The Important College Question That Goes Unanswered

By: Patrick O'Connor

School has just started, and I’m already disappointed.

It’s not because this is going to be a difficult year for my students applying to college. Admission to well-known colleges will be a challenge, but with a small decline in the size of this year’s senior class, opportunities for admission may just go up a bit.

It has nothing to do with families needing help paying for college.  Even with the ups and downs of the stock market, colleges are finding ways to offer more assistance than ever before to families in need.

And it certainly isn’t the quality of the students I’m talking with.  They’re more involved, more focused, and as a whole, more calm about college than most students I’ve known in past years.

So what is the cause of my disappointment?  I didn’t get an answer to my question.

There I was, in the Detroit studio audience of the MSNBC special “Making the Grade” that was broadcast live to the nation last month.  The topic was getting America’s students college-ready, and they asked for questions from the audience.  I raised my hand, told the producer my question, and 30 seconds later, I was on national TV.

“We all realize college is important” I said (I was a little nervous, so I think that’s what I said).  “Yet out of all the school counselor training programs in America, only one requires counselors to take a course in college advising.  What’s it going to take to get everyone else on board?”

To be sure, someone said something after my question—it’s just that what he said didn’t answer my question.  He talked about how getting into college wasn’t a problem anymore, thanks to so many colleges offering online classes.

Since you don’t get to rebut anyone on national television, I took my seat, knowing I’ll have to wait a little longer for a real response.

This wasn’t the first time this has happened.  For the better part of six years, I have talked to counselors; the counselor educators who run counselor training programs; state legislators, and Congress and asked them the same question.  If college is so important, why don’t we train counselors how to help students prepare, apply, and pay for college?

If two-thirds of the young adults in a recent poll said their school counselor was of little or no help choosing a college, why aren’t we helping counselors give better help to our students, the future citizens and workforce of our country?

If 95 percent of the new counselors in a 2007 poll said they thought a college counseling class should be part of counselor training, and over 60 percent said the class should be required of all counselors, why isn’t college counseling taught to every counselor, now?

Like every school counselor, a big part of my job is giving answers to students and families when they don’t know where to turn for college help.  If no one shows me where to find those answers, how much of a difference can I make in the life of a young person, no matter how much I care?

Everyone I talk to understands this is a problem, but no one seems to want to do anything about it.

Come next spring, college-bound seniors will have an answer to their biggest college question, “Where will I be going next year?”

By that time, I sure hope I have an answer to mine.________________________________________________

Patrick O’Connor’s new college guide, College is Yours 2.0, offers a better way to apply to college.  It’s available now through Amazon.com, and discounts are available for school group purchases.

Coming Back for a Change

By Patrick O'Connor    

The last week of August finds some school counselors saying goodbye to summer, while others have been hard at work for at least the last two weeks.  It’s hard to believe school can be in full swing for so many at such an early date, but that’s part of the change in our world we have to get used to…

…and if any group should be ready to make the most out of change, it’s school counselors.  Most of what we do is all about change; we work with students to change their academic behaviors to lead to better grades; we support parents as they look for ways to change the way they help their children; we offer new ideas to students, parents, and teachers as they try as students try to move beyond the past and build more solid futures.

Our training and experience tell us that change is often a challenge.  The need to change often comes when we’re dealing with a million other issues, and since change can challenge the way our clients see the world, it can be uncomfortable; this is why so many people decide it’s easier to stick with an imperfect status quo than build a different future.  Our clients tell us this in both their words, and especially in their actions; if every client we’d ever met simply did what they said they would do, there’s a good chance our world would be vastly improved, and we may even be out of work.

Knowing the challenge of change, it’s important for us to model the behaviors we like to see in our clients—and there’s no time like the present.  Settling back in to school, we often remember a part of the job we’d forgotten about over the summer, a task that may have nothing to do with counseling, and a chore we’d really like to get rid of.

On the other hand, it could be we look at a specific program we’ve developed for our students and think, “This could be better, or different.”  It may be the handouts need to be updated, or the entire program put on the school’s counseling web site—then again, it may be that your counseling office needs a web site in the first place!

In the interest of leading by example, now is the time to take five minutes and ask ourselves the questions we often ask our clients:

If there were one thing I would change about my workplace that I can change, what would that be?  How would I change it?  What would I need to change it?  When would I change it?  Who could I ask to help me change it? How would I know it’s been changed?

This is a busy time, and resources may seem to be in short supply—but change indeed can be inconvenient in its timing, and the road to being better can bring its twists and turns.

Still, there’s nothing more inspiring to many students than to know they aren’t alone in their quest to finding something better. As the new school year begins, now could be the best time to change the motto of the school counseling office to Lead by Example.

