Questions: who will help you, what are the odds, why does it matter?

Michelangelo's David

David and Goliath, one of the most well known narratives in history, has recently received an update from Malcolm Gladwell. His book challenges some of the assumptions we hold about who was best prepared to triumph on that famous day. He then uses this retelling of the story and applies it to various fields of endeavor in the world we live in now. I hope to do the same thing here in examining the college admission process.

But first I need to set the scene. On one side there are millions; on the other, there are thousands.  In terms of sheer numbers there is no contest. (Perhaps a better analogy might be the Spartans trying to hold off the Persians at Thermopylae.)

In fall 2013, record 21.8 million students are expected to attend American colleges and universities, constituting an increase of about 6.5 million since fall 2000 . Of these, several million will be starting out at colleges and universities across the US in August and September of this year.

On the other side, there are the 4000 or so colleges and universities. If I am generous and estimate that each school has an admission office that has 20 people reading applications then they can field 80,000 people to sort through the millions of student applications.

Some colleges and universities use numbers to select student. A certain Rank in Class and SAT will guarantee admission. Community colleges and for profit schools mostly have open admission and look for those students who can pay or receive financial aid.  These groups of school can, therefore, largely automate the process of selection once an application has been submitted.

On the other hand, for those who have worked in selective admission, the job is wonderful but daunting. Day in and say out during reading season the admission officer has to go through dozens of applications each day. It’s incredibly exciting, draining, and stressful. But letting in wonderful students gives great satisfaction. The process is time intensive. Application Readers look beyond scores and GPA and program, although these comprise the most important selection criteria. But given the deluge of applications, they do take time (typically about 1015 minutes) to read the essays, the list of activities, recommendations and supplements in order to choose student who fit the institutional goals other colleges and universities have established for themselves. This means that they may well turn down students with great numbers who do not demonstrate through a holistic evaluation, that they will add to the class in ways that are not easily measured by tests. Students with special talents, or students from under-represented groups, or a host of other factors (legacies, athletes etc.) come into the mix in selective a class from a group of very talented students.

From this perspective, it’s the students who are the Goliaths, the huge army against the overworked admission offices. And as far as these stats go, this is accurate. But stats are one thing and context is another.

In a previous entry, I tried to demonstrate that the influx of money, marketing and manpower (and perhaps even more, womanpower) into the world of admission offices across the world has transformed the educational landscape. It’s now a multibillion-dollar business (that is the correct word these days).

For some colleges and universities the dramatic growth keeps them at the top of the rankings; for others, it keeps them afloat financially; for many, it is somewhere in between these two poles.  Public, private, and for-profit designations do not matter when it comes to making sure the schools find, recruit, and then enroll the number and kinds of students that schools they are looking for (or a better word might be ‘need’). Selective colleges and universities have increased their budgets, staff, and efforts to increase applications and selectivity. And they have been exceptionally successful in doing so. Applications have nearly doubled at the most selective schools in the last decade.

In reality, however, the army of students applying to schools is not an army at all. Instead it is a large group of individual students trying to find the best place to get an education. It’s as if each student must confront the admission office, if not quite alone, then with a small set of people there for support: parents, guidance and college counselors, teachers, mentors, friends, and in increasingly large numbers, private counselors and testing prep centers or tutors.

For the most part then, it is students and a few people from secondary schools who have the job of making sure the transcripts, recommendations and all other forms are submitted on time and filled out in ways that speak to the individual accomplishments and personality of the students. Although the students do have the support of their secondary schools looking at the process from the student perspective the stats shift and so perhaps does the designation of who has the advantage in the admission process. What follows are some stats and some personal stories from the perspective of those whose job consists of helping students enroll in a college or university:  guidance and college counselors.

Secondary schools and college counselors

  

If administrative positions and increased staff have been the biggest growth that at colleges and universities over the past generation, what has happened on the other side? While faculty positions at many colleges and universities have remained flat, the number of administrators has increased over 40% over the last generation. Admission offices and many other offices  (student life and counseling centers, for example) have added re-enforcements. They have the tools and the staff to accomplish the mission that is central to their mission: enroll the right number and right kind of students they need.

