WPI, UC Merced, and (sigh) Varsity Blues

by Patrick O'Connor, Ph.D.

Great news this week from a couple of colleges laying the foundation of furthering college access. The first salvo came from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, which announced it is going test blind in the fall, the start of an eight-year trial of reviewing all applicants without looking at anyone’s test scores.

In taking this step, WPI is building on a data review of going test optional for some time, and their conclusions are compelling. The reasons for going test blind are nicely laid out in this interview with WPI admissions officer Andrew Palumbo, who pulls no punches.

WPI’s decision is a powerful statement, especially for those who think test optional/blind is only suited for liberal arts colleges. Until this week, a number of colleges were just expected to go permanently test optional. WPI has raised the stakes, and will likely lead to more test-blind decisions from other institutions over the summer.

Access efforts also got a big boost from UC Merced, which announced a new guaranteed enrollment program for students graduating from local high schools. Merced pulls in students from all over the state, but has assured local students there is plenty of room on campus for them as well, as long as they complete 15 college prep courses with grades higher than a C, and earn a GPA of 3.5 or higher.

This is a program worth watching. Guaranteed admission gives local students—most of whom are low-income and/or first generation students—one less college application barrier. Regional colleges across the nation are hurting for students, and the overall application rate for low-income students was already down last year. This approach may solve both problems at once.

While schools like WPI and UC Merced blaze the trail of innovation and opportunity, too much of the college admissions world still seems mired in either the past, or in America’s continued worshipping of the false gods that most consider the only 15 colleges in the United States worth attending. This was evidenced recently by media coverage of the new movie that takes yet another look at the Varsity Blues scandal of several years ago. The film debuted this week, and has also been the talk of many college admissions social media sites.

For a profession that speaks so urgently of the need for heightened access and opportunity in college, the obsession over Varsity Blues is an unhealthy impediment. As many have pointed out, the basic story line here is not new; some rich people do everything in their power to get what they want, whether that’s the best theater tickets, reservations at exclusive restaurants, or admission to what they consider the “best” college for their child. Still, this story involves three topics society can’t seem to get enough of—money, highly selective colleges, and Hollywood—so just when energies should be devoted to increasing access, society focuses on one more version of this tabloid tickler.

It was reassuring when NACAC President Todd Reinhardt posted a tweet this week gently reminding the world that 80 percent of all colleges in the United States admit more than half their applicants. Here’s hoping other profession leaders will step up to steer our collective interests to helping more students like those in the Merced Union High School District to UC Merced and beyond. There is truly no limit to the effect that would have on the mental health, self-esteem, and future plans of a host of underserved students who deserve our attention far more than the handful of minimum-security prison Varsity Blues alumni we just can’t let go of. It really is past time to move on.

Admissions Decisions: What’s Different With Yes (and No) This Year

by Patrick O'Connor, Ph.D.

Seniors, I get it. Many of you will be hearing back about your college applications in the next couple of weeks, and you’d really like in this year of the unusual for their replies to be what you’re expecting, or hoping for. It would also be great if the colleges saying Yes offer you the financial aid you need, and that they tell you that right away.

That would be great, but it just isn’t likely. Many colleges didn’t use test scores in admissions decisions for the first time this year, and many of the high schools are using different grading scales because of online learning. Throw in changes to the way colleges had to recruit this year (no campus visits, no old school open houses), and you should be able to see why colleges have no clue who really wants to come to their college.

That’s going to show up in the admissions and aid decisions you’re waiting on, so let’s talk about what each possible answer could mean:

Admission The good news here is that yes still means yes—however they figured out who to admit has worked in your favor, and they want you on campus (or at least online) in the fall. Well done!

What’s different with Yes is the financial aid award. It’s pretty likely colleges are going to admit more students this year who really don’t want to attend that college—this happens when so many things change at once. That means more students will be saying No Thanks who also have financial aid packages, so their money ends up going to someone else.

It’s always a good idea to contact financial aid and review your package, but that’s even more true this year. One Dad called just to ask a question about part of his senior’s package, and they offered him an additional $10,000 before he could even ask his question. You want the next person that gets that bonus to be you. Make the call.

