People make mistakes, and I wouldn’t expect a GC to know all the good programs in all the colleges since that is a vast amount of information. But deadlines should be their bread and butter. They should be organized the way surgeons and airline mechanics are organized - counting tools to make sure nothing is left behind. There still may be mistakes but they should be very rare.
In many jobs there are certain mistakes that simply cannot be allowed to happen. And yet, they do happen sometimes. (A prime example is for a college to send out acceptance notices to people who were supposed to be rejected.) I think deadlines of this kind should be something that a GC shouldn’t allow to happen. But I suspect it does happen sometimes.
Right, it is a mistake, a big one. The question is, does that mean can the guy immediately, or try to find a way to help the employee improve so that it doesn’t happen again? It’s not necessarily inexpensive or easy to fire and hire another superior individual, and if there are system problems contributing to this (assigning too many kids to each gc for example), hiring someone else may not help in any case.
Firing outright may be excessive, but escalating to the school principal would be appropriate.
Then they’d have to ping the principal repeatedly to ensure the issue is investigated and to find out the result…
Way too many counselors in our district don’t load recommendations in until the day before they are due causing lots of unnecessary stress. They enforce a 30 day advance notice, which is fine, but it chaps my hide that even with materials submitted 45 days in advance they skate right up to and sometimes miss deadlines.
Luckily colleges have generally been less picky on that front, but scholarships are a whole different story.
What’s especially goofy: If you have an IB program, you can pretty much be sure that your IB students are going to be applying to college and that many of them will choose ED or EA options. So, it shouldn’t be any kind of surprise that those students are going to need recommendations done by mid-to-late October.
We got lucky with our high school counselors. There were only 122 or so in our Ds’ graduating classes, and they made college counseling a priority.
For grad school, D2 really had to ride some of her LOR writers to submit them on time.
I’m so glad our Ds (and we) are completely done with college admissions stress.
Similar thing happened to a friend of my son’s.
Sadly, that’s the reality in many public schools where 1 GC is responsible for a few hundred kids.
I think our private school had 3 or 4 counselors for the 122-129 member class.
We had an on the ball college counselor. But our kids went to an independent private school – it was one of the reasons we were willing to pay for our kids to go there.
@nottelling I don’t doubt the story. I know of similar cases. Many guidance counselors are terrible. I think someone in this situation should sue both the school and the guidance counselor, and in some cases the damages should be in the millions when you count up lost earnings from not being to attend the school
@intparent My nephews went to a private college-prep HS, and their GCs were all over them right from freshman year. OTOH, my D went to a very large public HS which, due to budget cuts, had 1.5 GCs for 1800 students. With that kind of a caseload, IMO it would have been really unfair to expect anything in the way of personal attention. The only thing D required from them was transcripts, and you better believe we followed up with the colleges to make sure they’d been received.
Wow. That’s too bad. I guess it’s things like this that explains the surge in people paying for professional college guidance counselors.
“I think someone in this situation should sue both the school and the guidance counselor, and in some cases the damages should be in the millions when you count up lost earnings from not being to attend the school”
Well, that’s a little ridiculous. You can’t prove that if you had only attended Fancy Pants U you would have made $X more in lifetime earnings than Settled-For U. And where is the millions of dollars going to come from? The GC’s pocket? The school district - which then cuts into the education of all the students?
My trick in this kind of situation – and I love Hunt’s pretend-to-trust-but-verify line is this:
You never tell people what the real deadline is. You tell them a deadline that is (let’s say) two weeks in advance.
That gives you plenty of time to remind them for the faux-date and still gives you a chance to get something in should be the faux-date be missed.
Before agreeing that anyone should be sued for millions in damages, I’d want to have more information (and I imagine most courts would want the same thing. And I agree with PG that there’s no way to KNOW that missing out on the scholarship will necessarily result in millions in damages to the student over the course of his career). If the only thing standing between the student and the scholarship was the missing recommendation, that’s different from the recommendation admitting the student to a pool of potential scholarship winners.
If the GC said he’d send the rec and then simply dropped the ball, I’d agree he should feel some kind of ding, though I’d want to know more about it before agreeing he should be fired. The original scenario is all kinds of vague. I don’t feel as if there’s even enough third-hand information, which is all we have here, to decide what should happen to this GC.
How are these things sent? E-mail, fax, snail mail, express mail with a signature required?
Hindsight is 20:20, but it’s often good to follow up with thank-you’s … “I just wanted to say thank you for getting my XYZ paperwork there in time” which can either be a sincere thanks if the person actually did it, or can be guilt-inducing if they dropped the ball, in which case guilt away.
It’s also hard to verify on the receiver’s end. Our GC had sent things USPS and I had to ask her about it because we got a call from one college saying they hadn’t received something. Turns out they HAD received it, it was just sitting in a giant bag of mail that hadn’t been processed yet. They found it 2 days later and called to say they had admitted D1.
Parents and students can easily be in a position where they can’t tell if the GC dropped the ball or the receiving college did.
had 1.5 GCs for 1800 students. With that kind of a caseload, IMO it would have been really unfair to expect anything >>>>>
I don’t disagree. However, the counselor “promised”. Don’t make promises to kids in this situation, plain and simple. Of course I have no idea what a child is supposed to do then. This is seriously screwing with someone’s life big time.
It just seems really…well, amazing to me. Why even have the position of guidance counselor? Why are they put in the position of doing the impossible when the children end up suffering for it?
A student should stop by the g.c. office and ask. Every single day, without fail. That much is true.
If something were really super-uber-critical-important, I could see asking for an envelope back and then fedexing it myself.
With no disrespect to the seriousness of this topic – every time I check in to cc, I wonder if toledo has posted on this thread!