Admissions Blog

College Counseling: The Year in Review

Posted on December 17, 2019 by Patrick O'Connor

There are many years in the college counseling world that come and go without a lot of fanfare, but this certainly wasn’t one of them. Thanks to America’s ever-growing fascination with the college application process, counseling received more than its share of the limelight in 2019. Here are the highlights:

The Scandal Known as Varsity Blues Leave it to a small group of parents with way more dollars than sense, and a con man feigning to be an independent college counselor, to create even more angst over selective college selection than ever before. Since this story involved Hollywood, money, and some of the three schools the New York Times considers representative of the world of college admissions, way too much time and energy was devoted to understanding what this kerfuffle meant to college admissions as a whole. The average high school senior takes the SAT once and goes to college within 150 miles of home. Varsity Blues meant nothing to them. The same should have been true for the rest of us; instead, this issue is now running neck and neck with Popeye’s Spicy Chicken Sandwich for the year’s Story That Wasn’t Award.

Change to NACAC Ethics Code It made fewer headlines, but the Justice Department’s investigation into NACAC’s Code of Ethics could prove to have far more implications to the college plans of seniors than Varsity Blues could hope to. With colleges now allowed to offer incentives for students to apply early, and with colleges able to continue to pursue students who have committed to another college, the May 1 deposit date is still in effect, but may prove to have significantly less effect.

College Testing and the University of California The value of the SAT and ACT popped up in the headlines all year, as even more colleges decided test scores no longer had to be part of their application process. At year’s end, the test optional movement got a big media splash, as the University of California announced it was reviewing its testing policy. Combined with a lawsuit filed against the UCs claiming the tests are discriminatory, it’s clear that business as usual in the college application process is on its way out. Will more changes ensue?

The Harvard Case and Race Affirmative action advocates celebrated a legal victory this fall when a court ruled Harvard’s admissions procedures do, and may, use race as a factor in reviewing college applications. The case drew national attention in part because it was initiated by a group claiming Harvard didn’t admit enough students of Asian descent. It’s likely to stay in the headlines when the decision is ultimately appealed to the US Supreme Court, a group that, as it currently stands, has been known to be highly skeptical of race-based programs—meaning this year’s lower court victory could be pyrrhic at best.

Improved Research on College Counseling Academic research has never gotten its due in the world of school counseling, and that’s certainly true in the more specific field of college counseling. That trend may be changing, as a report from Harvard lays the groundwork for a more data-based approach to measure the difference counselors make in their work. The findings include an indication that counselors tend to be more effective in college counseling if the counselor was raised in the same area where they work, and, as a rule, are more helpful providing information to the student about the college the counselor attended. The report suggests this may be due to undertraining in college admissions as part of counselor education programs– to which most of the counseling world replied, no kidding. Look for more to come here.

Billions More for More Counselors, But Who Cares It’s hard to remember the need for more counselors was one of the favorite topics of the media just two years ago. A sign of American’s true indifference—or short attention span—rests with a congressional bill that provides up to $5 billion for new school counselor positions, a bill that is currently languishing in committee. Is this bill a victim of an absence of school shootings, impeachment, or both? Given what it can do, is there really any reason this bill can’t be a focus of action in 2020? That’s really up to us.

Remembering Tom Weede, and Calling on the Next Tom Weedes

Posted on July 16, 2019 by Patrick O'Connor

I could tell this was not going to be a typical meeting with a college representative. He walked into my office with absolutely no hurry, as if this was all he had to do all day, and talked about his school from the heart, not from a memory-committed checklist of things someone else told him to say. When I asked questions, he left a space between when I stopped talking, and when he started his answer, never once referring me to the school’s website, or the college catalog. This was clearly a guy who knew his school as well as he knew his middle name.

It was also notable that he didn’t talk about his school in some theoretical abstract. We do that a lot in college admissions, where we talk about a college in the third person, like it’s some kind of god. He mostly talked about the students at his school, what they were doing, what they liked about being there. He knew that’s what makes the college experience work for a student—who you go to school with. He wasn’t going to waste my time reciting scores and rankings, because Rugg’s could tell me about scores, and rankings were, well, pretty pointless. If you have time to talk with someone face-to-face, the conversation should be a giving of self, not of data, and that meant talking about things that mattered. What matters most in college is the students.

After he said everything he thought I should know, he got up and gave me his card. As I recall, he said something about how he’d like to hear from me, but the university had made it kind of hard to get hold of him, with a student aide and a secretary standing between him and every incoming call, but he urged me to persist. After he’d left, I read his card, and realized I’d just spent forty-five minutes talking to a Director of Admissions who had made a cold call to my high school.