 One simile that might help would be to recall the Cold War. The US, with its free markets and its huge budgets for defense simply overwhelmed the other side. The central government in the Soviet Union could not keep up. While I am not trying to say that public education is getting ready to fail or that it is like a communist state, it is accurate to say in the arms race with colleges and universities they are in no position to match what colleges and universities have spent and continue to spend to keep students flowing through their campuses.

 It’s made selective admission incredibly difficult and it’s made the costs of education soar. The debt incurred by students is now greater than the debt level that brought on the housing crisis. This means that things will need to change in education, but that will not happen any time soon unless innovative solutions are adopted (giving credit for MOOCs for example) or unless what the writer Nassim Taleb calls a black swan descends are forces radical change. (A black swan is an unexpected and unpredictable event --anything from a Tsunami to 9/11 to a government coup--that changes the way a country or the world as a whole must function.)

The financial hits the country took due to the housing debacle still affect the majority of those who depend on public education to prepare them for their futures. The middle class has seen little increase in income while costs at almost all colleges and universities have continued to rise dramatically each year. On top of this, public secondary education is in a weak position to help aid the individual students and parents find the best school for the best price. What follows are some stats and snippets from articles published recently on the pressure counselors are under to help students find the right college for their students.

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Fiscal year 2011 marked the first decrease in per student public education spending since the U.S. Census Bureau began collecting data on an annual basis in 1977, according to new statistics released today (dollars not adjusted for inflation). The 50 states and the District of Columbia spent $10,560 per student in 2011, down 0.4 percent from 2010.

What do these cuts and loss of support mean to those students looking to get help with the college process from the professionals hired to help them in their schools?

“ Although counselors' case loads have decreased in recent years, the national average remains nearly twice the recommended rate set by the American Counseling Association, with each counselor seeing 471 students on average. Only two states have ratios that meet the recommended caseload of 250 students for each counselor: Vermont, at 1:235, and Wyoming, at 1:200, according to data from the American School Counselor Association.

The situation is much worse in California, which at 1:1016 has the highest counselor-to-student ratio in the nation. But the numbers have spiked because California, like many other states, has no set mandate for student-to-counselor ratios.”

 “The vast majority ofAmerican high school students receive little guidance from college counselors. According to a 2009 U.S. Department of Education survey, public school students receive an average of 38 minutes of college admissions advice from their guidance counselors—a tiny percentage of the time needed to navigate a process that is challenging for even the most highly educated families. Effective college guidance for low-income students involves a host of tasks, including helping students to identify college matches that offer robust support structures and adequate funding; working with students as they draft and revise personal essays; arranging campus visits; and providing individualized guidance to students and families through the financial aid process.”

"There should be more educated guidance counselors who think outside the box: In high schools, where guidance counselors often act as college counselor, the average guidance counselor is responsible for 239 students,the ASCA reports. Those counselors must be well versed in the over 4,000 American colleges so they can find the perfect match for each student. Too few counselors means there are too many uninformed students navigating the difficult application process on their own.

An even bigger problem is college counselors with too little training. Often, overloaded counselors will point students in the direction of a school that many of their peers are applying to but ignore lesser-known schools far away from their home state. “There are plenty of colleges out there who aren’t getting as many applicants as they maybe deserve,” says Rosier. Those schools could end up being the best match, but a counselor may not be familiar with them. Requiring all college counselors to verse themselves in a variety of schools would benefit students."

If it appears that I am critiquing all counselors by quoting these sources I am not. I have worked closely with hundreds of counselors over the years and they are among the most dedicated and passionate advocates for education and students in the world. They spend untold extra hours helping students and have transformed lives by finding great schools, scholarships, and by providing advice and insight they that student will carry with them through the rest of their lives. The efforts on the part of counselors on behalf of their students have certainly altered the way I have made decisions on certain students when I worked in admission. Their comments, updates and advocacy made my job transcend the emphasis on emphasis on focusing too narrowly on GPA, SAT and other numbers. They convinced me at ties to take a risk (and in a very few cases not to take what looked great on paper) and educated me about schools and more importantly the human beings who are behind the numbers.

