Complaining About CCO is Sibi
If someone came up to me and wanted me to prove to them why I thought Exeter was a prime example of elitism, I would give this answer: our College Counseling. We get wildly better college counseling than most Americans across the country, and yet if you’ve been on campus for a decent amount of time you are guaranteed to hear someone complain about the counseling they received, or the counseling someone else received. How can this be? Well, I would argue the answer is as we began: plain and simple elitism.
Let me first explain why I think we have some of the best college counseling in the country. I don’t know about private schools, but public schools have one to two counselors per every 250-457 students according to the Washington post, and this data was taken in 2008-09, prior to big budget cuts a lot of states made that went to these funds. According to a more updated Times article, the national ratio is closer to 500 students to 1 college counselor. We have about 5 or 6 college counselors per 332 students, which means each counselor is in charge of about 55 to 60 students. They obviously still have their hands full, but they’re handful is manageable, and they have the ability to give each of their students personalized guidance.
But size of the students they have is only part of it; they also have resources, education and time. We start the college process at Exeter in the winter of our upper year, and are expected to spend a significant amount of our time working with our counselor. The friends I have that go to public school nearby don’t get nearly as much time with their counselor, and are given much less guidance overall. Not only did they start the process in their senior year, but one of my friends decided to go to community college simply because he didn’t feel like taking the SAT’s. He’s a smart kid and he was selling himself short—something the college counselors at Exeter would never let us do (unless we really, really insisted, I guess).
Additionally, the counselors know what they are talking about. Exeter hires people they know have training and will be able to give exonians the best counseling. They are educated well, and they are also given the money and time from Exeter to be able to give students up to date information, books, advice and personalized information. If you have specific requests for your college experience, like discussion based classes or a strong business program, the counselors know where to direct you. They know what kind of work you need to do in order the get the most out of the college process, and they set up deadlines for you, like for teacher recommendations or the common app essay, which they will help you with before senior year even begins.
And yet I always hear students talking about the college counseling office bitterly, even before they begin it. They sneer about the faulty advice one of their senior friend’s got, or how their counselor sabotaged them because the counselor “didn’t like them.” First of all, the counselor’s’ job is to help you get into the school you want, and they want to help you, so I highly doubt any of them would sabotage a student simply out of spite. Having known teachers all my life, I know that people who work closely with guiding teenagers don’t care enough to actively make them look bad despite the actual work the student put it. But the biggest complaints I hear always seem to relate to students getting into (or more likely not getting into) Ivy League colleges.
I have not met one Exonian who doesn’t want to go to any Ivies, nor one that has not decided to apply to at least one. According to naviance, 81 exonians last year applied to Harvard and 64 applied to Yale (which is the second smallest amount of Yale applicants from 2002-2016). Compare that to a school like Sarah Lawrence; only two people applied, or Bard, to which only 6 people applied. But, as everyone at Exeter knows, only a small amount of people from Exeter will actually get admitted to Harvard or Yale (or any other Ivy); only 8 were admitted to Harvard last year, and only 15 to Yale. So the majority of people who apply will not get in. Even if every single one of those applicants were fit to go to those schools, as I’m sure they are, those schools are never going to admit every Exeter applicant. So even if it was the college counselors’ job to get students into one of those schools, they still wouldn’t be able to.
But even more importantly, it’s not the college counselor’s job to get students into an Ivy; it’s not their job to get students into any school. That’s the student’s job. It’s the counselors’ job to help make the student’s job easier and less confusing and more informed.
Of course, the CCO and the college counselors aren’t perfect. They make mistakes. For example, my sister’s counselor told her she might not want not to tell colleges about her toilet review Instagram (toilets_of_exeter), even though that Instagram is the best thing she has to offer. But for as many mistakes they make, they do a lot more things right. The college counselors are damn good at their jobs. The fact that students at Exeter cannot appreciate this is explained simply: Exonians are obsessed with getting into elite institutions, and can’t imagine why they wouldn’t get accepted to them, except that someone else made a mistake or hurt their chances of admission. If Exeter was doing a better job teaching non sibi and turning students into caring, intelligent citizens, students would be more upset about the fact that public school students don’t get nearly the amount of quality guidance Exonians and other private school students get, than the fact that Exeter’s college counseling didn’t live up to their fondest dreams, or is possibly not the “very best” CCO of all American private schools. Now, I could be wrong about this. If you have read this Op-ed all the way through and it has made you mad, I encourage you to write an op-ed in response, and restore my faith in Exonians.