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<p>No, I’ve never had the pleasure of making Mr. Schafle’s acquaintance. The conversation I was referring to took place some years ago, and the AO I was speaking to covered another area. As you know, there’s a fairly high turnover in these jobs, and/or people end up getting reassigned to other regions, so there’s little point speculating on the identity of the individual.</p>
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<p>Absolutely. My point exactly. But in pursuing the richest lodes, they also end up having the most interaction with the usual suspects, i.e., students and GCs in high-end private and high-end suburban schools. I’m not criticizing that. They do it for exactly the same reason that many business recruiters concentrate their recruiting on a handful of colleges; it’s not because they think no one else will be qualified for the positions they’re seeking to fill, but they’re going to go to the places where they’ll get the most bang for the buck out of their recruiting efforts. It’s a perfectly logical strategy. But it also has consequences, which in the case of elite colleges means they never get on the radar of a lot of “diamonds in the rough” (as an earlier poster put it) because there’s little or no interaction. </p>
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<p>Yes, colleges fairs are somewhat helpful. I went to a few with my daughters when they were exploring colleges. A couple of things about them. First, the big NACAC-sponsored college fairs are held in a handful of big cities. They don’t do much for people in “Greater Minnesota” (as we call the rest of the state outside the Twin Cities metro). And second, the very top colleges have never attended the NACAC college fair here in Minneapolis. As for the joint-appearance events by groups of top colleges–I’ve been to a few of those, too. They are quite well attended–but mostly by the usual suspects, i.e., kids from the high-end public and high-end private schools who already know about Brown and Duke and may be angling to get into those schools. But if you go to an urban school or a working class suburban school that doesn’t regularly send kids to Brown or Duke, and your GC has never mentioned them, and you may never have even heard of those schools except in connection with Duke basketball, the chances of your attending such an event are in the range of extremely slim to none. If you go to a school in small-town or rural "Greater Minnesota, the chances that you’ll attend such an event are much closer to zero than to slim.</p>
<p>Look, the reality is that when top-end colleges recruit in Minnesota, they’re basically all recruiting the same kids. They’re Twin Cities metro kids at not more than half a dozen private schools, and roughly that many public schools. And because they can easily fill their quota of Minnesotans from that pool, they don’t spend much time outside it. I’m not criticizing them for that, I’m just saying it’s part of why they aren’t on the radar of so many kids at so many schools. And it’s a self-reinforcing cycle; because they aren’t on the radar, any recruitment efforts they do make beyond the usual suspects are likely to have little return. But this is not, as some on CC seem to think, a single national competition in which those with the best qualifications get into the best colleges. It’s not even close to that; there are information gaps and information asymmetries everywhere, and elite college admissions is still substantially an insider’s game. Who’s “inside” may be a larger group than in the past; it’s now no longer just elite private schools, it’s elite private schools and elite public schools, along with a few who wander in off the street and stumble across information channels like CC and more-or-less figure it out. But being an insider still gives you a tremendous edge.</p>