A sad story rolled across my FB, all too familiar to CC regulars.
Maria Medina, who is I guess a local news reporter in the SF Bay area, posted that her straight-A son was denied at all the colleges he applied to: MIT, Georgia Tech, UCLA, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. He had 4.17 weighted GPA, some AP classes, “average” SAT scores and no extracurriculars at all (“wasn’t involved in school clubs, community service or sports”).
She is sad that her son got all those rejections and started ranting about . I am sad that nobody gave her and her son a clue before the kid sent off those applications and didn’t send any to the schools he would have been accepted at. Anyone can apply anywhere, but MIT and Berkeley weren’t even plausible reaches in computer science for this kid. And I don’t know what “average” SAT scores are, but if they were something like 550/550, he was not a good bet for UCSC Engineering either.
The mom ranted about “unpredictable” UC admissions, but those results look pretty predictable to me.
The good news is a hard-working kid like her son is a good candidate for two years at community college and then a transfer to a UC.
I think at large public HS, the GC offer little to no advice because they are so overworked. It’s really on the students and parents to do their due diligence. IMO, this lady was living under a rock to think her kid would be competitive at the majority of those schools.
Why blame the guidance counselor? At a lot of public schools, the guidance counselors have hundreds of students assigned to them, and most of their energy goes to dealing with emotional and disciplinary problems, helping struggling students across the high school finish line, or explaining the basics of the process to first gen students. A student with a 4.17 GPA should be able to develop their own college list. While MIT is obviously a reach for anyone, UC Santa Cruz has what I would consider average SAT scores for students prepared to handle 4-year college work.
The kid was applying for engineering at Santa Cruz, I think, because the mom said he was applying to engineering schools. The engineering school at Santa Cruz is much more competitive than the rest of the school.
The top 9% is determined by the high school and refers only to the UC GPA, rather than scores.
Since he had a weighted GPA of over 4.0, depending on the other students at his high school, he would likely have received an Eligibility in Local Context (ELC) or top 9% designation, which means that the student is assured a space at a UC, even if it’s not the UC of their choice.
So despite average test score, as long as her son is UC eligible, he will still be offered a place a Merced, which has become the default UC. Even as recently as five years ago, the defaults were Santa Cruz in the north and Riverside in the south, but both of those schools have become considerably more selective.
I see this as less of a GC issue and more of a parent/student issue. Many times, parents disregard what a GC tells them because the advice they give is “insulting”. I understand that there are good and bad GC’s, but parents and students need to read all the material the school provides, attend meetings if available, figure out their finances, and make a list of schools from there. There are a lot of parents that expect the GC to do everything.
Not every parent and student listen to the GC. You can’t know if their GC tried. I remember ours begged a kid in D2’s class to add a match or safety. He finally begrudgingly added a local low mstch. His only acceptance and he attended. But this kid and his parent really didn’t want to add it — GC had to be super pushy.
Yeah, I’m befuddled with blaming the GC. Ultimately, other people aren’t responsible for your own choices.
Now what happened to a kid of a friend of mine (the GC didn’t send in all the required application material like the transcript to 2 highly-regarded OH LACs, so her apps there are still open even now) is more blameworthy. Though evidently she was also at fault for listing her academic counselor as the GC on some form.
To clarify, what @hop is referring to is the “local path” or ELC, in which students are compared to others within their own high school, and is only an option for students at certain high schools. The statewide 9% path is calculated state wide using both UC GPA and ACT/SAT scores. See explanation here,
He might be in the top 9%, in which case I guess he’ll hear from Riverside or Merced. But what struck me both from the mother and the dozens of commenters was the surprise and the entitlement about this result. Why was this excellent kid rejected, they say. Must be because of nefarious rich people buying their way into UC Santa Cruz, they say. UC admissions are a scandal, they say. Nobody seems to entertain the notion that he didn’t get in because the students who did get in were better qualified than he is.
I hopped on over to the UC Santa Cruz board here, to take a look at students who reported getting into Baskin, the engineering school at UC Santa Cruz. Those are well-qualified kids! Good grades, mostly 700+ on Math SAT or Math SAT II. An average nice boy who wants to study engineering and who has good grades and 600 in Math is, as far as I can see, not getting in there, not because of anything criminal but because the other applicants are better.
