Apr 9, 2015
In our last episode, we talked about why high school guidance
counselors are not enough of a help to you and your child in your
college search, and we speculated that one reason such a high
percentage of students attend college in their home state is
because guidance counselors do not have the time or background or
information or inclination to help them look any farther away. A
new report that just came out (March, 2015) has added some support
for our argument. The report is called A National Look at the High
School Counseling Office. It was produced by the National
Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC), using data
from 2009 to 2012. Here are some notable findings (as reported by
Caralee Adams in Education Week, March 26, 2015): Just over half of
guidance counselors said that their high school counseling
department spends less than 20 percent of its time on college
readiness, selection, and applications. So, let’s call that a day a
week by each of however many guidance counselors your child’s high
school has. Now think about how many juniors and seniors need
college-going help, and you can quickly see that there is just not
enough time to go around. (By the way, the American School
Counselor Association recommends a student load of 250 students per
guidance counselor, but most states, on the average, do not come
close to that. Even if you had the recommended number of students
per counselor in your school, how hard do you think it would be for
one person to advise that many students on college searches and
college decision making?) Just over 60 percent of high school
juniors and just about half of parents of high school juniors met
with a guidance counselor to discuss college and other
post-high-school options. It is not possible to tell whether these
pitifully low numbers are because guidance counselors do not have
time to have such meetings or because students and parents do not
think counselors can help them or because students and parents do
not think they need any help. Actually, another approximately 15
percent of students and parents did hire a counselor outside of
school to help them; so they, at least, felt that they needed help.
Given what these private counselors cost, it is my guess that an
even higher percentage of low-income high school juniors and their
parents from inner-city schools could not have or did not access
the help of guidance counselors when applying to colleges. And
finally, here is something I have known for a long time, something
that has been confirmed by studies my own nonprofit organization
has done over the years. Who is the main influence on students as
they choose a college? The answer we get is always parents.
According to the NACAC report, about 40 percent of students named
parents, while just about 5 percent named either a guidance
counselor or a privately hired counselor. Some people might say
that parents are so influential because they are paying the bill,
and I am sure that there is some truth to that. However, it was
clear to us in the high school we worked with in Brooklyn that
parents’ own feelings were a force to be reckoned with for their
children—that is, parents’ feelings about colleges they had
attended, or colleges a family member had attended, or colleges
that were well-known because they were close by, or colleges they
simply thought they knew something about (even when it was not
true). If parents are the most influential and counselors are
hardly influential at all, it is even more important that parents
do what they need to do to get the right information for their
children. Of course, we are hoping that NYCollegeChat is part of
how you are getting that information. But get it, you must. Past
episodes you may want to listen to before talking to your child
about college options are: Episode 24: Having the Money Talk
Episode 9: What Are Some of the Decisive Factors in Putting
Colleges on Your List? Episode 10: What Are Some More of the
Decisive Factors in Putting Colleges on Your List? In our last
episode, we also talked about getting you outside your geographic
comfort zone—to look at colleges outside your hometown and, really,
outside your home state. I know that is going to be hard for New
Yorkers, who are proud of their state and believe that there are
plenty of good options right here—and indeed there are a lot of
good options right here. And I know that is going to be hard for
our listeners from other states, too, because many of you feel that
there are plenty of good options where you live as well—and you are
probably right. 1. Good Reasons To Go Away However, let’s talk for
a minute about two key reasons you should consider going outside of
your home state. Both reasons are based on the fact that most
colleges seek geographic diversity in their freshman class; in
other words, most colleges want to attract and admit students from
across the U.S.—and even from foreign countries—so that the college
has an interesting and stimulating variety of students and so that
the college can advertise that it has students from a large number
of states and foreign countries for the prestige value of that
statement. I just read a post on LinkedIn from my own alma mater,
Cornell University, which said this: Cornell’s newly admitted class
of freshmen is the most diverse and international in its 150-year
history, with prospective undergraduates representing 100 nations
from around the world, based on citizenship. Because colleges want
that geographic diversity in their freshman class, your child is
more likely to be accepted at a selective college farther away from
home than at the same sort of college close to home. For example,
if you live in New York, your child probably has a better chance of
getting into the top public university in Colorado than the top
public university in New York because public colleges in Colorado
are interested in attracting good students from New York and from
other states in the East to balance out all of the good Colorado
students who want to enroll. Furthermore, as one college admissions
officer wrote in an article recently, if there are two students
looking for a scholarship and only one can be given, is it more
likely that the scholarship will be given to the student next door
or the student from far away? To the one from far away, she
said—because of the desire for geographic diversity we just
discussed. Now it is certainly true that there are some flagship
public universities that are cutting back on admitting students
from outside their states because budget issues are forcing them to
make sure that their own residents are well taken care of with the
state taxpayers’ money. This is true for political reasons even
though out-of-state students bring more money with them. So you
will need to do a little research on specific public universities
before throwing your child’s hat into those rings. But the summary
of our advice is still this: Look outside your home state for
colleges that might hold more opportunity for your child than those
at home do. For more information about visiting out-of-state
colleges, listen to Episode 12: To Visit Or Not To Visit? 2.
Geographic Regions of the U.S. and Colleges on Our Virtual Tour We
had to decide how to divide up the U.S. to take you on our planned
virtual tour of colleges you never thought about. We looked at a
number of ways agencies and organizations have divided up the U.S.
before deciding to use the regions used by the Bureau of Economic
Analysis (an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce), which is
responsible for producing an array of economic statistics for
comparing parts of the country. The Bureau has divided the U.S.
into eight regions, with each region’s comprising from four to 12
states. We are planning to do an episode for each region—though we
will see how that goes once we get started. As we mentioned in our
last episode, we are going to look at some colleges for students
with great grades and admissions test scores and some colleges for
students with more average grades and admissions test scores. But,
because every child’s high school record is its own mix of grades
and test scores and leadership positions and extracurricular
activities and out-of-school experiences, we are not going to try
to tell you as a family which colleges your child is likely to get
into. We will tell you that there are a lot of colleges you should
consider that you probably haven’t, and you will need to look at
your child’s own record against the profile of accepted students to
see which ones might be right for you. We will include both public
and private colleges, both large and small colleges, and both
liberal arts and technical colleges—that is, a wide variety of
colleges so that there will be some, for sure, that might interest
your child. However, we are going to focus on four-year colleges,
reasoning that students headed to a public two-year college are
highly likely to go to one in their home state and are not,
therefore, looking to leave their own geographic region right away.
Of course, we know that some of those students will eventually go
on to four-year colleges after a year or two at the two-year
college, so perhaps our information will be helpful to those
families in the future. We want to make it clear that there is no
statistical basis for the colleges we are going to name in each
region. They are mostly colleges that we know something about for
various reasons, and certainly there are some states that we are
more familiar with than others. We do not promise to name great
colleges in every state, though I am sure they exist. We do promise
to name a lot of great colleges. If you have a college you would
like us to talk about on the air, please email us or call us and
tell us what it is and why it is great, and we will certainly
consider it. We welcome those calls. Let us also say that no
college has asked us to name it and that no college has paid us
anything to name it. The choices in the next episodes in this
series are ours and ours alone. Our next episode will begin our
virtual college tour with one of the eight regions of the U.S.
Please join us. Listen to the podcast to find out about… Why
parents must get information on their own for the college
application process How to visit colleges when you are looking
outside your home state Why you should attend an upcoming national
college fair in NYC Visit the show notes for this episode at
http://nycollegechat.org/26 to find links to the higher education
institutions and events we mention. Connect with us through…
Subscribing to NYCollegeChat on iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn!
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