Enjoy the challenge of this great school year.

The Reason you should do What Nobody Else Does

By Patrick.O'Connor

A high school junior was getting ready to attend a college fair, so she stopped by her school counselor’s office to get some advice on how to prepare.  They talked about the colleges she might want to talk to, the questions she should ask, and the importance of writing down the answers each college gave her.

The counselor then suggested the student take a copy of her transcript along to show to the college admission officers.  “It will give them a sense of what you’ve done, and they can offer suggestions on what you can take next year.”

“Does anyone else do this?” the girl asked.

“No” the counselor responded, “but you should.”

The week after the college fair, the girl’s mother came by the counseling office.  “Thank you so much for talking to my daughter before the college fair.  The colleges were impressed by the questions she asked, she felt more confident, and after she showed them her transcript, one college even said they’d most likely offer her a scholarship worth $68,000.”

The key to this student’s success lies in three simple steps:

She planned ahead.  By paying attention to school announcement and counselor e-mails, the student had ample time to know the college fair was coming.  This gave her plenty of time to prepare for the event.

She asked for help.  Part of her preparation was realizing she didn’t know what to do, but because she had plenty of time before the event, she was able to get the assistance she needed—and was able to do so without putting the counselor in a time crunch.

She acted on the advice she was given.  It would have been easy enough to thank the counselor, walk out of the office, and forget what his advice was.  It also would have been easy enough for her to say “Is he serious?  I’m not going to be the only one to take a transcript to the college fair!” But she knew her counselor well enough to trust his advice, and felt confident enough to do what she needed to do to take care of herself—and that confidence made all the difference.

In about a month, many seniors will start to panic, and decide it’s time for desperate measures:  mailing homemade chocolate chip cookies to the admissions office; renting billboard space on every freeway that leads to the college, to make sure the rep reading your application knows your name and face; signing up for 9 clubs at the start of senior year.

Instead of panicking in a month, sit down two weeks from now and think about the next steps you need to take on your college path.  Once that’s done, seek out the help you need to complete that work, then take action.  This may not bring the same adrenaline rush as writing your college essays ten minutes before they’re due, but in the hurricane that college admissions can become, there’s a lot to be said for operating from the center that’s the calm of the storm.

Why College Access is Still Not Diverse

By Patrick O'Connor


In their well-researched book, No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal:  Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford pay considerable attention to the academic achievement gap between races and social classes.  While the authors recognize it will take significant resources and ample time to succeed in closing this gap, an immediate, affordable opportunity exists to improve the quality of academic preparation and postsecondary planning for all students, especially poor students and many students of color.

The need for improved college admission counseling is widely known and well documented. Data to support these concerns was presented in a recent study by Public Agenda, where a majority of young adults felt their school counselor was of little or no help in providing information about good college choices or applying to college.

What is not known is that a vast majority of school counselors, especially public school counselors, do not receive any meaningful training in working with students and families in college admission counseling.  The American School Counseling Association identifies 466 college-based programs that offer graduate training in school counseling, but the National Association for College Admission Counseling lists only 42 degree granting programs that offer a course in college admission counseling—and only one of them is known to require the course of all graduates.

The results of this policy decision are clear, and the policy clearly disadvantages large groups of underserved students.  Affluent private schools often hire former admissions officers from well-known colleges to serve as their college admission counselors, giving students and families insights into the preparation, process, and strategies needed to make strong college choices based on the student’s needs and interests.

Similarly, public schools in communities where college attendance is an expectation—most often in the suburbs-- devote substantial funds to providing training in college admission counseling for their school counselors.  Through professional workshops, conferences and visits to college campuses, these counselors develop an understanding of the need to tailor college choice to student’s interests, abilities and needs, and become familiar with a wide array of colleges—skills all counselors should have learned in graduate school.

At the same time, counselors in urban public schools typically have larger numbers of students to work with and smaller budgets to spend.  The same can be said of counselors in rural schools, who have the added limitation of being miles away from most colleges and the location of most conferences.  This not only gives these counselors fewer funds to spend on professional development, but it offers them less opportunity, since principals are unwilling to let their lone counselor leave the building.


Combined, these factors raise the likelihood that students in rural and urban areas—the students who play a vital role in making college campuses diverse-- will be less supported in college choice and unsuccessful in college.  These factors increase the chances the underserved student will drop out of college, with only lowered self-esteem, insufficient job skills, and untenable student loans as memories of the experience.

The absence of college admissions training and its subsequent consequences have been raised with a number of stakeholders, and all express sympathy for the problem, but none wish to correct it.  College professors who run counselor training programs often deride college admission counseling as “not real counseling”, but something akin to academic advising, a simplistic conclusion that is counter to the experiences of the counselors they educate.

