Counselor talks to Admission Officer

Pizzagirl
Thu, 07 Oct 2010 15:50:57 +0000

Well that is what I was saying as well. If for whatever reason your school has never had a kid accepted to Harvard, it is very difficult (though of course not impossible) for your kid to be the first.



But WHY is the question.
I mean, the thought process, “Well, I’ve never heard of / we’ve never seen any applications from this high school, so even though Joey is a reasonable candidate, we’re just going to say no, because after all, I’ve heard of New Trier and the New Trier GC tells me that her Billy is the best thing around” just doesn’t make any sense.

How can colleges do a whole big we-want-to-send-mail-to-any-student-who-makes-above-X-on-the-SAT-so-we-cast-our-net-wide-because-we-love-ourselves-some-diversity but simultaneously “penalize” a kid for going to a high school they haven’t dealt with? The lack of imagination of a kid’s fellow students (and / or their lack of financial resources, if such is this case) doesn’t reflect on the KID, does it?

I’ve got a D who has three of the elite women’s colleges on her radar screen. Yeah, maybe now and then, once in a blue moon, a kid from our school applied to one of those schools. It’s just not on the radar screen around here and if I asked a GC for advice about those schools, she’d have to point me towards the website. (OTOH, if I asked her about Northern Illinois University, she’d talk my ear off). So? What should that have to do with my D’s interest / application, from the point of view of the college reviewing her application? If we have the money and she has the stats / qualifications to be a reasonable candidate, why she should be explicitly disadvantaged - because no one else around here cares about those schools? So freakin’ what? I don’t get the logic. I’m so tired of the thought process that we’re somehow to be held responsible for the lack of imagination of others with whom we have nothing in common except we all live in the same general area.