Deferral /Waitlist Colleges give you this decision when they want to admit you, but currently don’t have room. With more students turning offers of admission down this year, waitlists are expected to be bigger than ever, and used more than ever—even as late as August.

This is no time to be quiet. Unless the college tells you not to contact them, you want to let the college know, loud and clear, that you still want to go there, and that you will go there if you get the chance. Measuring your interest is the single thing that’s changed the most this year. Erase any doubts they have by telling them how you feel.

Not Offered Admission If the college has simply run out of room, or feels you can’t be successful there, they’re going to tell you that. Appealing this decision may be an option, but since so many colleges are expected to bulk up their waitlists, chances are No is going to remain No, especially this year. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, but it does mean you should have a strong Plan B.

It would be great if college decisions and aid packages would all be tied up by May 1, but that’s never really been in the cards this year. Be patient, be proactive, and finish your high school career with a bang. Your college picture may not be clear until August, but you won’t really care about that in September. Persist.

Fixing College Application Stress

by Patrick O'Connor, Ph.D.

Early data for this application season suggests a decline in applications for most colleges that aren’t perpetually covered by the New York Times. This data is shored up by reports of declines in the number of financial aid forms being submitted—a sign that low income students are giving up on the idea of college.

That’s easy to understand. Most students rightfully see college as something more than just classes, and when quarantining takes away most of the non-classroom experiences, wondering what’s really left comes easy. What doesn’t come easy is an opportunity to talk about this, especially with students new to the college experience. Even though they have lots of questions about this new experience, they are hesitant to ask them, unless the timing is right.

So we need to make the timing right. One of the best ways I’ve seen this hurdle overcome occurred in a low-income high school with lots of first generation students. They were celebrating college with a College Awareness Week, basically a Spirit Week for college—you can get some ideas here for your own CAW.

As part of this celebration, the school counselor took over every section of Senior English for one entire period (and it’s important to take a class for a whole period—none of this twenty minutes stuff). She took each class to the computer lab, where every computer was showing the online application to the local community college.

“Today class” she announced with energy, “you’re going to apply to college. Follow the directions, and let me know what help you need.”

What followed was nothing short of amazing. Every student jumped into the application, which had no essays and didn’t require selection of a major or test scores. Twenty minutes later, most of the class had hit Submit. They had applied to college.

Of course, that was just the first half of the period, so you’re thinking, here’s where chaos ensues. Instead, two or three students raised their hands and said “I’m done with this application, but to be honest, I don’t really want to go to this college.”

“Oh?” said the counselor, feigning incredulity. “Do you know where you’d like to go?”

“Yes. I’d like to apply to Northeast Michigan State.”

“OK” said the counselor. “You know, I bet they have an application online—”

And with that, about half the class turned their attention back to their computers to search for the online application of another college. In about five minutes, about three-quarters of the class was starting on application two, and even if there wasn’t enough time to complete it, they were on a roll, and more likely to complete the application on their own time. The other quarter of the class harmlessly wandered around on the Internet, not a bad percentage, especially since everyone had already applied to one college.

The plusses here are easy to see. The mystery of the college application is exposed for what it is—a special version of a job application, replete with name, address, and other stuff they know by heart. Now that they’ve done one, students are more likely to do another—especially if it’s for a school they really like. When they run into something new—say, essays or letters of recommendation—they’re more likely to ask for help and follow through, now that they know what they’re doing.

There’s obviously more to managing college stress than this—there’s those lovely financial aid forms, for example—but this is a strong first step in making the process manageable, and real. Not bad for one English class.

State and Federal Governments Need Assessment Intervention

by Patrick O'Connor, Ph.D.

I hadn’t heard from my colleague in quite a while, so I was pleased to see her name pop up on my social media—until I read the contents of her message.  It seems her daughter, a very bright high school junior, had to take a state-required merit exam yesterday.  Following the safe distancing protocols, the school required her to take the test in the school gym.  On the bleachers.  Balancing the test and answer sheet on a lapboard.

