Apr 2, 2015
This episode is the first in Series 4: Looking at Colleges Outside
Your Comfort Zone. Our fourth series is going to deal with getting
you outside your comfort zone of college choices. For many
families, that comfort zone is actually a physical, geographic
zone. We have talked with many families who would strongly prefer
their children to stay near home to go to college—often that means
in the same city, sometimes it means within weekend-commuting
distance, and it almost always means in the same state. I saw a
statistic recently that more than 70 percent of high school
graduates go to college in their home state. Wow. We know that many
families are perfectly happy to be part of that group for a variety
of reasons, including money concerns, cultural background, safety
concerns, and general worries about sending their
less-than-perfectly-mature teenagers too far from home. However, we
are going to talk about another reason that we think so many
students stay in their home states for college, and that is the
role of guidance counselors in high schools. Over the past 40
years, I have spent a lot of time in high schools all over the U.S.
and have had a lot of chances to observe students and staff members
at work. As an outside consultant, I have worked closely with many
of those staff members—teachers, guidance counselors,
administrators, and others—and I have talked for hours and hours
with students and their parents, individually and in groups. I have
watched guidance counselors deal with students in serious
trouble—especially personal and interpersonal trouble. I have been
amazed at what students have to cope with at home and at school and
how guidance counselors are called upon to help them cope. That is
a full-time job for anyone. Perhaps that is exactly why a high
school guidance counselor cannot help your child enough when it
comes to exploring college options—especially options not located
close to home. That is not to say there are not some guidance
counselors whose high schools have allowed them to specialize in
college placement and who have become experts in the world of
college and its overwhelming number of opportunities. If your
child’s high school has such a guidance counselor, you are lucky
indeed. But that is not what is typical, in my experience. 1.
Questions To Ask Guidance Counselors If I were a parent of a high
school student now (as I have been in the last decade, three times
over) and if I were relying on a guidance counselor—or any other
college advisor at the high school—to help my child navigate the
world of college options, I would ask that person these three
questions: 1) How many colleges have you visited? This sounds like
a low hurdle, but I am convinced that many guidance counselors and
other college advisors do not have a broad background of visiting
and investigating in person a wide variety of colleges—in your home
town, in your state, in your region of the U.S., in other regions
of the U.S., and abroad. Even though your child might end up going
to college in your home state for a variety of reasons, it is not
good enough for someone to advise your child on what colleges to
consider if that person has not “seen it all”—or, at least a lot of
it. Your child’s college advisor should be able to talk about a
variety of urban, suburban, and rural college campuses from
firsthand impressions of those campuses and then to discuss whether
a beautiful campus or a certain geographic location close to or far
away from home or a particular type of setting makes any difference
to your child. Based on my own college visits, I might ask someone
trying to advise my child these questions: “Have you seen the
handsome University of Washington campus or the color of the
buildings at Stanford University or Thomas Jefferson’s realized
vision for the University of Virginia? Have you been in the
freezing cold of the University of Chicago or the sweltering heat
of Rice University? Have you been on the University of
Pennsylvania’s City-of-Brotherly-Love urban campus or Savannah
College of Art and Design’s campus in the prettiest city in the
South or the picture-perfect setting on the Thames River of the
lower-division campus of Richmond, the American International
University in London? Have you seen the grand LBJ Presidential
Library at the University of Texas or the world-class Meadows
Museum at Southern Methodist University? Have you seen idyllic
Kenyon College’s Middle Path in the middle of nowhere or majestic
Columbia University in the middle of everything?” Why do you think
that parents who can afford it take their children on the
traditional college tour so that they can see the options? Because
sometimes place means a lot. If someone has not seen, say, 150 such
places—college campuses of all sizes, locations, and settings—I
would not want that person advising my child. 2) How many colleges
have you studied at or had family and close friends and former
students study at? Yes, I know that most people (guidance
counselors and other college advisors included) probably studied at
only one or two or possibly three colleges, but were they all
pretty much the same? Ideally, someone advising my child would have
some experience—either firsthand or close secondhand—with the
variety of higher education institutions available. Remember, as we
said in earlier episodes, there are the public and private and
combination public/private institutions, two-year and four-year
institutions, liberal arts and technical schools, big universities
and small colleges, single-sex and coeducational schools,
faith-based institutions, HBCUs, military service academies, fine
arts and engineering and business schools, and more. That is a lot.
While no individual can know about each of these types of
institutions firsthand as a student, I would want someone advising
my college-bound child to know about most of these at least
secondhand—that is, by the testimony of thoughtful family members
and informed friends and trusted former students who had attended
them. If a guidance counselor or other college advisor cannot be an
expert in every individual college, he or she should at least be an
expert in the types of institutions that are available to my child.