The irony is that counselors want this training.  A poll of new counselors in Michiganindicated 95 percent of new counselors polled thought a course in college admission counseling should be offered in graduate school, and 61 percent thought it should be mandatory.  Since many colleges offering the course are willing to share the course syllabus and other materials at no charge, replacing an elective course in graduate school programs with this needed class could be done swiftly and economically.

All school counselors care deeply about their students, but without proper, in-depth graduate school training in the college admission process for school counselors at all grade levels, well meaning counselors can only do so much—and they are the first to admit more is needed.  The long standing paucity of college admission training will continue to contribute to the equally well-established academic achievement gap between rich and poor, and white and black and Hispanic. That one contributes to the other is intuitively and empirically supported; why those who could easily alter this arrangement, but instead choose to prolong it, is a mystery, a disservice, and a shame.

Education Reform Finally Hits Home

By Patrick O'Connor


Real change in education may finally be coming to Detroit, a change that should be noted by counselors everywhere.

The woes of the city of Detroit are well known (note: I am a native Detroiter and live in theMetro Detroit area).  The former mayor had affairs with at least two staffers, and only left office after he spent millions of city money trying to cover up his indiscretions.  The census shows Detroit lost 25% of its population in the last decade, giving it the same population in 2011 as it had in 1911.  Recent test scores showed many Detroit elementary schools with 1 in 4 students reading at grade level, leading Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to call Detroit “ground zero” for public education.

Detroit’s need was made clear Tuesday when Secretary Duncan (a Democrat), Republican Governor Rick Snyder, the State Superintendent and at least three extremely well-financed foundations decided enough was enough.  Using state laws crafted in the last two years, the governor has created a new, boundary-free school district that will ultimately include every “failing school” in Michigan.

The first schools included will be the failing schools in Detroit.  They will receive funding separate from the other Detroit public schools; a local university will offer teacher trainingin these schools; 95 percent of all funding will be directed to classrooms, and principals will have the right to hire and fire staff at will.

All of this makes for great drama, but the real change is in the small print of each newspaper carrying the story; parents sending their children to these schools must agree, in writing, to support their child’s efforts to learn.

And that, my friends, is headline news.

For the last 20 years, and especially for the last 6 months, educators everywhere have borne the brunt of attacks from the right, the left, the rich, the poor, and the unemployed.  All of these attacks have three things in common:

i)                    Some of our kids aren’t learning enough.
ii)                   All of our kids go to school.
iii)                 All schools have to change.

But wait.  All kids go to school, but only some kids don’t learn—even in the worst Detroit schools 25% of the kids know what they’re doing.  Same school, same teachers.  What do they have going on that the other kids don’t?

It’s clear none of these critics have ever been teachers, because this is something teachers and counselors have known for years.  Who shows up at parent conferences?  The parents of the good students.  Who calls counselors for help, sometimes to the point of distraction?  The parents of the good students.  Who volunteers for the PTA, field day, the refreshment table at back-to-school night?

It isn’t a perfect relationship—there is no study that shows kids will go to Harvard if their parents bake cupcakes for school-- and teachers are trained to make a difference in the lives of all students, while parents receive no such training.  But it’s still there, and Tuesday’s press conference in Detroit shows that government leaders are starting to admit this.

So what took them so long?  Why, instead, have they tried merit pay, eliminating tenure, teaching to the test, degrading teachers as a group, and denying teachers the right to negotiate for a salary commensurate with their education?

Simple.  No public funding is tied to parenting, and you can’t legislate a change you can’t control.  You can ask parents to change, but that won’t happen unless they want to change.  Counselors have known that for years, too.

Maybe education’s leaders need to go back to counseling school.

Planning Ahead is a Piece of Cake!

By Pat O'Connor

I was heading Baltimore to confer, converse and otherwise hob-nob with my fellow counselors. I usually try to sponsor some kind of event while I’m there, and I had the perfect plan--an afternoon tea, featuring a Charm City Cake.
My daughter is insanely devoted to Ace of Cakes, the show that features this bakery, which has created cakes that blow your mind, and blow up--no, literally (look at www.charmcitycakes.com.) Since Charm City is based in Baltimore, I figure I would buy a cake, grab a photo op with Chef Duff, and all would be well-

-and all would have been well, if I had ordered the cake a year ago, and picked up deposit bottles along the highway from Detroit to Baltimore. I went to the Web site to order the cake--a month ahead, just like I would at the local bakery--and found that the next available Charm City Cake date is November 9th. I also discovered that the quality of the cake and the genius behind its design costs you at least $1000

.
Am I miffed? Yeah--at myself. It should have dawned on me I wasn’t the only guy on the planet who watches the show; if I was, there wouldn’t be a show. Duff’s cakes rule so much, people from states that don’t even border Maryland will order ahead and pay to have a cake delivered from several states away.

