Lousy advice from H.S. Guidance counselors

In My Humble Opinion
1

God bless high school guidance counselors–I know they’ve got a tought job and they are underappreciated. However, a current MPSIMS thread caused a few people to mention bad advice given to them by guidance counselors.

So let’s hear it.

My example: I wanted to go out-of-state to college. Now, I know my state doesn’t like “brain drain” and my guidance counselor wanted to do her part to keep talent at home, but she lost her credibility in her attempt to sway me. She told me “There is no out-of-state school that is any better than a Nebraska school.”

What a load of crap. Institutions are good in different ways and for different people. Yes, I could have gotten a fine education in Nebraska. Where an institution was lacking in selectivity, I could have made up for by entering an honors program. That’s probably what she meant. But the statement sounded like a load of prideful crap.

2

Last I heard, Harvard wasn’t in Nebraska.

3

Harvard is the UofM of the East.

4

U of M?

5

Well, I think I saw my counselor for a total of about 30 seconds the whole time I was in school. The only memorable thing was when he signed me up for a session with a representative from Harvard who was going to give me and two other students some advice on preparing our applications.

Great, huh?

Except that it turned out that the session was only intended for Hispanic students who were going to get special help with their application essays.

The rep. couldn’t exactly throw me out, but he wasn’t exactly warm and welcoming either. It was kind of morbidly interesting listening to him go through his spiel and then work out ways of say “except for you, cher” without actually saying it. To be fair, though, the two other students legitimately present, neither of whom spoke much more Spanish than I did, were probably equally embarassed by the whole thing.

6

check his location, ivylass

7

My “guidance” counselor neglected to tell me that I had applied to some of the hardest schools in the country to get into. They weren’t Ivy League, so how was I supposed to know that it was so damn hard to get accepted by small liberal arts colleges in New England?

Also, she had never heard of Baylor University (granted, she was born and raised in New Hampshire, but geesh!), and really couldn’t be bothered to look it up.

8

If you were a student who wasn’t on the honor roll or sure of which college you were going to attend, our guidance counselor would automatically suggest the army. I’m not knocking the army, but it seems like there was more to his job than military recruitment.

9

“Stay here at the Louisiana School of Mines son. Ain’t none better nowhere.”

10

I actually went to see my counselor after my first semester. (They told us it would be a good idea - ha). I had nearly straight As (I sucked at PE), I was taking advanced everything, and we’d just had our scores come in from some set of standardized tests and the lowest of mine was in the 95th percentile.

Well, after looking over everything she said “Maybe after you graduate you might be able to go to community college!” She apparently thought that a four year university was just entirely out of my reach.

I saw her twice more, first when she lied to me about the speech requirement (found out 2nd semester senior year that no, the year of debate team wouldn’t count like she said it would).

Second when she wrote my “recommendation” for colleges, which was closer to a page of left handed compliments mixed with insults (silly me for doing well in high school and having great test scores, apparently she resented it or something). Luckily, I had great teacher and principal recommendations that I could send in along with her attempt to keep me away from higher education.

11

My kid sister’s guidance person told her:

“I know that you want to be a psychologist, but your grades show that you’re just not smart enough. And you come from a very poor family, so college is probably out of the question for you, anyway.”

Yes, in those words. No, no encouragement to get her grades up to get scholarships or grants - Jess didn’t even know that such things were available until just a couple of years ago.

Guess what? Oddly enough, my sister proceeded to do much worse in school after that, dropping out of highschool about a year and a half later.

Soon after, the same person met with my youngest sister (the kids were split up alphabetically, so she got all three of my sibs,) saying pretty much the same things, but this time, she got to add “and you come from a family with a history of dropouts and poor acedemic performance.”

None of my three sibs graduated from highschool. I know that’s not her fault…but I can’t help but wonder what a little encouragement might have done.

12

I attended a magnet program at a high school about a half an hour, and half a world away from my hometown. Mostly blue collar families, about half of the graduates went to community college or worked, many went in state. Freshman year, my dad met my guidance counselor for the first time, who proceeded to tell him that if I got good grades, I could probably aim for a state school. My dad asked where they kept the catalogues for the liberal arts and top tiered schools.

“Oh, we don’t send our students to those schools,” idiot guidance counselor said.

“Well, you do now!”

13

I don’t even know what sort of advice my high school counselors gave about college and careers. I tuned them out around the middle of freshman year, after they tried to tell me it was my fault I was being bullied, and that I should do more to “blend in with the crowd.” (Which meant … what? Abusing the other kids who didn’t “blend in,” or just wearing designer clothes I couldn’t afford, listening to music I didn’t like, and hair-spraying my bangs six inches off my forehead? Ack.)

