Do people ever do this? I would like to call my regional counselor and ask for feedback on my application. I would rather do this myself and not my guidance counselor too because I heard he always says no to students who ask him to do these types of things
You won’t get any specifics. Colleges and employers who turn down applicants are very lawsuit leery. Thus you’ll only get a repeat of the vague language you for in your rejection note
You need to ask your guidance whether s/he might be willing to call on your behalf .
If your profile is very similar to that of previous applicants from your high school who were admitted in the past, and if your guidance counselor has a strong relationship with the admissions officers at that college/university, then your guidance counselor may not mind making a quick phone call. But even then, the only response your counselor is likely to get will probably be along the lines of “This year we had an exceptionally large number of well-qualified applicants.”
It is understandable that you’d like to know what went wrong with your application, but at this point in time, there isn’t much you can do about it. Kick this particular college/university to the curb, and move on.
Don’t call the admissions officer… they will not give you a specific answer (and they don’t like it when kids do this either). The best way to contact the school is through your guidance counselor, but that is usually for deferrals. Perhaps that is why your counselor does not call for his students — he knows that he will not get a legit non-scripted answer. Move on with your other applications… there are many great universities out there that will accept you, so don’t worry about this one! Good luck!
Another approach would be to have your guidance counselor look over your entire application (and read your letters). When I did admissions we’d never have a specific answer to the question because there was usually not one aspect of the application that resulted in the outcome. Had every thing been a bit higher than…
Another approach would be to just move on.
That’s the approach I’d take.
You will not get feedback on your application from your regional counselor.
If you want you can ask your guidance counselor to call and she if he/she can get feedback.
Best option is to move on.
Hard because MANY qualified students at selective colleges will get denied right along with unqualified students. There are only so many slots.
Sure you CAN call them, but you’ll only get the canned dialogue about too many highly qualified candidates and too few spaces, yada yada yada…
Yep. Don’t do it; nothing good can or will come of it and you’ll inevitably be unsatisfied.
If you were deferred, yes, you (or better, your guidance counselor) should call. But since you were rejected, I agree with the above posters: don’t call.
Look at it form the college’s perspective. Imagine that you’re GPA is in-line, your testing is solid; you wrote heart-filled essays; your teachers liked you; and you have impressive accomplishments outside of the classroom. What can the college say besides “unfortunately, we could not take all of the qualified applicants”? If the college were to say anything, a lawsuit could easily arise.
Relax, and chalk this up to one of the hardest life lessons to learn - sometimes life is unfair. I am sure this will not be the last time you will get rejected and not know the reason why, and learning to turn the page and move on can be a very valuable skill. There will be a great school for you - go find it and enjoy it!
They will just say our applicant pool was competitive and blah blah blah. So there’s no point in calling and asking
You have absolutely no idea if this is true or just another one of those college rumors that floats around HS campuses until you ask him…
Very occasionally a GC will find out a reason if the result seems very out-of-whack. (I recall a case where there was a mistake in the transcript and a college thought the student had a D in a core course instead of a B.) But that’s highly, highly unusual - as others have posted, they will never tell the applicant you will just get the “too many good candidates” line. I also know of one case where a waitlisted candidate had been considered not serious because they hadn’t visited. They got off the waitlist when the GC disabused them of that notion. I don’t think it would have helped that student if they’d been rejected however.
thank you everyone, i have decided to drop this because it was a top school that is highly selective