Joshua Stecke can serve as one example. In a recent article in the Atlantic, his efforts to help a student, Michael Forbes gets lots of praise. Michael is anything but an ordinary student. Homeless, with a mother battling cancer, with two younger siblings to take care of and no father in the picture, he had ore challenges than many will face in a lifetime. Josh encourages Mike to aim high and helps him to apply to highly selective schools:

“Throughout his two years of work with Mike, Josh saw himself in the traditional role of a college advisor: marshaling his college admissions knowledge and experience to guide Mike through the application process. He had helped Mike make lists, fill out the Common Application, write essays, prepare for interviews, and complete the endless legwork required of low-income students—including assembling financial documents to confirm eligibility for the state’s opportunity programs, collecting third party letters attesting that Mike’s father did not contribute to the family’s income, and completing federal, state, and institutional aid applications. Now, with all the forms submitted and the acceptance letters received, Mike needed a different kind of guidance from Josh. He needed help making a choice that set his dreams for his future against his responsibility for his family.”

The story ends well, with Michael getting a full ride to a great school and then doing exceptional well academically in his first year. To me both Mike and Josh are heroes. Mike would never have been where he is now without Josh. Josh isn’t alone. There are many counselors who have changed lives in the help they have given to students. All of us in the country owe them a debt of thanks for doing so much for often less than great pay.

In addition to the heart-warming story, however, the article gives some data that underscores what many students and parents have discovered about the average interactions between counselors and students:

“The vast majority of American high school students receive little guidance from college counselors. According to a 2009 U.S. Department of Education survey, public school students receive an average of 38 minutes of college admissions advice from their guidance counselors—a tiny percentage of the time needed to navigate a process that is challenging for even the most highly educated families. Effective college guidance for low-income students involves a host of tasks, including helping students to identify college matches that offer robust support structures and adequate funding; working with students as they draft and revise personal essays; arranging campus visits; and providing individualized guidance to students and families through the financial aid process.”

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From TS Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Given the data about counselors and schools, here is a math thought experiment. If a counselor has over 200 students to guide, and each student applies to 6 schools, and, in addition,  each needs help selecting which schools and forms and test requirements how much time is there for help with things like essays and resumes and just plain conversation about what makes for a great education? I don’t have a number in mind but the answer, unless the counselor does not sleep and has no life whatsoever, is not that much. It isn't that counselors don’t want to help; it’s simply that they are far outnumbered. And this overwhelming caseload is something I have talked about with counselors this year.

This past fall I was asked to talk to counselors and teachers in a workshop for a very well respected public school district. The schools are great and many students apply to Ivys and top Public Ivies. The topic centered on recommendations. Rather than simply lecture on the topic, (I have presented 2 times at NACAC on the topic, so I do have a lot to say on this topic), I decided to try to have a conversation.

I asked what the counselors’ approach should be with students. Should they give equal time to every student or should they pick those who could benefit most from their expertise and spend more time with them. Josh, the counselor I cited above, spent an immense amount of time and effort helping this one very special student. What the story does not detail is that in doing so it meant he could not have possibly done the same for all the other students he is assigned to counsel. He picked the one who had a chance to get beyond the typical and in doing so he changed the student's future. 

Working with a low-income students like this might be worth all the extra effort, but it also means other students may not have the same access and help. The same can be said for counselors that try to help the stars of their schools. In the fall, I commented to the  counselors that they would likely need to spend extra time trying to get their star students into top rated colleges and universities. With acceptance rates below 10%, students who present near perfect numbers are nothing special. In order to get in there needs to be something special. This something could be, for example, a counselor recommendation. 