That was my introduction to Tom Weede, who passed on earlier this month, leaving this world and our profession all the poorer. The outpouring of loss has come from all circles of our field, and it all contains one common message; Tom was the rare person who not only felt you mattered; he made sure you knew you mattered. He trusted you with his opinion, and trusted that you would step up and let him know how you felt in turn, even if you saw things differently. His advocacy in the profession was focused on students, and when he engaged you in conversation, you felt, as George Bailey once said, that he knew you all the way to your back collar button.

Tom’s come to mind quite a bit this summer, and not just because of his passing. I’ve been besieged by a number of students and parents flooding my office with requests to make college plans, and they’re all ninth and tenth graders. One father called and insisted he had to meet with me right away, since his son was a junior, and had no college plans at all. The student’s name wasn’t familiar to me, so I looked him up. Turns out he was a sophomore, but since his father called the day after school was over, calling his son a junior made things sound more important, I guess.

That’s the kind of month it’s been. One parent wants to meet to talk about “college strategy,” another one is convinced his ninth grader’s chances at graduate school are already shot because the student has no plans for this summer. It’s easy enough to get caught up in the mania the media is peddling as college readiness, but it’s never hit the ninth and tenth graders like this before. Worse, it seems to be hitting their parents, and too many of them are succumbing to the herd mentality of college angst, abandoning their post as sentinels of their children’s youth.

If there’s any remedy to this, I’d like to think it’s the calm, listening voice of the Tom Weedes that are still with us. Tom did most of his preaching to admissions officers, and none of us were smart enough to ever ask him if he’d thought about saying this to kids and families. Since similar voices are doing the same thing, it’s time to ask them to broaden their scope, before SAT flash cards become the in gift for bar mitzvahs.

Voices like Ken Anselment, Heath Einstein, and Tamara Siler do a very nice job of reminding colleagues that that the college selection process is all about the kids. What’s needed now is for them to share their insights with a larger audience, giving kids permission to be kids. It would be a great way to honor Tom’s memory. Better still, it would be the right thing to do for our world.

Thoughts and Prayers Aren’t Enough in College Admissions Either

Posted on April 22, 2019 by Patrick O'Connor

Earlier this month, I was trying to figure out what day it was. Rather than look at the calendar, I simply looked at the College Admissions Facebook page on my computer screen. There was one story about the record low admit rates at Ivy League colleges, four stories about how most colleges admit a vast majority of their applicants, and two or three reminders that it’s all about what you do in college, not where you do it.

“So” I said to myself, “it must be April 10^th.” And I was right.

There is something equally comforting and disturbing about the college admissions grieving cycle. It begins in late March, when we all bemoan it’s easier to get struck by lightning than to get admitted to a selective school. Even the recent admissions scandal, replete with movie stars and lots of cash, played right into the timing of the “ain’t it awful” phase.

Early April gives way to requests for help with aid packages and muffled cries for some kind of reform from the madness of the application process. Mid-April begins the search for schools willing to accept great kids who somehow ended up with “nowhere” to go, and late April finds us back in the trenches, asking about colleges for really bright juniors who want to study Hungarian and elephants.

This is our version of thoughts and prayers. Like legislators tackling school safety, we look at the misshapen blob college admissions has become long enough to be horrified, only to get swept away by the need to make the broken system work just one more time, if only for the benefit of next year’s hardworking seniors. Major changes are just too far out of reach, and minor changes make no palpable difference, so we sigh and carry on, hoping a thoughtful social media post or two will somehow turn the tide. Real change, it seems, is beyond our grasp.

It isn’t. Like anything else that’s out of shape, moving in a new direction requires a little bit of time, and a ton of vision. No one in this profession is short on vision; they’re stymied by how to bring that vision to life. Here are some starter ideas.

College Admission Personnel who want to open up college access have all kinds of small projects that, when regularly tended to, can take on lives of their own.

Buy lunch for someone on your student success team, and get an overview of their work. What students are doing well once they’re on campus, and which ones aren’t? Is there anything your institution can learn from the success of Georgia State, understanding that student success is far more than a cut and copy endeavor? What does any of this mean about who you’re recruiting—and, more important, if they have no idea who’s succeeding and why, why not?
If you have two counselor fly-in programs, cut it to one. Use the new-found money to hold a three-day College Counselor Workshop for any school counselor in your area with less than five years’ experience. As a rule, counselor graduate programs teach nothing meaningful about college counseling. You know the counselors who know their stuff, and you have a NACAC affiliate at your disposal. Bring them in, and let them train your local rookies.
As long as you’re at it, have coffee with the director of your graduate counseling program, and ask them if you can have a three-hour class period to talk about college admission. Most counselor educators will have the humility to admit they’ve been out of the college admissions game too long, so they’ll give you the time. Bring along two of your favorite counselors, and the grad students will be begging for more. If you don’t know what you’d do with those three hours, I have a program that’s in the box and ready to present, and you can have it.
Call a test-optional college that looks like yours and ask how it’s going. The argument that test optional is a ruse to raise average test scores means nothing to the bright kid heading to University of Chicago this fall who can’t even spell SAT. If colleges that look like yours have figured out test scores mean nothing in the application of a straight A student– and they have– maybe your school could open things up, too.

