Working with your HS Guidance Counselor: Creating a Foundation to Maximize Acceptance to College

by Dr. Yo, with contributions from Anthony Faulise (originally posted June, 2020)

For better or worse, college counselors play a significant role in every U.S. high school student’s journey to college, influencing many aspects of the entire application process, from the selection of schools to admissions committees’ final decisions.  

College counselors have substantial administrative responsibilities both for their school’s particular guidance program and for each of their individual students’ applications, including coordinating letters of recommendation, sending official high school transcripts and mid-year reports, arranging information sessions with regional directors and other college representatives, helping to run college nights and other counseling events, and, in some cases, a lot more. But even more important to applications from a bottom-line admissions perspective is that they often communicate directly with admissions officers, and they always write the Counselor Letter of Recommendation that serves as a kind of cover letter for every student’s entire application. In other words, they typically make the first impression on admissions officers about each applicant’s candidacy, and, of course, first impressions are lasting impressions. 

Ultimately your individual talents, interests, college preparedness, and likelihood of making some kind of contribution must score the touchdown, but in many respects college counselors are the quarterbacks who can make plays to get you the ball.

Nationwide, relationships between applicants and high school college counselors vary considerably from region to region, state to state, and school to school. At the luck end of the spectrum, counselors know their students as well as their parents do—perhaps because they served as dorm parents for a year or more, as academic advisors, teachers, coaches, or extracurricular instructors who guided them through a significant chunk of high school, or some combination of these. At the unlucky end, counselors are faceless administrators, whom students meet for the first time when they sit down to develop their college lists.

While relationships between students and counselors come in every gradation between these two extremes, the national student-to-counselor ratio—somewhere between 300:1 and 500:1—strongly suggests that most counselors simply don’t have the bandwidth to give each student the time and attention necessary to know them well enough to create outstanding applications. Some data in 2023 suggests a slow trend toward smaller numbers, but even the most optimistic numbers peg the ration above 400:1 (see, for example, New data shows fewer students per counselor at nation’s schools, but caseloads remain high). It’s often hard to get your quarterback’s attention and focused interest when you’re competing with hundreds (or frankly, even dozens) of other players screaming for the ball.

we advise all college applicants to make it their responsibility to make sure their counselors know them well enough to serve as an effective advocate for them throughout the process. 

At CPE, we advise all our applicants to make it their responsibility to make sure their counselors know them well enough to serve as an effective advocate for them throughout the process. 

Nevertheless, having a good working relationship with their counselor—their quarterback—is paramount to every applicant who wants to maximize his or her chances of acceptance to college. And a good working relationship in this case stems from the counselor’s specific knowledge of the applicant, both the most salient features of a high school career and particular dreams and goals for college… even if that counselor has 500 such applicants.

Consequently, regardless of how well a college counselor may or may not know a student, we advise all college applicants to make it their responsibility to make sure their counselors know them well enough to serve as an effective advocate for them throughout the process. 

Your counselor may be the quarterback, but ultimately either YOU score the touchdown or YOU do not.

And this is where being prepared with written summaries of the highlights of your high school career to date and your academic and personal goals for college for your first big sit-down with your counselor (and sometimes parents) go a long way toward helping you get in. In other words, given the hundreds of students typically assigned to a U.S. college counselor, the responsibility falls to the applicant to help their counselors know enough details about them through a clearly articulated assessment of their greatest strengths as college candidates—wherever they may lie.

And if the overworked counselor is getting their information from you, the student, then you can help control the narrative.

And if the overworked counselor is getting their information from you, the student, then you can help control the narrative. The cues you write for your counselor and how you write them may play a stronger role than the counselor’s own observations, especially if they are overloaded or sidelined in the post COVID-19 era.  When you write your reminders to the counselor, write them in the way you would like the counselor to write them for your colleges—their limited time for each indicia advisee may necessitate their having simply to copy-and-paste from you. You can’t just invent an award you didn’t actually earn (#CollegeAdmissionScandal), but you can heighten the impact of a passion you want to convey.

Although these written summaries, if done well, will be as unique to each applicant as a thumbprint or a photograph, they will generally cover three major areas of a high schooler’s life: 

1. Academics, supporting standardized tests, intellectual pursuits outside the classroom, and academic accolades
2. Extracurricular activities, including athletics, club affiliations and leadership, community service, important holiday and summer experiences, and hobbies/passions
3. Hopes, dreams, goals, and likely area(s) of study as an undergraduate

How NOT to Do It

The two most common mistakes students make when they first attempt such a self-assessment is that they’ll write too little or too much. 

