<p>If it bothers you, you can just request another interviewer. I don’t think that is a problem. We did that because the scheduling was not going to mesh with the guy S was assigned. But what are you going to do if this next person also has kids in the public school system? The chances would be good that he would. THis is really not something that even occurred to me regarding the interviews.</p>
<p>I am sorry but this thread is a bit bizarre. Do you really think that an employee of a public school system has a vendetta against private school kids? If anything, I think it would be the opposite of that…because public schools are inclusive…and educate every student regardless of their means, their race, their religious beliefs, their stance on abortion or sexual orientation which is NOT the case with private schools as you well know. If I was a paranoid person, I would fear the opposite far more than a public school employee as an interviewer…I would fear a narrow minded private school employee or parent. lol</p>
<p>I concur with the posters here. Don’t do it.
Are you going to call his professors in college as well if they were educated in public universities? future employers?
If your son is confident in his skills, he will do just fine.</p>
<p>The OP hasn’t posted since it became apparent that virtually no one recognized the threat he posed. That’s his prerogative, but if he’s still reading, I would love to know if he’s rethought his family’s reservations regarding this interview, and realized tht the available information in no way posits a prejudice against his son.</p>
<p>I sincerely hope so, for the sake of the young man, and the perception of the process in general.</p>
<p>My perception of the process is that it is flawed and human. I’m ready to believe that the OP and son are justified in their concerns and are in the best position, given their local conditions, to recognize this. They both independently had the same reaction. Enough for me.
I just think that requesting another interviewer or voicing their concerns beforehand to the college is worse than letting the chips fall where they may.<br>
The best way out of this, if possible, is to request and schedule a campus interview and then cancel the local one.
But again, it is likely that the local interview will be okay after all. Just one of the many uncontrollable elements in the college admissions game.</p>
<p>I will accept as gospel that the interviewer will be biased against the student because of the public/private school dichotomy. What the OP needs to do is reread Lafalum’s post: even if the fears are true, it doesn’t matter. Alumni interviews have so little effect on admissions decisions that it is silly to worry about it. And it is a good learning experience for S: how to turn around someone who may be biased against you for whatever reason.</p>
<p>I have a rhetorical question…does the OP plan to google every person with whom they may come into contact during the admissions process? They only knew about this private/public school “conflict” because of a google search. What if the first interview had been able to go on as originally scheduled? This would not have even come up as an issue. I hope the OP let this one just rest…and that the interview was rescheduled and went just fine.</p>
<p>I think this is taking helicopter parenting to a new level. The parents response to the sons paranoia should have been NOT to feed it but to reassure the boy that he will be just fine, he did after all attend the University he wants to get in and if that University is worth anything…he would LOVE to have a fine young man like him attend. Pat him on the back and say go blow his socks off.</p>
<p>I would not ask for a new interviewer, for the reasons already stated.</p>
<p>If, after the interview, you and your family still believe that this interviewer is biased and will sabotage your child’s admission because of his school, then you might re-evaluate whether to raise this issue with the prospective school. But I wouldn’t do it now, before you’ve met the interviewer.</p>
<p>At the risk of bumping a thread that has clearly run its course, I would like to comment on what happened here. And thank you to all posters for their replies to my OP. </p>
<p>The original honest inquiry turned out to be a CC Parents Forum Rorschach test. It only confirmed my own professional and personal experience that issues about school choice remain contentious and deeply felt, and not just in my locality and state. What I had forgotten is that in liberal society non-social scientists sometimes object to analysis that seems to reduce a person’s values and opinions to products of his/her background, experience and position. </p>
<p>In this case our concern was the effect of the interviewer’s professional employment and what we suspected it said about his/her views on school choice, something many posters completely discounted as likely to influence his/her opinion of a student. As the Rorschach test of this thread showed me (admittedly, with a small “n”), that concern is entirely reasonable.</p>
<p>Analysis that is the stock in trade for social scientists can seem to threaten the notion of individuality and freedom of choice. But that does not make good social science analysis wrong. Some of the more vitriolic posters here may want to review their postings in the thread and consider how their responses reflected their own schooling and economic background, current employment and the choices they have been making for their own children. Use of the word “paranoid” was flung about the way “fascist” was when I was in school and with equally coarsening effects on the level of discourse.</p>
<p>This thread also reminded me of the limitations of anonymously asking for advice for a child whose privacy must be protected. Perhaps offering more detail about both S and interviewer might have helped clarify the situation, but only at the risk of revealing enough personal detail that S’s identity would have been disclosed, especially if combined with my few other posts at CC. </p>
