my high school had the absolute worst guidance counselors i could imagine
in fact one of em was in the news recently for writing a “good” letter of rec to her friend’s son after her friend (who works in the district) got an unfavorable (and honest) letter of rec from one of the other counselors. that district friend who used to work at our school wasn’t pleased with the unfavorable letter (her son was a classmate of mine and he was an awful student so i have no doubts the bad letter was being honest) so she just asked her other counselor friend to write a better one. she threatened the principle and other counselors as well.
both of those counselors however, are absolutely horrible. the one who wrote the unfavorable letter of rec told so many students including myself that we wouldn’t go to college. she told us we wouldnt even graduate high school at times. she is absolutely awful and refused to help us out just because of her opinion that we wouldn’t make it anywhere. she even told this to white students so i don’t think it’s a matter of it being an underrepresented student body. and believe me the students she talked down to ended up going to UCLA and other great schools but at absolutely no help from her. just horrible. they would never send transcripts on time, lose things all the time. every year our schedules would be completely messed up with unrelated classes, sometimes classes that weren’t even for our grade level. this would happen for the first month of school before these counselors finally sorted out the mess they made. this happened every year. they never bothered to fix the problem.
the other counselor was just as bad (the one who wrote the good review for her friend’s son). she was honestly a female dog, there is no other way of saying it. we hated having to see her. much less, none of us would want to see her for college guidance even if we knew that was a thing she was meant to help us with. our school was both a middle school and a high school and yet it only had 3 guidance counselors. absolutely ridiculous. for a huge public school. she was so condescending and mean. everytime we had to see her, she would just act so rudely towards us and always roll her eyes and looked like she hated us so much. absolutely cruel.
i do remember once that these people came to our school once and made us meet with them w/ appointments where they asked us where we wanted to go to college. that was all i remember though, they didn’t really help unless you were wanting to go the local state college, in which they’d just tell us what classes they required us to take which was common knowledge that us students already found for ourselves online. they knew nothing, they didn’t even know what our current grades were to help us stay on track or anything. no help at all. and that was probably the only time i recall talking about college at that school. it wasn’t helpful and i only remember it happening once in my 4 years in high school. college guidance shouldn’t be something you introduce once every 4 years. these organizations just think that’s enough and then they pat themselves on the back for thinking they impacted our lives or something. college guidance should be something students think about every day, ever week. not every 4 years, and not once every year.
our school wasn’t even that bad to be honest in terms of quality you’d expect… it was a magnet school and it was mostly whites and hispanics (but it was mostly white-washed hispanics, not cholos or whatever), and then a smaller quarter was filipino, and then less than that were a few vietnamese and black people. suburban area. probably not a very rich area compared to most places, but for the surrounding areas which were a bit more rough and ghetto, i suppose it was the richest area in context.
and even that didn’t save it from having terrible counselors.