For example, in summarizing their academic careers, some students will offer their cumulative GPA and maybe a sentence about their favorite subject.  That much can be gleaned from even a cursory glance at their transcript, so it’s not much help to the counselor. Likewise, they might summarize their extracurriculars by noting they played a Varsity sport and listing all the clubs and organizations in which they participated since ninth grade. But they fail to connect their activities to each other, to their academic or professional interests and accomplishments, or to their aspirations for college. That’s too little. Conversely, some students will write a book about every class every year, or how they bounced between fall sports for three years before finally deciding to weight train senior year, and an array of other discrete narratives of all their other extracurricular activities, often losing the counselor in a sea of disconnected minutia. That’s too much.

The best summaries take a lesson from Goldilocks: they’re not too short and uncommunicative, they’re not too long and discursive, but just right—with enough details to support a few, key, memorable points that highlight their strengths and make the best case for college acceptance.

Writing up these summaries of academics, activities, and plans for college sounds simple and straightforward enough, but it is not an easy assignment for a high school junior or senior during the application process. Ironically, less than a year later, they will be much better equipped to do a thoughtful, thorough, and compelling job as a direct result of writing their applications. The CommonApp, and every other college application I’ve ever seen, asks students to put in writing answers to questions that create an overview of their academic records, their extracurricular pursuits, and what they hope to accomplish in and out of the classrooms at college. When they see their answers to all the application questions laid out in front of them, they start to notice, alas many times in hindsight, patterns in their academic, intellectual, and personal interests that will drive their college pursuits, and how their personal values and convictions are woven into their daily activities and allocation of time.

But in the college admissions game, as in life, foresight leads to far greater success than hindsight. 

It’s a tall order, then, for teenagers to write cogent summaries of their high school careers as one of the first steps in the process. But those who rise to the challenge and do a thorough job are rewarded thrice over in the college admissions game: 

1. they ensure their college counselors know the major chapters of their overall story and how they have paved the way to their college dreams, thereby positioning them to be of maximum service in helping them get in;
2. they place themselves in a much better position to write cohesive and ultimately successful college applications when the time comes;
3. they position themselves to hit the ground running upon arrival to college campus, which is good for them, and nice for their parents, who typically spend a bajillion dollars to send them there.

To ease the burden, students shouldn’t be afraid to ask their parents or other trusted adults who know them well for assistance. And the hard truth is that, even with help, most high school juniors and fall semester seniors lack the knowledge and experience of how to draw from the full range and subtleties of their entire high school careers as well as enough perspective to see it clearly while it’s actually still unfolding to be able bring out the key connections between their course work; their major academic and intellectual interests; their performance on standardized tests or individual sections of standardized tests; their athletic, organizational, community service, and vacation/summer experiences, accomplishments, and leadership; their personal values, beliefs, and future goals; and, ultimately, how all these connections convincingly point the way toward their next four years at college.

How TO Do It: Here’s a template to help organize your thoughts and your first* written assessment.

Academic Summary

1. GPA and AP/Honors/Accelerated coursework
2. Interests and achievement in particular areas, classes, topics, and success with particular teaching and learning styles
3. Which standardized tests, or sections thereof, including SAT, ACT, APs, and Subject Tests, highlight and corroborate areas of study?
4. Identifying possible college majors or general areas you want to investigate in college
5. Where do your intellectual interests find expression outside the classroom?

Be prepared to tell the best story possible about your high school coursework, and specifically how it has shaped your academic plans for college. For example, is your GPA lower than you’d hoped, mostly because of one subject (maybe math? foreign language? science?), but in the area you most enjoy and expect to pursue as an undergraduate, you show a consistent record of excellence? You need to let your counselor know…

Extracurricular Summary

1. Top 5-ish activities in terms of importance, time commitment, and impressiveness
2. Highlight connections among activities, and between activities and academics (e.g., connect sports to summer job as camp counselor to a psychology class with a unit on child psychology) 
3. Where and how to position for leadership or to demonstrate greater depth of passion in one or more activities in remaining junior and/or senior years
4. Activities you will likely or possibly pursue in college
5. For those who are working on or even finished t heir Activities list on the CommonApp, simply click Print Preview and save as a pdf and presto! Done!

College Requirements/Aspirations

1. Identifying your required criteria
   1. How far do you want to be from home?
   2. Do envision your dream college as single-sex college? Public or private? With a religious affiliation?
   3. Do you want to live on campus? Would you like most of your classmates to be on campus during weekends?
   4. Do you prefer small seminars or large lectures?
   5. What kind of classmates would you like to have in college?
   6. Do you want a school with flexible curriculum or structured? Both are good 🙂 

2. Can you envision likely or possible paths through college in and out of the classroom? Are there any specific colleges you’re already eye-balling and why? Have you spent any time online—which is likely during COVID-19—getting excited about this or that school’s website? What got you excited?

Again, I say, tall order. Need assistance? We’re here to help :-). 

*If you’ve already been working with your counselors for month or even years, it doesn’t mean it’s too late—present a written assessment anyway.