I  have read many that were beautifully crafted documents that made a case for a student and in so doing moved the student from the maybe pile to an easy yes. But taking the time to craft such a detailed recommendation takes a lot of research and effort. If the counselors go all out to help those applying to the most selective schools it will mean they will not have the same amount of time for those further down the academic spectrum. Or should the counselor give less time to the students at the top since they will certainly get into a good school? instead, should they fight for those who have overcomes odds or have specific situations that might heave hurt their grades and performance? Should they be helping those who may be low income more than those who may have a solid family and support and who desperately wants to get into an Ivy or Stanford or who would benefit greatly from an academic scholarship? My audience that day was very divided on how to approach the process and the answers to these questions. Some said every student deserves the same attention. Others said they needed to fight for the top kids because if they didn’t then they would not get in. And others thought that the student who faces special challenges deserved the most time. All of these responses are 'right' but all of them can't happen. There simply isn’t enough time. I imagine if I asked the same question to parents and student I would also get different 'right' answers, depending of the individual circumstances they are living in.

But while some schools do not have enough staff and funding, others do. Students get the opportunity to meet often with college counselors that often have great experience, attend conferences to learn and network, and often have the emails and ears of some admission deans, At these schools college counselors often look over every one of the their students’ essays. I know some who do this and they provide great feedback. Many of them have seen hundreds of students pass through their schools and have seen the words of the best and brightest. They use this knowledge and experience to help their current crop of applicants get into top schools. 

For students who have such counselors, they are lucky indeed. But many of these counselors work at private or boarding schools. Their caseload is usually not tiny but it is small enough they can give the time and attention to each student. At other schools, however, counselors may have several hundred students they oversee through the admission process.  These counselors do not have the time to devote to all these students and once again the issue of fairness arises. Are those who attend a private of boarding school at an advantage in the admission process? Certainly in terms of one on one advice, they may get more comprehensive information and more direct feedback. The private and boarding schools know that placement at top schools is one of the reasons parents will pay significant sums for their son or daughter’s secondary education. I will say, however, that most admission readers try to give a push to those students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds and attend schools that are not all that great. But what often gets left out is this: Those who comprise the majority of students applying to selective schools attend public schools which are often quite good in terms of AP classes and extracurricular activities often don’t have a big enough counseling staff to provide hours and hours of personalized help.

For many middle class families they must negotiate a lot of the seemingly overwhelming choices and options and deadlines and essays in ways the previous generations never did. Many students now take SAT I, SAT II, ACT tests, take many APs, so lots of Saturdays are spent taking the tests or preparing to take the tests. In addition, students’ lives are far more structured than a generation ago. They go from sports practice to meetings for activities to community service to stacks of mail and hundreds of emails and tweets and Instagram and blogs from colleges. It is a high stakes game in many people’s estimation with the future of a student on the line. But the fact is as I have said before, it isn't the school that matters as much as the performance in college that counts. And the preparation for an increasingly competitive job market. But there is no doubt the stress is high and the odds seem overwhelming at times. Tense conversations take place over dinner. “Have you” questions often dominate the discussions. It’s hard being a student trying to shine for selective colleges and universities.

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There are a few things a student can do to help themselves and their counselors. The first is pretty simple. Read all the emails the counseling office send out and give full attention and any college workshops the counseling office offers. Don’t expect them to do your job. Students need to be on top of the process. Those students who do not make much of an effort to reach out to their counselors should not expect them to do much to reach out to students. Those who come in near a deadline and say could they put together an application packet and recommendation are not thought of kindly by most counselors. If a student has talked with a counselor in a way that demonstrates interest, respect and a desire to follow advice, then that student has helped themselves and the counselor too. 

No matter how good a student is he or she does not ‘deserve’ special treatment because of an SAT score or a GPA. It’s the attributes of character and that matter more in life and in creating relationships with people who might then be willing to put in extra time to help a student. Humility, kindness and sometimes cookies or chocolate usually go a long way. Students, therefore, should start the college search and application process early (not in preschool but not in December of the senior year). They may give some feedback, but the hours it often takes to craft on essay simply is not built into the job many counselors have.

In subsequent entries I will write about other people who can play a significant role in helping students apply and get accepted to schools which best fit the student’s abilities and interests. Next up: teachers.