Counselor talks to Admission Officer

Pizzagirl
Thu, 07 Oct 2010 15:14:14 +0000

How many students did your school send to the Ivies each year for the past few years? This is generally a good predictor (though of course not perfect) of how many it will send this year.



My concern isn’t “how many kids will the school send to Ivies / similar elites,” because other people’s kids aren’t my business, other people’s finances aren’t my business, and if the smartest kids in the class decide that they’d rather go to U of I because hey, they want to be local and it’s half the cost of an elite and they’ll do just fine from there anyway especially in fields like biomedical engineering … hey, good luck to them. My concern is the mindset that enables the school to appropriately support kids who do have desires to attend the LAC’s and the more elite schools – in terms of teachers and GC’s knowing how to write recs that sparkle and push the right buttons versus “Joey is a pleasant, hardworking student that I recommend to your college,” in terms of steering kids towards EC’s that might mean something, in terms of having at least some nodding awareness / familiarity with adcoms.