Those commenters who say that I shouldn’t be putting all the blame on the counselor are right, of course, and it was partly just a catchy title. People don’t know what they don’t know. A lot of us live in upper-middle to upper class areas where college admissions permeate the area, and many many parents are familiar with the minutia of admissions. It’s easy to forget that the rest of the country isn’t like that.
A corollary to that is in the rest of the country, the GCs at the public high school are not familiar with the minutia of admissions. They may be familiar with in-state schools, but when it comes to admissions at OOS schools, the GCs are often even more ill informed than the parents and kids.
Any student without ECs has to have for-sure schools. It’s fine to apply to schools where strong ECs are important for admissions, but those must be viewed as reaches. My S had stellar scores, 4.0, all honors & AP … but no ECs. He was a much better student than a number of his classmates who were accepted to our state flagship (a really good school) - but he was waitlisted. Thing is, I told him it could happen due to his lack of ECs, and he had schools on his list that were for-sure for admissions & had automatic merit. Parents need to understand that there is more to admissions at many schools than just the grades. I am sure my S would have excelled at the flagship he didn’t attend … but I didn’t go around talking about how unfair the admissions process is.
I’m constantly shocked by how little many college educated parents I meet know about the whole college application process. I never went to college. I didn’t grow up in America and, consequently, never went through the education system here. At some point parents have to take responsibility. It’s convenient to blame guidance counsellors.
I ask questions on here that might seem ridiculous to some of you but I do so to try figure out things about this whole crazy process that I haven’t figured out yet. I read books and I look at college websites and, thanks to advice on here, read common data sets. Guys I work with can give you New York Yankee stats for the last twenty years but won’t invest the time it takes to research things that impact their kids educations and futures.
Yes, listen to your guidance counsellors but, as parents, you have to decide if the advice is good or not and act accordingly.
I’m more surprised that the parents and/or the student himself didn’t do even some basic research. Applying into CS right now is really tough. Add that to “average” SAT scores and no ECs at all? Then look at the list of colleges. The outcome is something most people on CC could have predicted.
@Jon234, some parents who went to college in the US may know so little because they went to college in the US (and assume that college admissions hasn’t changed so drastically from when they applied when Penn, NU, and the U of C had admit rates around 50% or higher and UCLA had an admit rate around 80% back in the '80’s). Parents from abroad figure they know nothing about American college admissions and would do the research.
I was a ‘know nothing’ parent. My kids had gone to 3 different high schools. I liked the GC at the 2nd school, but they were only there one semester. I didn’t like the GC at the final school and she was a mid 20’s counselor with much too much work to do and not very mature. I was exhausted.
I was lucky I had two kids who weren’t looking to reach, just to go to college. It was all complicated by my job ending and money being very tight.
I didn’t broadcast my kids’ rejections on the local news. Poor kid.
I’m curious how the guidance counselor got injected into this. Other than the title, the original post has nothing related to a guidance counselor. Did the GC recommend these schools and tell the student/parents that student was guaranteed to get into them - no problem? Given the available data, I’d say all of them were a reach and the result was fully predictable.
I learned after talking to the GC for my older daughter that we needed to own the application process. The GC’s questions/application diagnostic could have been summed up as “So, Pitt or Penn State?”. Anything else was beyond her. So we had a nice chat and managed the process ourselves.
OK, I found and read her entire 1200 word FB post and still see not a word about a guidance counselor.
OP @Cardinal Fang, what’s the reason for the title?
She is correct that
"My son shot high, and he only shot high. Because we were so blindly confident in his academic success and commitment, we didn’t think about applying to colleges that we knew he’d definitely have a chance of getting into.
That brings us to mistake number two. We didn’t research our “safe” school. We thought he’d get into UC Santa Cruz, no problem. "
Kudos to her for sharing it an helping others avoid this problem. I think the low acceptance rates of the top schools are indicative of lots of students/parents overestimating their standing. Nothing wroing with that, I suppose, other than $75, but be smart about contingencies. Even 4.0UW/1600’s need a safety school.