From The Director
Letter from the Director of College Guidance
With a 30:1 ratio of students to counselors, GSB's college guidance office can devote much time to working with individual students and their college choices. Part of this search process often involves addressing preconceived ideas about certain schools.
In recent years, as more and more media attention is given to a select group of "name" schools, this approach has taken on greater importance. Relentlessly, we hear there are more graduating high school seniors than ever before, and that acceptance at one of the nation's most competitive schools is increasingly difficult to obtain. As a result, parents put pressure on students to demonstrate higher levels of achievement, and students put equal pressure on themselves towards the same end.
However, this media attention can be very misleading. It suggests that the only colleges worth our time and attention are the 30 or 40 most selective schools. Virtually no attention is given to any other institutions, yet there are over 3000 colleges and universities in the U.S.
If admittance to one of the most selective schools guaranteed health, wealth and happiness, all the effort and anxiety might be understandable. But this is hardly the case. In fact, many studies have shown that simply graduating college is a more important variable in predicting relative comfort and career happiness. What happens after that has more to do with an individual's personality characteristics. The college name on the diploma of a successful person is often surprising!
All the attention and effort to get into the "right" school is often misguided as well. A college search is conducted by most people in the junior and senior years of high school, right in the middle of the time when a person's goals and aspirations are very changeable. What's right for a seventeen-year-old may be less right for the same person at nineteen. For that reason, and many others, only 80% of graduating college students finish where they started, and less than half graduate within five years.
I've used quotation marks when mentioning the "right" school because I truly believe there is no one "right" school for each student. Rather, we seek to help students make matches with colleges that seem most appropriate for them.
We're proud of our college list, and not only because it features many nameplate schools. Rather, through a process that includes student self-reflection, faculty advice, parental input and attentive counseling, our students find schools that will serve them well and that they are excited about. Their job is to make the most of the learning opportunities every college offers.
Michael Chimes
