my daughters friends either took out loans or went to community college thinking it was cheaper when they may have been eligible for big merit money at a 4 year school if they had been lead in the right direction .
This same gc was disappointed that D1 didn’t attend Georgetown (some merit) but instead went where she received full tuition . She’s happy where she is & we were aware that she had a sister 2 years behind!
Thank you for trying to help your students!

27

I agree with many of the earlier replies about the family’s financial situation. It takes a lot of time, $, and mental energy to write essays, send scores, etc. when applying to colleges. I am currently helping guide my youngest daughter(2 older sisters already in college) and the first thing we do is sit and run the net price calculator for colleges she is interested in, together. If the price tag is too high, the school is off her list, no matter how much she likes it or how good its academic programs are. We have focused her search on schools which will likely offer enough merit for her stats to meet the price we can afford, along with our state school(still a stretch if she gets little merit), and the University of Alabama, where she qualifies for automatic full tuition scholarship.

Many parents of my generation are clueless about how much college costs now. When I attended my state’s flagship back in the early 1980s, it cost $3500/year my first year and did rise to $5,000/yr senior year, including room and board. I was able to pay for school with federal student loans, summer earnings, a part time job while in school, and a little help from mom and dad. Those days are gone!

Undertaking a college search is really useless without knowing how a much student’s family is able/willing to pay each year. Students have fantasies of taking out gigantic student loans to pay for their expensive dream college, but they can only borrow the Federal direct loans themselves, and their parents don’t want/qualify for big private loans. I have seen the same pattern in my kids’ high school year after year: the kids get caught up in narrowly focused searches for dream and reach schools that are unaffordable, then they are crushed and disappointed when they realize in the spring that their only options are the State U that they don’t really want to attend or community college. Encourage your students to use college matching websites such as one here on CC, or the college board website, or naviance and evaluate how their stats stack up against other applicants/students form their school.

It is a rare family which has saved enough money to pay for 4 years of private college, especially if they have multiple children heading off to college. Low income students need to investigate schools which meet 100% of financial need, and private schools are more likely to meet that need than cheaper in state publics. Everyone else needs to have a conversation with their parents and find out what they are willing to pay BEFORE they start assembling their college list. It is not always easy to get that information from parents, because they may not wish to share negative financial info. with their kids. If a student can’t get the info from their parents, try and have some financial safeties on the list for that student, so they have choices come spring of senior year. Other issues such as divorce, owning a business or a farm, can also complicate the financial aid picture.

28

A GC has to be careful about finances. You want to give them information on tools and data sources. You want to strongly encourage them to understand and use those tools to make sure their colleges are affordable. But you have to leave the detailed analysis & decision making in their hands.

29

Make sure eligible low income students know about https://www.possefoundation.org/ and http://www.questbridge.org/.

I agree it’s generally too early to be thinking about majors. Some other majors that may require starting right away are art school, architecture school (but there’s also a path where you start with a masters), drama school and at least one computer science program (Carnegie Mellon). Kids who want this stuff are usually pretty driven, but I thought I’d put it out there. It’s not just engineering and nursing. Otherwise I do agree most students don’t have a clue what sort of majors are out there.

30

You will want to build a library of books kids can look at. Definitely a Fiske Guode to Colleges, also the Book of Majors sold by College Board.