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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Just a quick note about our positive experience with college counseling.

First, I think there is not a family who has gone through the process that does not respect the very difficult work of our college advisors.  Our children are very grateful for the help the college advisors gave them over the years, and I know many other students and families are as well.  Thank you for doing that job.

The students and the college advisors confer independently - without parents - about their essays, completing the common app, requesting and securing teacher recommendations, and preparing any supplementary materials.  Literally, as a parent at our school, you are expected to trust that your student - with the gentle guidance of their college advisor - is not only capable of doing all of that independently, but will get it right.  We, as parents, had little to no involvement with any of that.

The students draft and write their own essays, and common app responses, and the college advisors read them over and make suggestions for improvement.  The students also independently decide, sometimes with the advisor's help, who their teacher recommenders will be, and go about the process of securing those recommendations themselves.

There are two meetings that involve the parents, student, and college advisors.  One is to go over the student's college choices, which the school prefers that you limit to eight total; and to get a sense of what the student's top choices would be.

The other meeting is closer to the application deadline, for both early and regular admission.  By this second meeting, in the early application round, the student must have already informed the college counselors of which one school they will apply to in the early round.

At this meeting, then, the college advisor is able to say "there are X number of your classmates who also intend to apply to W college early."  They are also able to tell you where, numerically, your standardized test scores and gpa rank compared to those other applicants.  The college advisors will not tell you who the other applicants are, or obviously, what their specific standardized test scores or gpa are.

This exercise is very helpful in letting you know, for example, that your gpa is last among the students applying to X college, and your test scores fall somewhere in the middle. The college advisors will also be able to tell you how many students are applying to other colleges on your list, and where your scores and gpa rank in that subset.  Again, this is very helpful in conveying to a student that 15 classmates are applying to Z early, but only 1 is applying to A.

What you cannot know, and the school is very good about confidentiality, is what other accomplishments or attributes the students in a particular applicant subset bring to their applications.

The students are also discrete, and I think they rarely, if ever, discuss gpa or test scores with one another.  They are also discrete about their applications and admissions, although the good and bad news still eventually gets out about particular decisions.[/quote]

It sounds like you had a great experience.  We did not.  We had one meeting with the counselor, who gave no reasons for schools suggested and was completely unhelpful with respect to essays.  Moreover, the counselor predicted our child's likelihood of success without giving any rationale.  Fortunately, the prediction turned out to be wrong.  While we are pleased with the result, I'm glad we won't have to go through the process again.       [/quote]

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