High school counselors are there to ensure the students graduate high school. They are possibly not experts in the college admission process.
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My guess would be that the number in both absolute and relative terms of kids who receive âsmoothingâ to a degree that meaningfully limits their opportunities for personal growth is vanishingly small.
We made this observation at our school to the CCO, and they pointed out that in fairness many kids are making these decisions at the 11th hour, so thereâs not necessarily a practical way to ingest the info, do the necessary sorting, and reflect back to everyone in a timely manner. Not to mention that doing so might have, in the case you describe, made many of the kids shooting for B switch to A, thus negating the benefit from the info in question.
The same can be said about parents, even well intentioned ones. That somewhat negates your prior commentâŠ
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So our HS has a dedicated college counseling staff that is independent from the normal advisory process. They are usually former AOs, go to industry events, and so on.
Interestingly, I would have suggested one of the biggest added values was how much they encourage our kids to look outside the same few colleges. Kids are encouraged to explore different regions, different formats of schools, and so on. They also promote different merit opportunities.
In the end, I did supplement all that with my own research, conversations here, and so on. But in terms of getting us started well on college search and selection, I felt we were very well served. It sounds like that is not as widespread as I would have thought, though.
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Middle class parents get private lessons for their child that plays Trumpet. Why donât they teach them trumpet themselves? The parents donât play Trumpet. The same for private swim coaches, baseball hitting coaches, debate coaches, etc.
Wealthy parents may have little to no expertise when it comes to college admissions, but in this one specific case, it is viewed as a moral failing to seek out expertise that could benefit a child.
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Most high schools do not have such a dedicated college counseling staff.
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Most public high schools do not. Private schools are different.
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That is common in top independent schools.
It is not common (I have never heard of it, but surely exists somewhere) at a regular public HS, and I live in a very high performing public school area that sends lots of kids to tops schools. The counselors do have a pretty good handle on college admissions, but they first and foremost are there to get kids to graduate, have background in HS counseling and are NOT former AOs and spend approximately 1 -2hrs, tops, with each kid. I think 3, 20 minute meetings is normal and maybe 1-2 group meeting.
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Our experience was that the schoolâs college placement office was very tight-lipped with information. School did not offer Naviance or Maia, so no data was made available for public consumption other than a 5 year matriculation list and the annual graduation issue of the school magazine that showed where all of the recently graduated seniors were going.
For the rising seniors, that graduation issue was the only real road map for what to expect. Everyone went over the list and said, OK, he was recruited to play squash at Yale, heâs going to Harvard because his dad was a member of the Harvard Corporation, heâs going to Brown because heâs a legacy and the parents just donated $1mm. You had to find the guys in the class ahead of you who were your âpeersâ and see where they ended up.
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Okie dokie. No formal debate point counter point. So it goes.
As a parent, I know as a fact the two people that care most about our kids are my wife and me.
That written, the world can do whatever they choose⊠but we control our own destiny and put the time, effort, and what money is at our disposal to raise them.
That includes academics, arts, athletics, church, volunteer, etc. and extends to the college application process.
To each their own.
Our large public has a fantastic college counseling office. The numbers arenât amazing (1 counselor for each 125 kids), but the counselors are very well trained, travel to colleges regularly, and are focused only on college counseling. They get full access to the counselors in January of junior year (right around the time all the seniors are done needing application help), but a student can always reach out to their counselor before then to confirm they are making appropriate schedule choices for junior year, or to discuss summer programs/applications, etc.
The counseling office prides itself on providing customized college suggestions to each student. Both of my kids that have been through the process so far went in with some pretty specific likes and dislikes, and a couple of colleges they were interested in. And their counselors made 10-15 suggestions of similar schools that would be in the reach, target, likely ranges, as well as some different schools so that they were thinking about maybe some different types of schools (in terms of size, structure, academic focus).
Both counselors did an amazing job of predicting reach/target/likely. D22 was a recruited athlete. So, after building her list, which included predicted difficulty by the counselor, she did pre-reads. And the pre-reads came in much as the counselor predicted.
For S24, the counselor identified an additional likely school, that he ended up really liking. As the counselor predicted, he did not get into his two reach schools. He got into his target, but not in the major he wanted, and he was admitted quickly at his two safeties.
However, even with great counselors, there are a lot of kids that are disappointed each year at the school, because they didnât really listen to the counselors advice. And also because the counselors donât do as much expectation managing as they could do if they were a private counselor. Neither of the counselors seemed willing to have the very tough talk and say do not apply to that school, do not waste your ED, etc. I think they donât want to anger parents or kids. Whereas I think a private counselor can do a little bit more pushing and reality testing.
As with most things in life, I think you got out of the schoolâs college counseling process what you put in. Armed with lots of research from CC, both my kids gave the college counselors a lot of information to work with.
