As the school year comes to a close, we see an abundance of emotions in our families and students. We always strive to maximize the joy of success and minimize those regrets that are associated with missed opportunities. With few exceptions, our graduating TZ High School seniors are happy and excited to be entering into the next phase of their lives. The guidance team at the high school has played an important role towards assisting these students on their journeys.
While joy is abundant at graduation, there are those rare instances when a student or parent expresses confusion or regret that the student was not accepted into a desired college. When a student or parent expresses concern that his or her child was not accepted into a college program, I ask the administrator or high school counselor to assist the family with understanding why this happened and how to best move forward.
College admissions decisions can be difficult to understand for a variety of reasons. There are many factors that colleges use to determine college admissions and each college has slightly different criteria in this regard. Because of the complexity of these decisions, parents/students may have misconceptions about which variables best yield the anticipated highly-prized acceptance letter. To simplify this process, our counselors encourage families/students early-on to use the Naviance tools on our website to better guide them in this process. We formally begin this advisement when students are in the 10th grade.
Our counselors are especially good at explaining to families/students how to use Naviance and guiding them through the selection of suitable colleges. The tools that we present to our families/students to select possible colleges are excellent, particularly those that are on the Naviance site (but only as good as the students’/parents’ willingness to use the tools).
Below, is an excellent example of an actual college decision made by one of our graduating TZ High School seniors. The figures below show how the Naviance forecasting tool can be used to better inform students about prospective colleges (The actual TZ student’s data is removed from the illustrations below to protect her privacy). This type of information is presented to families/students as part of college admissions counseling starting in 10th grade. Families should be going into this process with their “eyes wide open,” and these tools have an excellent predictive capacity. Similar to Goldilocks selecting a bowl of porridge to eat, the TZ student in this example applied to the following three colleges ranging from a “reach school” (low chance of acceptance), “possible school” (fair chance of acceptance), and “likely school” (good chance of acceptance). Here is the Naviance graphic presentation of these choices.
Middlebury College (Needs Improvement or “reach” college):
University of Rochester (Fair chance or “possible” college):
Skidmore College (Likely chance or “good” overall possibility):
Consistent with the Naviance predictions, the student in the above example was not admitted into the “reach” college and was accepted into her “possible” and “good” chance college choices. I happen to know this student personally, and I’ve encouraged her to be happy that she is attending the University of Rochester (it’s a great fit, and she is happy). The Tappan Zee High School counselor did a great job of framing the process using the Naviance tools and prepared the student and her parents for any anticipated outcomes.
I recognize that there are more variables than ACT, SAT, and GPA that go into the college admissions process. However, these three variables serve an essential purpose in that they have a predictive value in understanding college acceptance decisions. Other variables, such as participation in extracurricular and co-curricular activities, also factor into the college admissions criteria that colleges use when selecting incoming classes of students. While less predictive, these variables play a far more significant role in the development of the “whole child.” To this end, we are preparing our students for life and not just for college admissions.