3) How many colleges have you worked at or closely with? Most
guidance counselors and other college advisors based in high
schools have not also worked at colleges, and that’s a shame. Yes,
they were all once students in college, but that view is very
different from the view you get as an employee at a college or even
as a consultant to a college. You can learn a lot about the
operations of a college when you are working backstage, and you can
better figure out how those operations impact students. For
example, if a guidance counselor had worked with college support
services offices, it would be easier to judge what services might
realistically be available for a student with special needs. Or, if
a guidance counselor had worked with a number of college department
chairs, it would be clearer how difficult it might be for a student
to change his or her major if that student started down the wrong
path. Or, if a guidance counselor had worked with college
registrars, it would be easier to figure out how to get a student
credit for college courses taken while a student was still in high
school. Of course, all colleges are not the same. But a firsthand
dose of working at a college can sometimes go a long way toward
helping students choose a college that is a good fit. If your
guidance counselor or college advisor does not have good answers to
these questions, then get whatever additional help you might need
so that your child makes the best college choice possible. 2.
Inequity in College Counseling Recently, I read a powerful article
in The Hechinger Report, entitled “Rich School, Poor School,” by
Erin Einhorn, and the subtitle of her article tells it all: “How
the class divide is widened by gaps in counseling kids for
college.” Ms. Einhorn’s story tells the sad truth that many
professional educators know, but would like to forget, and that
many parents know instinctively. The sad truth is that there is no
equity in college counseling services for U.S. high school
students; in other words, a student’s chances of getting into a
selective college are clearly improved by attending a great high
school—public or private—where dedicated college counselors know
how to make the college applications system work for those
students. Quite often, those public schools are in relatively
wealthy suburban locations. I worked recently with a couple of
students who attended two first-rate high schools in the
metropolitan New York City area. One was a famous competitive
public high school in New York City, where only the best students
are admitted, based on their high school admissions test scores,
and where I am guessing virtually all graduates go on to college;
the other was a well-respected, academically rigorous public high
school in one of the richest towns on Long Island, where I am
guessing virtually all graduates go on to college. To be honest, I
was not impressed with the work of the college counselors in either
one. They recommended to my two students mostly colleges in New
York State, plus any colleges outside New York State that the
students had already discovered for themselves. Now, the two
schools had full-time college counselors, who had access to fancy
software that kept track of where students had applied and who, at
least, tried to keep students on a schedule that would get college
applications done on time. Of course, these students were also
supported by the strong college-going culture that is present in
such schools—schools where students spend a lot of time talking to
each other about the great colleges they are applying to and then
the great colleges they got into. It’s just not fair, I thought,
reflecting on Ms. Einhorn’s story about the vastly different
college counseling services available in a private school and a
public school not 20 miles apart in Bloomfield Hills and Detroit,
Michigan. But what is fair? Our wise principal at the Early College
public high school we co-founded in Brooklyn had an unusual
definition of “fair.” Chris Aguirre used to say, “Fair is not when
every student gets the same thing. Fair is when every student gets
what he or she needs.” Man, with that definition, low-income
students in poor urban neighborhoods should be getting three or
four times as much college counseling support as upper-middle-class
students in rich suburban high schools and private schools.
Everyone knows that it is just the opposite now. The kids who need
college counseling least actually get the most. Upper-middle-class
kids whose parents and school culture could handily make up for a
lack of counseling time and expertise benefit from the most
counseling time and expertise. Marie and I like to think that
NYCollegeChat can help make up for that lack of counseling time and
expertise—whether your child is in a large urban high school where
guidance counselors typically have their hands full or a
medium-sized suburban high school where there is a lot of
competition for college counseling services or a small rural high
school where a guidance counselor might have to wear many hats. So
what we are going to do during this fourth series is take you
around the country to different regions and spotlight some colleges
you might not have thought about for your child or indeed might not
even have known about. We are going to look at some selective
colleges for students with great grades and admissions test scores
and some not-so-selective colleges for students with just average
grades and admissions test scores. We are going to try to take you
out of your geographic comfort zone to show you some places that
might be more appealing to your child than what is right next door.
We are also going to talk about why going away could be a financial
plus for you and why going away might actually get your child into
a better college than staying at home. So tune in next week. Listen
to the podcast to find out about… The kind of personalized list of
colleges your guidance counselor should be providing for your child
What we lost when college field trips were cut out of high school
activities The pluses and minuses of online searches for colleges
you might be interested in Links to all the higher education
institutions we mention can be found on the show notes for today's
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