<p>I am particularly appreciative of the advice from posters who did not need an identifying level of detail and whose advice proceeded from the assumption that we had reason to be concerned, but I want to thank all of you again for your contribution. I know your posts were all meant to be helpful.</p>
<p>What I learned from the OP’s response here is that people hear what they want to hear, without regard to what anyone says.</p>
<p>I thought the unanimous response to his question was (a) your concern does not seem reasonable, and (b) raising it runs the risk of antagonizing any number of people, including the admissions department at the college in question (by suggesting that their alumni interviewers are likely to pursue personal agendas at the expense of the college’s goals, and by suggesting that the OP’s child is hostile to anyone associated with public schools) and of course the interviewer (by suggesting that he could not evaluate fairly a student whose family had made different choices than the interviewer had). Also, that even if the concern turned out to be valid, the alumni interview is not such a critical element in admissions that there would be a high risk of a meaningful adverse effect on the ultimate admissions outcome. In other words, the risk of raising the issue in advance exceeded the risk of harm if it were not raised.</p>
<p>That makes sense to me. It was near unanimous. I don’t get where the Rorschach part comes in – everyone but the OP saw pretty much the same thing.</p>
<p>As for the OP’s “social science” premise, it is full of holes. Sure, I suppose public school administrators are several times more likely to be hostile to private school students than private school administrators. But that says nothing about how likely it is that this particular administrator would be hostile to a student in this role. My experience tells me that the absolute – not relative – risk of hostility is very low. And, compared to the next available interviewer, even the relative risk of hostility is low. If the OP is right that school choice is contentious in his area, what is to say that the next interviewer wouldn’t hold stronger views, whatever his or her profession?</p>
<p>My experience is completely consistent with what other people said in this thread: I would absolutely NOT assume that a public school administrator would be hostile to a private school student. Apart from the nontrivial possibility that he would faithfully perform his task as an alumni interviewer without regard to any personal views he held, there are too many complexities in peoples’ lives to be able to predict his attitude from the single datum of his position. Someone could make the same assumption about my spouse, and miss the fact that she spent years as president of the parents’ association at a private school. For instance.</p>
<p>The reason I think that most people here did not buy your assumption that you had reason to be concerned, is that you gave us all the information you had–that the interviewer is a public school principal, in a town where there is a perception of bias toward private school attendees. Given the same information, the overwhelming majority of posters interpreted it differently from how you did, or, more commonly, said “not enough info.” I’m not sure exactly who was Rohrschached here, but I’m not sure it was the posters.</p>
<p>Virtually everyone gave you the same advice–don’t change interviewers. My inference is that you were not looking for this answer, or any answer different from the conclusion you had already drawn. I myself would probably have skipped replying if I’d have known you were running a sociological study, not asking for points of view.</p>
<p>(Edit: Crossposted with JHS, who posted a more eloquent reply.)</p>
<p>My two cents: the kind of alum who volunteers to spend his free time interviewing applicants is the kind who really, really cares about his college. This kind of alum is very unlikely to discourage the college from accepting an otherwise desirable student because of a philosophical difference with the student’s parents.</p>
<p>I feel sorry for wisedad’s son, who clearly is not going to get a reality check from dad. One hopes that he will not succeed in ticking off ALL of his alumni interviewers.</p>
<p>I think the OP has a valid concern. In our community, the public school system is very hostile to the private schools.</p>
<p>As I said earlier, I work for the public schools, but my husband & his siblings attended private schools, as does my D’s boyfriend. A friend works for the public school, but she herself attended private school. Just because someone works for a public school system does NOT mean they personally have animosity toward private schools, no matter what the political tenor of their town. </p>
<p>In our town, there is a strain between the public schools and some of the privates; D isn’t necessarily “advertising” her relationship to her schoolmates because some of them will consider her a “traitor” for dating outside of her school/town. But I myself, as an alumni interviewer or as a person in general, understand that different people choose different schools for their kids for a variety of reasons, and the important thing is that the child attend the school that is right for THEM. I have several close friends who have one child in public school and the other in private - decisions that were made based on what was best for each individual child, based on their personality and needs.</p>
<p>I agree 100% with JHS’s posting #50. Clearly the OP had his mind already made up, I think he was just looking for people to agree with him. And I found his commentary on sociology to be self-serving and arrogant.</p>
<p>Wisedad, I’m with you.