 

The test was the ACT.

 

Just when it seemed things were heading in the direction of common sense, along comes the government to put logic in its place.  Your school isn’t offering in-person instruction—or is doing so, but  with severe limits using social distancing protocols?  Let’s put these to the test (sorry) and have you do annual state testing as if nothing had happened this past year.  After all, we need to see what the children have and haven’t learned.

 

The children have learned plenty, thank you very much—but most of it isn’t measured on the test.  It’s pretty likely scores will be down this year compared to past years; but even if school had been open every day and we were still saving the use of masks for Halloween and Mardi Gras, would learning really be accurately measured while students are taking the tests in a semi-fetal position on bleachers? Since many of these tests are used to award state scholarships for college, are leaders prepared to reduce the cut scores to reflect the realities of reduced learning and the effect of testing logistics that resemble Twister more than Oxford? 

Students have learned all about flexibility, altering study strategies, and the huge difference learning platforms can make when it comes to understanding ideas.  Last time I checked, the ACT measured none of these, and the items it does measure have often received short shrift in the back-and-forth conversion to online learning.  What exactly are the states expecting?

 

In fairness to at least some states, part of the blame for this goes to Washington, where a change in presidents and Education secretaries has evidently done little in the name of student learning.  Leaders of my home state anticipated test scores would cave this year, so they asked the US Department of Education if they could just take a pass this year on mandatory testing.  The response of the we’re-not-Betsy-Devos leadership was remarkably familiar:  Nope. As a result, schools that have never been open all year in the interest of the health of the students must now open up for mandatory testing.  You can’t help but wonder if Dr. Fauci’s going to scratch his head when COVID cases jump among high school juniors in March.

 

We’re entering year two of social distancing, so it’s easy to understand if people are getting  a little cabin fever, deciding it might be worth a chance to eat a meal out or attend someone’s wedding.  The vast majority of colleges that waived testing requirements this year are wise enough not to take the bait, and are extending the testing freeze another year (note—this clearly means most of them will never be going back to test requirements.  You heard it here first). After seeing the successful transition colleges have made to an ACT-free world, many government officials have decided to wait until the last minute and require tests anyway, reflecting the too-little-too-late decision-making that has plagued the COVID crisis since day one.

 

If that’s not an assessment of what hasn’t been learned, nothing is.

Common App Adds a Happiness Question, and Drops the Wrong One

by Patrick O'Connor, Ph.D.

Common Application is doing record breaking work this year, and it isn’t using COVID as an excuse to rest on its laurels. CA announced its essay prompts for next year, and decided to make just a slight modification this time around, much to the relief of essay writing coaches everywhere. The one new prompt reads “Reflect on something that someone has done for you that has made you happy or thankful in a surprising way. How has this gratitude affected or motivated you?”

Common App says the prompt was added as a result of the input from school counselors and admission officers, “along with input from psychology and gratitude researchers.” It’s clear Common App has the current COVID culture in mind as part of their selection, as the announcement adds “An essay prompt can’t erase the loss and anxiety of the last 12 months, but it can validate the importance of gratitude and kindness. We hope students see the new prompt for what it is intended to be: an invitation to bring some joy into their application experience.”

It's certainly noble that the producers of the most used college application want to make sure applying to college is no less of a burden than it needs to be, but using joy as a rationale for adding this prompt is a little mystifying. This prompt is one of seven options students can choose from; if the goal is to make sure the process adds some joy to filling out a form, wouldn’t it be better to make this the only prompt? Will admissions committees assume a student has predominantly Eeyore-esque qualities if they select another prompt, one whose central theme may not be joy—particularly the highly used and often-tortured prompt where students are asked to relate a time they failed at something?

This logic especially falls into question when considering the prompt Common App got rid of to make room for this new entry, where students are asked to “Describe a problem you’d like to solve.” Common App says this prompt is not used very much, but this now-defunct prompt has the same potential for excitement and joy as the prompt replacing it. I know this, because I’ve worked with many engineering and science majors whose applications went to another level when they wrote about the projects they’d like to take on, and how they’d proposed to take it on. Talk about a prompt that is a guided tour of how big a thinker a student is.

