Guidance Counselors

Pizzagirl
Sat, 06 Mar 2010 08:54:38 +0000

My experience based on my own experiences and my kids is that the GC’s are so overwhelmingly rooted in getting kids into local schools, that if a kid expresses interest in a selective college, the selective colleges that are nearby are the only ones that get mentioned, and something farther (further? I never got that one quite right) away might as well be in Timbuktu.

As someone who went to hs in Missouri, I got “apply to Wash U” and they looked at me cross-eyed when I said that my family would be taking me on a tour of some East Coast schools. The smart kids here get “apply to Northwestern” and if they don’t spark to that, “apply to U Chicago / WashU / Notre Dame.” Then it’s the usual Big Ten suspects. I think that’s trite, pointless advice for a smart Chicago-area kid. I recognize that there can be financial issues with having kids apply elsewhere, but I think it’s their responsibility to open up and brainstorm possibilities rather than just assume the kid wants to be within a few miles of home.

The other thing that they did both in Missouri and here, which drives me nuts, is that they tell the smart kids to apply to the (out of state) Big 10 schools – Indiana, Iowa, etc. But then you’re going to be paying OOS tuition and those schools aren’t going to be throwing money at another state’s residents when their mission is to educate the students of that state whose parents pay the taxes to support it. For families who need financial help, I just don’t see OOS big state flagships as the place to start hunting. Better to hunt at a private that has more financial aid, and that is not beholden to the residents of its own state. (To be clear, I’m not talking about places like U Alabama, which might go out of their way to provide lots of money to attract high caliber students. I’m talking about states where there are already lots of high caliber students attending the flagships, and they really don’t need to search out and find the 3.9 student from the neighboring state.)