<p>The GCs at our mediocre SoCal suburban HS do the best the can, but they’ve got a huge task. They don’t aim for HYP. Their definition of Big Success is getting a smart kid into a UC, any UC. If a top ten kid wants to shoot for HYP s/he is going to have to pull together any needed extra effort on his/her own. The GCs have bigger problems to deal with in trying to keep the lower third of the class (including many minorites) from dropping out. </p>
<p>One telling thing came last year when one of the GCs (knowing that both our girls had gotten into highly-selective colleges) asked US for advice about how to get her own daughter accepted at high-end schools (she ended up at Berkeley).</p>