14

My counsellor: “What do you plan on majoring in in college?”
Me: “Computer science, I want to be a computer programmer.”
My counsellor: “You know, I think you should choose something else, that’s going to be far to difficult for you. You have to be really smart to be a computer programmer.”
Me: “Well, alright then.”

Never talked to the idiot again, and I’m currently a computer programmer, sad only because I’m programming Java instead of computer games, but my time will come…

What really makes me mad is that I was an Illinois State Scholar, Honor Roll, and all that crap, but he still told me I wasn’t smart enough. I wonder what the hell he said to the other kids. He was a complete ass.

15

I went to see the guidance counselor during registration for sophomore classes. My best friend went along, because we were both having the same scheduling problem, and in order to have it worked out, we needed a guidance counselor’s signature.

We both wanted to take a full load of classes, and the pesky P.E. requirement (every other day) just didn’t fit in there. We needed permission to sign up for “early bird P.E.” which met before school. The only way you could get in was if you had a full load like we did, and the guidance counselor was in charge of handling that.

He took one look at our schedules and said, “You know, you’re just going to be sophomores. Why are you in such a hurry to take all these classes? You have two more years, you know.” (Peruses our four year plans.) “Why are you taking five years of foreign language and math? Don’t you know that state colleges only require four years of foreign language and three of math? And Sarah, you don’t need all these AP science classes, do you? Q.N., why are you taking all these English and Social Studies courses? Don’t you know that none of this is required? These schedules look really hard. Don’t you want to take some easier classes, like Home Ec or Shop or Parenting Skills?”

Us in unision: “No. We want to take those classes. For fun.”

Guidance counselor: “Well, that’s going to be a really tough schedule. And when are you going to take driver’s ed?”

Us: “In the summer.”

Guidance counselor: “Why not now?”

Us: “Because we don’t have time.”

Guidance counselor: “Well, you would if you dropped some of these extra science or English classes! Look, you don’t even have a study hall! Don’t you know you’re only required to take five classes and P.E. every semester to graduate?”

I finally threatened to go look for a different counselor to sign off on the slips–there was one decent one out of four–and so he reluctantly signed. He just couldn’t understand why we wanted to work so hard. He was convinced that we couldn’t handle that kind of course load. (We were A students.)

Then, when I was a senior, I applied to a lot of small, nationally-known liberal arts colleges. I got scholarships from some of them, and when the guidance counselor had to talk about that on Senior Awards Night, he was flummoxed. He’d never heard of ANY of the ten schools I’d listed because they were not in Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, Illinois, or Missouri, and those were the only schools he knew. He was SO impressed that any student at our school could win a scholarship to a non-Midwestern school that he went on and on about it for about ten minutes.

This ignorance is especially pathetic because in that class alone, we had students going to Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, Harvard, and other big-name schools. So, clearly, the guidance department was just not sophisticated enough to service many of the students’s needs.

16

Has a guidance counselor ever given good college advice? The ones in the place my wife went to high school didn’t. The one in the high school my daughters go to are known for advising to go to community colleges to save money. We got my daughter’s counselor to sign the right papers, which was an effort, and that was all she was good for.

I worked in the college office of my high school, right by all the reference materials, so I did it all myself.

A lot of them seem not to want to help kids get into any school better than they went to - or don’t believe that anyone going to their school can have a brain.

17

Yes. I went to a public high school with good guidance counselors. They did not give me a lot of college advice, but neither did they attempt to dissuade me (I already had a pretty good idea what I wanted to do and my father was an educator). I was a “B” student with fairly narrow extracurricular interests, which didn’t prevent me from getting in to the three colleges I applied to (one small liberal arts, one excellent university, and my state university’s honors program.

18

I didn’t have much interaction with guidance counselors, but I do remember one guy muttering under his breath (with a certain tinge of contempt or weariness in his voice), “Oh, another art major.” He looked at me as if he was hoping that I’d change my mind and switch to something more “practical.”

I know that the guy didn’t know me, but I was very active in art, and had already sold quite a few works while still in art school. I was serious, not someone who was picking art because they weren’t sure what else to major in. I can’t say that I appreciated his attitude.

19

I only met mine once in a hallway, during which he looked at my glasses and said “you know you can clean those, don’t you?”

He was right of course, and it was probably wise advice. Course I wouldn’t say it was what propelled me on to stardom or into the gutter though.

20

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a h.s. guidance counsellor giving any good advice. I knew enough by the time I entered h.s. to just avoid them.

But I’ve always longed to say to one, “If you’re living up to your full potential, why are you still in high school?”