Instead, any effort to try and infuse the college application process with more joy and gratitude would go a long way if it included giving the boot to the “failure” prompt. Each year, several counselors post to professional discussion lists about students who spend hours in counseling offices, asking their counselor if a particular failure is “big” enough to write about, as if the prompt were not a narrative but a competition. This same prompt also leads more students to write about athletics (a topic many admissions officers find difficult to be fresh with) or the dreaded essay that talks about the challenge of writing the essay itself, another topic that is tepidly received and rarely successful.

No one wants the college application process to produce anxiety, and the experience of writing about a time of gratitude or excitement will certainly go a long way to meet that goal. So would getting rid of a prompt where too many students feel compelled to out-Sturm-und-Drang their peers. That’s something to consider for next year.

You Can Never Leave Dondero High—and That’s a Good Thing

by Patrick O'Connor, Ph.D.

I only saw him on campus once, and it was clear he was a visitor. I was a school counselor at Dondero High School in Royal Oak, Michigan, about a 20 minute drive from downtown Detroit. Royal Oak was a Detroit suburb from the get-go, but its roots were clearly blue collar. I spotted this visitor in the late 80s, when guys wearing dusters were all the rage, and this guy’s duster was not the Target knockoff—it radiated with authenticity.

It was also easy to see he wasn’t a teacher by the way he moved. Teachers—and counselors for that matter—always seem to walk at a pace and an angle that allows them to carry the maximum number of unchecked papers, juice boxes, or dioramas. This guy was flying in and out of offices and classrooms with his head held high and a keen sense of purpose. It was like he knew the place and loved every nook and cranny of it, and he wanted to see all of it, right now.

It turns out there was a reason why it seemed like he knew the place—he had gone there as a student, and tried out his early hand at music in high school, as did so many budding Les Pauls of the day. Turns out, it stuck with him, as he went on to write and record some of the most played music in American history as part of the Eagles.

I ran into Glenn Frey twice that day, once as I was leaving my office, and once when he was going into the attendance office to say hello to one of the secretaries. I was later told he only made it back into town one or twice a year, but he always—always—came back to Dondero to say hello to the teachers and staff he still knew—and he said hello to all of them. Overhearing him interact with his role models, you could tell this was pretty standard “catching up” stuff—have you heard from this guy, did these two finally get married, why did this teacher retire so soon? Any of these visits could have been a serious press event, or an all-school assembly where he would sell a few records and tell kids to keep their grades up. Nope. This was just Glenn, catching up with the people who raised him.

In a two thousand dollar duster.

This is one of many moments that stay in the front of my head about Dondero, which closed in the mid-2000s due to low enrollment. There were about 1000 students when I worked there for two years, but the place burst at the seams for many years at 2400 kids. In a tribute to administrative overplanning, there were 4 different lunch periods back in the day, including two where students went to class for twenty minutes, left to eat lunch, and then—watch carefully—returned to the same class for twenty-five more minutes of instruction. Classrooms were crammed to the gills, it was an open classroom because administrators were praying students would go loiter somewhere else, and while the football team was never all that good, every opposing team knew you went straight to the bus after the game, because Dondero may not win the game, but they would sure win the postgame rumble.

And it all worked. Like every public school at the time, the only thing all Dondero students had in common was a zip code. They came from different backgrounds and different countries. Many were born in the houses they would ultimately own and die in, and college was still an iffy proposition for many of them. But at the end of the day—literally the end of every school day—each student had the chance to go home knowing a little more about the world, knowing a little more about themselves, and knowing they were loved for who they were. This was due to a veteran staff—when I was there in the 80s, the tenure of many of my colleagues went back to the Eisenhower administration—who had to learn the vital elements of teaching in a hurry. With 2400 in the audience, there’s no room for dress rehearsals.

