When good kids get bad advice on college

Kimberly Cummins made headlines last October when she was told by her New York City high school that she could not apply to Harvard University.

Confused and indignant, she pressed for an explanation. Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn, she says she was told by her college counselor, allows only its top five students to apply to the Ivy League. With an 86.6 GPA, Kimberly was ranked 11th.

But Harvard was her dream - even though she knew admission was far from a sure thing.

Kimberly's story is a dramatic example of a scenario that's played out in public and private high schools across the country: College counselors, often with the best of intentions, advise their students to aim low.

The reason may be unofficial school policy, as Kimberly says was her case. (Or a misunderstanding, as her school described it.)

By other accounts, some counselors simply aren't accustomed to sending students out of state for college. Or else they may hope, through careful vetting, to boost the number of graduates they place in elite schools.

Most of the time, it's an honest attempt to insulate students from exaggerated expectations and crushing disappointment.

Yet in trying to quantify an increasingly unpredictable process, some counselors are turning to numbers, at times placing undue weight on factors like GPA and SAT scores, when recommending where kids should apply.

That may shortchange some students.

"There are so many subtleties and unmeasurables" that a student brings to the table, says Lloyd Thacker, executive director of the Education Conservancy in Portland, Ore., and author of "College Unranked: Affirming Educational Values in College Admissions." The intangible set of qualities he calls "studenthood," for example: curiosity, imagination, hard work, passion for learning. "You can't quantify them simply and you can't rank them," he says.

But some of the instances in which student aspiration is discouraged may also reflect a larger issue: overextended college counselors.

In 2003, the US Department of Education reported one counselor for every 478 public high school students. The ratio is even worse in urban schools and low-income schools. At one Los Angeles public school, researchers found a student-to- counselor ratio of 5,000:1.

It's these very schools, though, where a college counselor is most important - and influential - and where even muted or unintentional discouragement can have a deep impact.

When Kimberly was told that she couldn't apply to Harvard, her mother, an immigrant from Barbados, and her older sister, a law student at New York University, immediately stepped in. They negotiated with school and district officials and contacted a newspaper and nonprofit advocacy group.

But many students lack such a backstop. "What you're faced with in urban districts like Boston or New York City is a situation where students don't have someone else to advocate for them," says Greg Johnson, executive director of Bottom Line, a nonprofit in Boston that helps get low-income and first-generation students into college.

Still, students of all types could be at risk of getting discouraging messages from their guidance counselors.

A father from Albany, N.Y., recently posted a message labeled "Your GC [guidance counselor] may be steering you wrong" on the discussion board of collegeconfidential.com, a website with admissions advice. It drew over 100 responses.

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