You Too Can Have a College Counseling Class

 One of the attractive things about moving to CBA is the ability to teach a college counseling class for the juniors. This class runs every other cycle (don’t ask me to explain a cycle schedule), and is a mandatory class for all juniors. We work to demystify the application and admission process, as much as possible. We are using a plan that was developed by our current director, and updating it with a curriculum I was fortunate to work on with Patrick O’Connor over the summer. When the students leave school in June, they will (hopefully) have a solid understanding of the college process, and also will have their Common Application as done as possible.

On my end, one of the best parts is that the class is pass fail, and as long as the CA is as complete as possible in June, and the young men have finished off their brag sheets for their counselor, they pass the class. It’s much like the old show Whose Line is it Anyway: the points are made up and the scores don’t matter.

It’s a common sense class and program and is surprisingly easy to implement. The problem in other schools was getting the administrators off of the “but we can’t fit that in” bus. With the resources that are available for free at this point, there are so many ready-made lessons that can get the students working forward. It will allow the students (and counselors) to be a little less pressured as the senior year begins.

The other advantage I am discovering is that the class takes away many things I would have to spend time in my office explaining, or tasks I would have to accomplish individually. It is allowing my meetings with the students to be much more productive in terms of helping them find the right schools to look at; it also allows me to fine-tune the application more: I don’t have to work with the kid to create the wheel; instead our counselors are helping to inflate the tires.

I know we have “more freedom in the private school than they do in the publics,” and there are a million other “but…” arguments that can be made for why this type of course isn’t done in every school, but if you were to weigh the benefits versus the inconvenience of running this type of program, counselors would be overwhelmingly in support. Sometimes if we just think outside the reasons why something can’t be done, we can see that things can be done: we just need to change the perspective to one finding solutions versus the impediments.