I’ve worked at schools with better college admit rates and nicer buildings, but these were private schools that got to pick and choose who got to go there. Dondero opened the front doors every morning and created a sense of community with whoever showed up, every member wincing at the team nickname (the Oaks), every member willing to defend the honor of the school if an outsider was doing the wincing.

I’ve studied a lot about community building, and worked in many high schools that had slogans about students coming first. They have all been pretty great places, to be sure, but there’s something to be said about teaching at a school where kids live in art deco and Craftsman houses built so close to each other, they might as well be one big house for one big family. At Dondero, we were. Glenn Frey thought so, too. That may be why the road by the south side of the building was named after him. Like all of us, he’s part of the family forever.

Three Ways to Celebrate National School Counseling Week

by Patrick O'Connor, Ph.D.

It takes a lot for me to recommend another counseling article in this space, let alone use the first few sentences to tell you to go read something else. That’s what makes the article by NACAC CEO Angel Perez all the more compelling. Angel’s now in charge of one of the biggest college access organizations in the world, and he owes it all to the counselor who, despite the standard ridiculous caseload, tracked Angel down, asked him about his college plans, and then helped him live the dream. If you’re somehow getting through National School Counseling Week without enough props for all you’re doing, read the first half of Angel’s story. Twice.

The second half outlines many of the key things that need to be done for counselors and for the counseling profession so we can be more effective in our work. This is a great call to action, but it did occur to me all these items had one thing in common—they are completely out of our control. More counselors? Administrative decision. Better training in college counseling? Graduate school decision. Time to talk with more students? Closer call, but as long as we’re still changing schedules, not our decision.

This means only one thing— it’s time to take action now. As in, this week.

Look, it’s pretty reasonable to say you aren’t going to get much more attention than this week, unless you do something really nuts like put 45 students in an American Government class when the contract limits class size to 35 (Yup—and man, did we get attention!) If this is the only time you get a major spotlight, now is the time to use that spotlight and engage in some meaningful conversation. I’m not suggesting you start talking about counselor ratios at the cupcake reception they throw for you, but this is probably the best time to pick your top three needs, and see what can be done about them. What they are depends on your school and your needs, but here’s my standard starter list to get you thinking:

Get what you do in writing. It’s still pretty amazing how many counselors show up for work each year with no effective job description. Most union contracts don’t deal with this, since counselors only make up about ten percent of the membership.

That’s why, as always the ASCA agreements form is your best friend. ASCA has updated its counselor model, so there are some reports of difficulty finding this form—but when it comes to being clear about who does what and when, it’s tough to beat this outline. You may not get rid of schedule changes in a year, but an annual discussion of this form is a strong foundation for change. Take a look, and remember, if it’s not in the agreement, you don’t do it.

Does anybody know what you do? I have long said that the main problem with our profession is NOT that people think they know what we do. The problem is they think they know what we do—and they’re wrong. But do we really have time to set them straight?

The answer is, kind of. If you’ve got a counseling department web site, it’s about a day’s worth of work to build a page talking about all you do. It would be great to include a “typical day” scenario, and you could spend a minute in the summer creating a video where you talk about your work. Administration can support this work by giving you a webpage if you don’t have one, and by referring others to it in activities like parent orientations—once the administrators read the page themselves, of course.

Build your team. Even if you have the right ratio and incredible resources, there’s no way you do your job without help. The Counseling Advisory Committee does that, since they are the key advocates of your work, both in the school building and the community. If pro football teams have cheerleaders, you could benefit from getting some as well. Look here on how to start one.

Write your grad school. The first three are just suggestions—this one is something you really need to do. Angel’s column briefly supports my favorite pet peeve—better training for school counselors in college counseling. There are about two dozen counselor training programs in the US that offer a class in college counseling. Others teach college counseling with career counseling, leaving about 20 hours of instruction in college counseling—as if that’s enough to even scratch the surface.

It’s time to write your grad school program, thank them for the credential that allows you to follow your passion, and urge them to create this separate class. I have tons of syllabi from folks who have taught the course, so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel—they just have to jump on the bike, and all they need is someone to tell them to do that. Take the time.

And thank you for all you do.