I’m a little jealous of the one-on-one meetings! That is fantastic!
I’ll have to double check, but I’m pretty sure our kids don’t get that at all. I do know that my D24 had a class meeting that talked about the application process and had suggestions to picking safety, match, and reach schools, but that wasn’t until the middle of October senior year. They are pretty much completely on their own for college.
12 students ? what type of school does she go to ? Is this a very remote or specialized school ? S26’s graduating class is 550 and I don’t think he has a single class with less than 30 students.
He tried to meet with his counselor multiple times and finally gave up. Everyone seems to be on their own when it comes to college some parents hire professionals and some try to figure it out on their own.
Our college counselors have been fairly proactive especially given school size (I think we have around 300 juniors/to be rising seniors). Presentations to both parents & students have been done, C26 has had their 1:1 and got a college list, and they will do various sessions with the juniors over the rest of the semester. The fall semester focuses on the seniors only but hoping C26 will have most apps in early.
Our HS switched from Naviance to SCOIR over this past summer. D24 & I used Naviance last school year when she was going through the application process. I thought it was just ok. So far, I prefer SCOIR a lot more.
Our HS is doing a 3-session presentation series with 11th grade parents on successive Thursday evenings starting next week. The college counselor is going to talk about all things college application related.
They did something like this when D24 was in 11th grade, but it was only a single 1-hour presentation & discussion session that school year.
Our HS has a lot of immigrant families and if the parents did attend college, they often did so in another country and their experience was quite different than how college admissions operates in the US. When D24 was in 11th grade, the college counselor spent a couple of min in her presentation talking about this in what I think was an attempt to reduce some of the ‘high stakes/high pressure, you must go to Harvard or your life will be ruined’ point of view that results in a lot of application disappointments if you only apply to lottery schools.
The counselor is going to meet with each 11th grader some time over the next few weeks to talk to them about what classes they want to take next year. usually that discussion happens shortly after the electives’ catalog gets released to everybody, which I think is going to happen by the end of this month. So now that I think about it, the whole counselor meeting w/the kid thing will probably happen in March.
Our school does something similar, but it’s in the fall. (school is a public charter school, I think D26’s graduating class will be ~ 40 students?)
Seniors all get enrolled in a mandatory College Counseling class. When D24 went through this, most of Aug. was spent on stuff like:
how to figure out where you should apply
how the Common App works
getting your Common App profile created, setting up your SRAR in it, etc.
putting together a resume (depending on where you apply, some colleges might ask for this)
asking teachers for LORs (letters of rec)
requiring students to attend 2 in-person college admissions sessions at school during the school day (i.e., in person presentation from a college at the high school)
helping students figure out what types of things they might want in a college
working on Common App personal statements
Sept & 1st half of October includes completing college app essays & a bunch of other stuff.
At some point in the fall, the college counselor does have the students get into pairs or small groups and they review & provide feedback on each others’ essays. Counselor also does a lot of reviewing & presenting different student profiles in Aug & Sept (de-identified info; counselor uses actual students’ profiles from previous years, but it doesn’t include student’s name). Plus the class does activities where they’re given these prior or sometimes mock applications & each group has to decide whether to admit, deny, or defer. Then when they’re done, the counselor tells them what the actual decision was.
When D24 went through it, she said it was pretty eye opening because everybody thought that the profiles of students who had almost perfect test scores & GPAs + a long list of extracurriculars would have been admitted to whatever the Lottery School was in the example they were all reviewing in class.
FWIW in case anybody’s interested, there are colleges who have posted some Youtube videos where they walk through prior students’ application profile and the admissions staff explain their thought process while reviewing the application. I watched a couple of those last school year, but can’t remember the name of the college at the time (some small LAC in MA). That was really interesting.
College counseling in our district consists of:
an evening meeting with parents on how to complete FAFSA
the advice to students to go to their Google Classroom to get information and that’s it. No Scoir, Naviance etc. This is the highest performing public school district in our state
I honestly don’t think the career coaches and college counselors in our district know much about college admissions. The large majority of students that pursue college will do so at in state publics. Those that want private or more “exotic” choices are on their own. That’s how I ended up here when doing research for D22.
S26 will also likely end up at an in state or neighboring state public, so we’ll be fine without counselor involvement. His college list is very slowly evolving and we might do tours over spring break. We are strongly considering having him take advantage of the National Student Exchange. He would love to spend a year studying in Alaska or Montana. Our state schools participating in NSE are not great ones though and only one might be a fit for him. It’s not one that was even on our radar before taking NSE into consideration. This school is in the middle of nowhere, so I’m not looking forward to visiting
Our HS has 850-900 graduating seniors each year. Students from our HS attend a wide range of colleges including schools like HYPSM, Cambridge / Oxford, all kinds of LACs, state schools in and out of state, community college, etc. There is no class rank, we do not have Naviance or anything similar, and we have extremely limited college counseling, so it can be very challenging for students to understand how they compare to others at our HS and to build a realistic college list. My guess is that a lot of these families might get private help? We’ve also seen some families struggle with the process and end up with poor outcomes (college not a good fit, or not affordable). Fortunately we have been through the process with S23 so we are better able to figure out how to help D26, but I still expect to be getting a lot of help here on CC.
I think National Student Exchange is pretty cool. Last year, D24 briefly considered UNM (New Mexico). They participate in National Student Exchange…and so does Univ of Hawaii-Manoa (in Honolulu) and UH-Hilo (on the big island). And my kid was like “Oooo, I could spend 6 months living in Hawaii?”
Another shameless plug for my favorite podcast ever:
Also College Essay Guy has a podcast, Youtube channel, and lots of useful information on his website. I forced D24 last year to do a bunch of his short writing exercises (although she would have argued at the time that they were all short torture sessions) in order for her to find some material to use for her Common App personal statement.
I think I will make S26 apply to UNM, because it might actually be affordable even with his more average stats. And it would be a lot better school than our state NSE schools
UNM also has a very easy application, and rolling admissions early in the season. As long as UNM has programs that fit your S and he can see himself potentially attending, it’s really great to start senior year with an admission + scholarship already in your pocket
My kid found it to be a huge stress reliever once an acceptance letter came in from 1 of the rolling admit colleges she applied to. I think your idea is a good one!
C26 came home from school a little dejected; it seems they are not sure there will be enough students to run a separate chamber singers /choral performance class next year. If there isn’t they’ll likely merge with the “ordinary” choir class, but that’s non-audition and there isn’t an honors option, so it’s really not what they want to do. And they probably won’t find out until the day before they start school in August, although I’m hoping that if they need to merge classes they’ll at least contact parents/students beforehand. Sigh.