High School Counselors have eight bajillion kids on their caseloads and duties that have nothing to do with counseling. That said, find a way to get to work twenty minutes early once a week, and pick one of these projects to work on:

Shoot an email to the professional development chair of your NACAC affiliate and volunteer to be a mentor. Less than thirty graduate programs in the country devote a course to college counseling, and it’s showing. What you know about this profession will be an oasis to a new counselor, and most of the mentoring can occur through email and phone calls.
Look at your messaging about college options. Do you tell students and parents about test optional colleges, community colleges, or state colleges with amazing residential programs? Use this time to bring yourself up to speed on the paths your students aren’t taking, then put together a plan for spreading the word to parents and students.
When’s the last time you talked college with your middle school and elementary mental health partners? Opening up postsecondary options is as much a matter of changing the mindset of parents as it is presenting options to students—and if that’s starting in ninth grade, forget it. Ask your NACAC affiliate for grant opportunities to strengthen your K-8 postsecondary curriculum, and build the partnerships needed to make it work.

No one in this business was surprised last month to discover the wealthy have an advantage applying to college. What may come as a surprise is how much we can change that dynamic by throwing our hearts behind that change with twenty minutes a week, giving tangible shape to our thoughts, prayers, and deepest hopes for this profession.

The Most Essential College Admission

Posted on March 15, 2018 by Patrick O'Connor

He was on his way home from just having dropped all his classes at the local community college. Having graduated from high school sixteen months ago, every one of his postsecondary plans had failed to come to fruition, and the drive home from campus gave him time to ponder what would come next.

As it turns out, he didn’t have to ponder long. He came across a home construction site on the route home, and had always had an interest working with his hands. He swung his car up to the site, got out, and asked the first hard-hatted worker just what it might take to get a job like this. The worker turned out to be the contractor, who said that anyone who had the guts to pull up and ask was worth taking a chance on. Find yourself a good pair of boots, he was told, and come back tomorrow.

That was the beginning of a postsecondary plan that stuck. At age nineteen, he took on a job that paid $42,000, less than the median household income for his state, but far more than he would have earned working at the local sandwich shop. His brief stint at community college left him little debt to be concerned with, and while his short-term plans doubtlessly included continued residency with his parents, it wouldn’t be long before he could afford an apartment of his own—and after that, his own home.

This is a remarkable story for several reasons, but what’s most noteworthy is the response this story receives from the school counselors and college admissions officers who hear it. To nearly a person, they are convinced this young man has thrown away his future. Citing countless personal and professional histories, they speak with clear certainty that he will regret his choice by the time he’s twenty-eight, only to find himself saddled with a mortgage or the well-being of a young family, unable to go back to college on a full-time basis, and therefore destined to be trapped in a job that appeared to pay well in his youth, but will limit his opportunities later in life.

This story comes to mind as we are weeks away from headlines that decry a different kind of postsecondary story: the headlines of another round of record applicants to a handful of the most selective colleges in America, where statistics suggest admission is less likely than being struck by lightning. Every seat in these colleges will be filled this fall by a promising, eager student, but the headlines turn their attention to the vast majority of exceptionally bright students who also had the potential to do great things at these colleges—except the college ran out of room before they ran out of quality applicants.

The way most stories tell it, these hapless applicants are victims of the postsecondary wheel of fortune, destined to try and make do at a college that likely is still highly regarded, but not quite as highly regarded, forced to devote part of their lives to perpetually looking back, and wondering what would have been if they had been one of the fortunate few whose cell phone had played the school’s fight song when they opened their emailed admissions decision.

Much has been written about the need for reform in America’s higher education system, and while there is ample agreement that the current system has need of correction, there is no clear consensus what that correction should look like. Not surprisingly, testing companies insist the answer is more testing at an earlier age, while advocates of test-less admissions policies are convinced their approach is the only one that will open the gates of higher learning to a wider audience. Others advocate for stackable college credentials that measure a semester’s worth of work as the only way to make college affordable, while developmental purists fret this approach would reduce the developmental benefits young people receive in the delayed gratification that is part of the four-year college experience.

These arguments make for interesting intellectual exercises, but they do little to help the students who had to “settle” for studying at the honors college of a four-year public university, or the students whose knowledge of geometry put college out of reach, but made them experts at framing walls and cutting pipe. Our current system of higher education has many challenges, but the biggest one lies in changing the perception that there can only be a handful of winners once high school is over. Different talents and different needs require different plans, and honoring those differences doesn’t require us to sacrifice the quality of the unum, simply because we honor the talents of the pluribus.

Our country is supposed to be a tent of opportunity. Let’s advance that idea by seeing all our high school graduates as residents of the big top.