In my opinion schools, particularly public schools, have become a secular religion. Otherwise thoughtful people believe in such an apparatus on faith. I understand completely why you feel vulnerable to the true believers, and to those who make their living from the system.
I’m sure I go beyond you, but the smartest people I’ve come across on education are Ivan Illich (“Deschooling Society”), John Holt, and John Taylor Gatto.
Good luck to you and your son, and in my opinion, you are not imagining things.<br>
I think you are right that the topic is a litmus test that gets to unexamined beliefs.</p>
<p>In general I wonder whether a high school principal is ever a good choice for an alumni interviewer. In a small town she would be interviewing her own students. In a big city she would be getting a look at how the competition prepares their kids. While I’d go with whoever they have interview because it’s doesn’t carry significant weight, I can see the concerns that wisedad and son have more clearly after the last post. My mother, a long time school principal, says that the competition between schools is the most nasty politics there is.</p>
<p>Hanna, I know that you are a Harvard alum and my son’s experience was a completely idiosyncratic one. I’ll tell the story anyway.
My son dropped out of school and more or less educated himself. He pulled a Harvard grad public school teacher from the district (Chicago) as his interviewer. Things were fine in the interview as an identified home schooler. The alum opined that home schoolers were mostly suburbanites.
In our case, the home schoolers in our group are almost all African-Americans from the Southside inner city. At the same time as the interview, I was attending the funeral of a 39 year old home school mom who died of untreated breast cancer. Untreated due to lack of resources. Most of the people in the home school group think the Chicago Public Schools would have destroyed their kids if given half a chance. IMO, they are right.<br>
The interview was for all intents and purposes was over. In my opinion, the interviewer could not handle the negation (Herbert Marcuse word?) of his self image as a positive force in society working in the Chicago Public Schools. You are not a hero, bud.
Do I think my son would have gotten into Harvard except for this experience? No.
But my son and I thought his chances were over at that point. Can I prove this? No. Do I think I’m right? Yes.</p>
<p>Wisedad – There may be an easy way to gather information that will allay or validate your concerns. Has this gentleman served in his capacity as interviewer for this college for some time? If so, I assume that other students from your son’s school have interviewed with him. Private schools tend to keep pretty detailed info on college acceptances/denials. Was there anything strange or unanticipated in the admissions results of the private school students who interviewed with this guy? If the info you gather suggests that he is not, in fact, using his position as interviewer to undermine private school applicants, you can calm down. If there is something odd about the pattern of rejection of students he interviews, it would probably be a good idea for someone from your school’s guidance office to be in touch with the college. ( I suspect that the college would notice if an interviewer were, however subtly, pushing for rejection of candidates from a high school with the same religious affiliation as the college while urging the acceptance of public school students, particularly if a single admissions officer reads all of the files from your region.)</p>
<p>wisedad…
Sorry if I’m an uncomfortable ally. Please know that my kids have done fine in the college admissions sweepstakes in spite of our familial failure to drink the school kool aid.</p>