What might this have to do with college? Watch and learn, rising seniors!


*   Planning ahead rocks. You don’t need to worry about your ACT scores when you’re in eighth grade, but if seniors haven’t taken the ACT or SAT, now is the time to do that in order to get it done by October. That may seem a lifetime away, but twenty thousand of your closest personal friends will be taking the test, and if you wait too long, you may end up taking it at Patterson Park High School. Can you say Good Morning, Baltimore?
*   To find your wallet, follow your heart. I’ve never seen Cake Baker on the list oflucrative careers. That’s because it isn’t--unless you see something in it that no one else does, and you have the strength to give oxygen to that vision. Chef Duff might or might not own a Bentley, but he sure owns the cake baking industry. Don’t believe me? Name ten professional athletes. Now, name 10 professional cake bakers, besides Duff. ‘Nuff said.
*   Quality drives price, not the other way around. The Charm City Web site shows you why the cakes command the price they do; great stuff deserves commensurate pay. Keep this in mind when you college hunt--start with the qualities of the college, and when you find one that blows you away like Chef Duff’s Nightmare Cake (under Gallery), paying for it becomes a goal, not an obstacle--there’s a huge difference.
*   Value your friends. Genius that he is, Duff can’t do it all by himself, so it’s a good thing he’s tight with his friends, who happen to work at the bakery. Moments of Sturm and Drang sometimes seem larger than life--especially during college app season and senior year--but the seas are calmer if you’ve got a crew who knows how a bilge pump works, and you know how to return the favor.
Making it to college, let alone a career, is almost never a cakewalk, but the lessons of Charm City can get you to your college graduation party in style.

Just be sure to order the cake early.

How About a Race To Somewhere?

By Pat O'Connor PhD


It’s been a year since Vicki Abeles released Race to Nowhere, a documentary that looks at the negative impact our culture of teaching-to-the-test, getting into the “right” college is having on the lives of our students and families.  I thought the message was drowning out some of the media-driven college frenzy that has nothing to do with really preparing and applying to college.

Then two quotes came along that hit me harder than a slap in the face with the Fiske Guide.

“My daughter’s in 9th grade and will have all this free time this summer.  Can you tell me what community service activities she should get involved in?  You know, the ones the colleges like?”

The dad who called wasn’t wrong to ask the question—he loves his daughter, and wants her to have every opportunity to create a bright future.  He thinks “right” community service activities will open doors at the “right” colleges that “wrong” community service activities won’t.  Since that’s what he ‘knows”, he’s just trying to close the deal…

…and that’s why Vicki Abeles made Race to Nowhere. Like it or not, our No Child Left Behind culture not only tells us there’s just one answer to the capital of Nigeria and 3x+2= 5i; it also suggests all answers can be known without being explored, and the first one to get all the right answers wins.  College isn’t like that; college admission isn’t like that; life isn’t like that. Just ask Thomas Edison about finding the right filament for the light bulb.  It wasn’t the destination; it was the journey.

Our society certainly took some hits when students graded themselves in college (ask your parents), but we seem to be overcorrecting.  If classrooms can’t ask students what water feels like, or how world hunger will end, then knowledge is finite—and if we had admitted that 20 years ago, you wouldn’t be reading this column, because the Internet wouldn’t exist. Meandering has its purpose, too.

On the other hand, we have quote two:

“If Harvard receives 35,000 applications for a mere 1,640 freshman spaces, something is clearly amiss in our value system.”

This is Vicki Abeles herself, in an article where she argues the only two choices in parenting are to “push” children or “encourage” them.

But Vicki Abeles is wrong on both fronts. If bright students have worked hard in school and enjoyed understanding who they are and what the world looks like without feeling the stresses of doing so, why not Harvard?  Harvard is a great fit for the free thinkers Race to Nowhere wants to nurture, and it’s free to families who make under $60,000.  Given that, it’s a wonder a million kids don’t apply.

As for the argument that parenting is either about pushing or encouraging, whatever happened to it being a little of both?  If your child loves music, encouraging them to practice is a snap; if the discipline to practice is part of the recipe of enjoying music, then pushing enters the picture.  Just ask Yo Yo Ma, who, to this day, hates to practice.

Schools need to wonder why kids who spend five hours nightly on homework can’t remember what they were tested on last week.  At the same time, encouraging students to do their best without learning anything gives us the same result—dysfunctional kids who don’t know where they’re heading, or why they need to get there. The truth is somewhere in the middle; now that the extremes have been established, we need to get there, and in a hurry.