COLLEGE KNOWLEDGE: Что, куда, зачем и как?

Номер #800

Helping You Put the College Planning Puzzle Together

Elena Mikhailova is a high school counselor and a college advisor with Santa Clara Unified School District. She has 15 years of experience in the US as an educator and a counselor. She holds an M.A. in Educational Counseling from San Jose State University and an M.A. in Education from Russian State Pedagogical University, St. Petersburg. She is also professionally certified in College Admissions and Career Advising by UC Berkeley.

Начиная рубрику “College Knowledge”, хочу сразу оговориться: эта и все последующие статьи будут написаны по-английски, и связано это прежде всего не с желанием выделиться, а с желанием помочь русскоязычным родителям понять и разобраться в обилии лексики и терминалогии, связанной с “College Admissions”. По-английски это получается более естественно и с большим толком для окружающих. Итак…

Congratulations! Your child is in high school or starting high school. He leaves behind a care-free childhood and ahead is a new stage of adolescence – high school, filled with new opportunities, new challenges, new responsibilities and lots of unknowns. What, how, when, etc…these questions inevitably come up to any family that has a college-bound child. You’d ask why- why all these uncertainties and how come the college process has become so complex, overwhelming, unpredictable and becoming more so as each year passes? Well, simply put, shift happens…!

The College Admissions Hysteria
As a result of the ‘baby boomlet’ (baby boomers’ offspring), the college-age population has reached its peak; substantially more students are applying to more schools. The high school graduating class of 2011 will likely be the largest in the US nation’s history and this trend will continue for a while. Naturally, this new demographic tendency has a significant impact on the college admissions process, resulting in much higher college requirements. Selective colleges admit smaller and smaller percentage of applicants every year and deny many highly qualified students in record numbers, both for public and private schools. Yesterday’s safety schools are today’s competitive colleges. Strong GPA and SAT scores are no longer enough to ensure college admissions (they just get you taken seriously), as there are many other factors that play into college decisions. Not knowing them, and not knowing the rules of the admissions game in general, will seriously hurt your chances of getting accepted into college.

Not enough or too much…both!
In addition to demographic changes, kids are often faced with numerous challenges in their local high schools. Most public high school counseling offices are seriously understaffed: with the heavy workload of hundreds of students, not many counselors know their students well or have time to provide the individualized attention desperately needed in the vital college preparation process. Schools also burden counselors with so many administrative duties that even the most dedicated and hard-working ones are stretched to their limits.

On the other hand, if you choose to rely on virtual help instead of counseling help and Google ‘college info’, you’ll get thousands of hits. Sure, information is out there, but the sheer volume of it, good or bad, overwhelms even the most sophisticated students and families. An abundance of information is as dangerous as the lack of it and the price of a mistake is too costly. As the evidence suggests, the vast majority of families prefer personal over virtual help. After all, college admissions is a very personal matter.

So how are all these changes impacting you and how can you beat the system? …Well, this would be the topic of our discussion next time.

In the meantime, if you’d like to find out more about College Planning and Admissions, we invite you to a FREE College Information Night that will take place on Wednesday, 09/01 @ 7 pm at Oshman Family JCC, 3921 Fabian Way, Palo Alto, CA 94303 (room G-100).

To reserve a space please call (650)223-8621.
For any questions please e-mail collegepathway@gmail.com

Продолжение следует.