That said, tons of people around here use private college counseling services too. My D had one friend used a counselor that promised some pretty amazing things. Kid was a 1560 and crazy rigor/GPA. Ended up not getting into any of his reaches or targets. Chose between some safeties he didnât like. In my non-professional opinion, the IEC packaged him all wrong. The big push was that he was âintellectually curiousâ ⊠but he wasnât really. He was a super smart kid (particularly math) that did really well in school, but didnât pursue anything academically outside of school.
Like he didnât read for fun, or participate in any academic clubs or competitions, or research academic subjects on his own for fun. I thought what made him very unique was that he was amazingly good with people of all ages, and could strike up a conversation with anyone anywhere. To me, âsocially outgoing and communicative math geniusâ is a more unique character description, than âintellectually curious.â But nobody pays me for this stuff. So I could be totally wrong!
Edited to add: It is my understanding that the other large publics in this area have similar college counselors. I didnât intend this to come off like bragging â â just saying that there are a number of large publics that advise in a manner somewhat similar to independent schools.
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Thatâs good advice except for the LORs - colleges want LORâs from a studentâs junior year teachers. There is no way to set that up 2-3 years in advance.
After these conversations Iâm definitely no longer tempted to generalize about what schools offer high end college counseling (which to me necessarily includes the sorts of personalized list building process you described).
I will note as an aside I am not sure there is any sort of counselor who can truly manage expectations well if the kid and parents do not willingly buy in. We see it at our private HS, there was an anecdote in this article, Iâve seen many more references to this issue beforeâsome kids/parents just have their list and want to be told how to get in, and if a counselor tries to suggest the list should be adjusted, then the counselor is going to be ignored.
And in the case of private counselors, they might be fired, or never hired in the first place. I think ethical private counselors try to do their best anyway, and if they lose some clients after giving realistic, ethical advice, OK. But I do wonder if these counselors making these huge sums are maybe sometimes more inclined to tell the kids/parents what they want to hear, with enough caveats that they wonât be in legal jeopardy if the kids/parent were overreaching.
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that is so amazing a public district pays for that 
! and separate college counseling is super cool.
(I will say, ours do have a good gist of likely/safety etc and that sort of thing, and ideas of what schools might be goodâŠbut it is highly highly reliant on kid having done a lot of thought in advance since they donât spend much 1:1 time getting to know themâŠ)
But counselors have about 220+ kids (across all 4 grades) to do everythingâŠits a district where everyone (pretty much) everyone graduates goes to 4 year schools so not as complicated a job as in some placesâŠ
Yes and no. Here is what we do⊠Freshman year mid-way through, we say hey, what teachers do you feel akin too? Now granted, their high school they have (mostly) one Science teacher all four years and Math, etc. for the IB-students. So its easier in that respect. Then So/Jr. year we ensure they are building relationships with those two LOR (plus GC). Sr. year first day to school, request LOR with a personal bio attached to help refresh LOR/GC about our student. Plus, we as parents do our part⊠we go to every open house⊠every parent teacher conference or back to school night⊠even though all the teachers/admin/staff ask, âWhy are you here?â⊠to which we say we decided to have children so we might as well raise them. These little steps are small but have a cumulative compounding influence on the LOR themselves. This requires no money. This requires only energy (which time and work is required to equate to energy). The adage holds, gotta be willing to put in the time.
@DadOfBoys3 - that sounds like it really worked for your family and your environment! My kids attend a very large public high school and thereâs no predicting who your teacher will be, so itâs totally not possible to build relationships ahead of time w. those teachers.
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I can add another anecdote about a school that does NOT offer this kind of counseling.
DS20 and DS24 both went to a full-time gifted STEM program that pulls top 50 or so students per class from our mid-size (six high schools) school district in a fly-over state and hosts it within a regular large public school.
They take all core STEM classes with the cohort, and some of the humanities AP classes with the more advanced students of the hosting school, and have to fulfill an expanded set of requirements (including a 360hr mentored research project) to receive the schoolâs diploma with the programâs logo upon graduation.
You wonât read about it in the news, but the student body is on par with some of the top STEM magnets in the nation, as reflected on their brag sheet.
Their school counselor covers all students in the program as well as a certain range of last names starting letters in the general school. In our experience, her involvement with the college application process was largely limited to fulfilling the duties of providing counselor letters and transcripts to various application portals.
I heard that some kidsâ parents may be hiring outside college counselors. I never heard it about the top kids in the program. I would say it is viewed as somewhat of a bad form.
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Coming back to this thread for a moment, am I the only old geezer (probably) who remembers Fred Ruggâs âRuggâs recommendationsâ book? Great resource for identifying schools for many different majors and it delineated them in part by the most selective/very selective/selective programs. Not sure if its been updated since 2018, but its available online as a pdf for $25. Excellent resource!
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Sadly the 2018 version is the most recent.
I didnt need to invent the perfect college applicant. One of my kids got at least 30 mailings from Wash U telling her she was the perfect applicant for their school (she wasnât, and she didnât apply).
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