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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Off to an auspicious start (private, jr year).  Got us focussed, expanded DC's list, talked through testing schedule, gave advice to DC re choice of recommenders, will keep DC on task/timeline.  (Glad to outsource that!)  Will ultimately write the school's letter and zi feel confident she'll do a good job.

DH and I were both public school kids and are surprised at how much help the school provides.  That said, the process seems more complicated and DC will be considering a broader range of schools than we did.[/quote]

I've been very impressed with my the experience of my kids' friends at private schools. DCs both attended private schools for ES, so this is not going to be about bashing. I do think that private high schools are judged by some (not all) parents on exmissions, so the privates put more effort into making everybody happy and getting good results among the top private universities. Whereas the public schools brag more about the percent going to college overall, closing the gap, and helping kids find financial aid. DC's friend at Sidwell had seminar thing junior year, which is way more than my public kids got/are getting.  I went to one college  presentation in the evening at our MCPS public and there was a lot of great information about SATs and financial aid, which was surely really valuable to the parents attending, but there was very little (nothing? can't remember, haven't gone back for DC2) about strategizing for a top 10 university. I do get several emails from our MCPS high school every week about all the colleges that are visiting, organized tours of HBCs, and about dozens of scholarship opportunities (adds up to hundreds of scholarship opportunities every semester). If kids want to check out one of the top private universities, though, these aren't visiting our public HS and these kids will need to attend one of the area presentations at a hotel or private school.

Not complaining, though, because I think the public counselors really do serve the vast majority of their kids. DC1 got into a really great (top 5) university because we put a lot of research into it ourselves and don't need FA. We're in the middle of planning DC2's spring break college road trip as we speak. The one risk I think is that first generation college kids at our public probably wouldn't even consider the top private universities because, yes they are being pushed to UMCP like my kids were, but also because they don't understand the application process, they don't understand FA at the top private universities, and the public high school college counselors aren't really covering these things.

Yes, the process is much more complicated! The Common App, for one, means that you can apply to lots more schools fairly easily, but that also means that you need to think about more schools. Competition is much tougher because of population growth and the aforesaid Common App increasing applications. When I went through this, there was no SAT prep or APs in our smallish town (although apparently these things did exist in NYC and elsewhere at the time). SAT IIs didn't exist. [/quote]

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