<p>For what I know, I believe there are some people who, on CC, given the proper training, might do better as college counselors than some college counselors high schools currently have.</p>
<p>I am going to acknowledge that being a guidance counselor is more complex than what CC makes it look like. Perhaps there are people who could hack it as a GC here...</p>
<p>I pretty much did all the work a real counselor would do. The school was too busy trying to keep kids from quitting to pay attention to the high achievers. I have since retired from this self imposed job. Thank goodness. I have to say that talk confidential was extremely helpful.</p>
<p>I don’t know an individual person, but the aggregate knowledge of the people on this website should be better than any individual I can think of.</p>
<p>The real issue is not who can make a good guidance counselor, but how can schools afford to hire more guidance counselors? My guidance counselor could have been the editor of the Princeton Review and Fiske’s Guide, as well as all of the best CC posters put together. It wouldn’t have mattered. At my high school of almost 3,000 there were THREE guidance counselors. THREE. </p>
<p>They didn’t have time to talk to students about finding the perfect college, or intricate details about preferential financial aid packages. Instead they had to focus on making sure kids didn’t drop out, and how to ensure that a recently homeless student could still go to class. Quite frankly, a student with good grades and high SATs who wanted to go to college was the last of their worries, and subsequently, and infuriatingly (at least to myself) the last of their priorities.</p>