Advice for Counselors

Headline: When good kids get bad advice on college
Byline: Teresa Mendez Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Date: 05/31/2005

Kimberly Cummins made headlines last October when she was told by her
New York City high school that she could not apply to Harvard
University.

Confused and indignant, she pressed for an explanation. Boys and Girls
High School in Brooklyn, she says she was told by her college
counselor, allows only its top five students to apply to the Ivy
League. With an 86.6 GPA, Kimberly was ranked 11th.

But Harvard was her dream - even though she knew admission was far from
a sure thing.

Kimberly's story is a dramatic example of a scenario that's played out
in public and private high schools across the country: College
counselors, often with the best of intentions, advise their students to
aim low.

The reason may be unofficial school policy, as Kimberly says was her
case. (Or a misunderstanding, as her school described it.)

By other accounts, some counselors simply aren't accustomed to sending
students out of state for college. Or else they may hope, through
careful vetting, to boost the number of graduates they place in elite
schools.

Most of the time, it's an honest attempt to insulate students from
exaggerated expectations and crushing disappointment.

Yet in trying to quantify an increasingly unpredictable process, some
counselors are turning to numbers, at times placing undue weight on
factors like GPA and SAT scores, when recommending where kids should
apply.

That may shortchange some students.

"There are so many subtleties and unmeasurables" that a student brings
to the table, says Lloyd Thacker, executive director of the Education
Conservancy in Portland, Ore., and author of "College Unranked:
Affirming Educational Values in College Admissions." The intangible set
of qualities he calls "studenthood," for example: curiosity,
imagination, hard work, passion for learning. "You can't quantify them
simply and you can't rank them," he says.

But some of the instances in which student aspiration is discouraged
may also reflect a larger issue: overextended college counselors.

In 2003, the US Department of Education reported one counselor for
every 478 public high school students. The ratio is even worse in urban
schools and low-income schools. At one Los Angeles public school,
researchers found a student-to- counselor ratio of 5,000:1.

It's these very schools, though, where a college counselor is most
important - and influential - and where even muted or unintentional
discouragement can have a deep impact.

When Kimberly was told that she couldn't apply to Harvard, her mother,
an immigrant from Barbados, and her older sister, a law student at New
York University, immediately stepped in. They negotiated with school
and district officials and contacted a newspaper and nonprofit advocacy
group.

But many students lack such a backstop. "What you're faced with in
urban districts like Boston or New York City is a situation where
students don't have someone else to advocate for them," says Greg
Johnson, executive director of Bottom Line, a nonprofit in Boston that
helps get low-income and first-generation students into college.

Still, students of all types could be at risk of getting discouraging
messages from their guidance counselors.

A father from Albany, N.Y., recently posted a message labeled "Your GC
[guidance counselor] may be steering you wrong" on the discussion board
of collegeconfidential.com, a website with admissions advice. It drew
over 100 responses.

In his sophomore year, this man's son was told that his 83 average and
1200 SAT scores left him no chance of admission to a four-year college.
His counselor advised him to look into a community college or technical
school.

"The GC was not totally wrong," his father wrote on the discussion
board. "Our kid applied to 19 colleges and our son knew as well as we
that he stood almost no chance of getting into 15 of them."

In the end, however, the young man was admitted to five schools -
including highly ranked Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y.,
which he plans to attend.

Sometimes counselors simply don't understand student ambitions.

At Derby High School, a 2,400-student suburban school in Kansas, Logan
Runyon faced skepticism and resistance when he expressed interest in
out-of-state colleges.

Logan's transcript was packed with challenging college prep courses. He
graduated with a 3.98 GPA, and had earned a 1460 on the SAT. He wanted
to go to the kind of prestigious school where such numbers would be the
norm.

But for his counselors, "a postsecondary education, whether it's gotten
at Butler Community College or at Duke, is the same," says Logan's
mother, Karen.

Undeterred by his counselors' lack of enthusiasm, Logan aimed at some
of the country's most selective schools and was accepted at several,
including his dream school, Duke University in Durham, N.C., where he
ended up enrolling.

But for every counselor who offers unfortunate advice, there are many
more who do their best at a very difficult job. Even under the best of
circumstances, point out those familiar with the process, college
advising is a balancing act.

Counselors must be pragmatic about students' chances without becoming
pessimistic. They must nudge them to be realistic while remaining
encouraging.

Hard as they try, there are always students and parents who feel
they've been ill advised. Often, says Harvard admissions director
Marlyn McGrath Lewis, what these families mean is "the counselor didn't
have a crystal ball."

Every year there are success stories, students who made it into their
dream schools, despite middling numbers and incredulous counselors.

Yet counselors maintain that the admissions process isn't a complete
mystery. "Just having the numbers and scores isn't enough" to guarantee
admission to an Ivy-caliber school, says Michele Hernandez, a former
assistant director of admissions at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H.,
and currently a private consultant in Portland, Ore. "But not having
the numbers and scores, you don't have much of a chance, either."

In Kimberly's case, her early-decision application to Harvard was
deferred and then she was rejected in the regular decision pool. At
Yale she landed on the wait list. Finally she settled on the University
of Michigan - sometimes called a "public Ivy" - where she was offered a
generous scholarship. It would seem that the Ivy League had been a
realistic goal for her.

Kimberly says there is no ill will between her and the staff at Boys
and Girls High School. (Her counselor asked not to be a part of this
story.)

She says she understands that counselors and schools "have opinions and
they have experience." But the way she sees it, "you just have to apply
where you feel comfortable and go from there."