What You Need to Know About High School Guidance Counselors

In my last article I talked about college advising and how awful it was. Thankfully, high school advising is a little bit better but it could still see room for improvement. High school guidance counselors have two main functions. The first is to help students resolve any personal conflicts that they have with their classes or home life. Guidance counselors also help students who have gotten into trouble with a school's dean such as skipping school, missing class, or getting into academic trouble.

The second major function is that guidance counselors are assigned to every student in the high school to help them with college applications and to help them decide which colleges to he or she should apply to for their future.

When students are assigned to a guidance counselor, he or she has to meet with them at least once or twice to discuss how they did on their Scholastic Aptitude Test and what schools he or she is thinking of applying to for college. For a large majority of students, this meeting will entail your guidance counselor telling you that certain schools which you have selected you don't have a prayer of getting into. At least that's what happened to me. Now perhaps I am an anomaly and maybe things have changed since way back when I went to high school, but the schools that were my "reach" schools that I wasn't supposed to get into, I made. That always made me regret the decision not to apply to schools which my guidance counselor said I would never be able to get into. At worst, you will get a rejection letter and at best you could get put onto a waiting list or even, just maybe, you can get accepted into that school.

The idea of a reach school is something that guidance counselors have developed in their categorization of colleges for high school students. For each high school student, depending on your Grade Point Average and Scholastic Aptitude Test Score (SAT), your guidance counselor will tell you which colleges are your reach, target, and safety schools. The reach schools are the schools which you are least likely to get in and are usually your dream school which you are desperately praying that by some miracle you can get into. Your target school is the school which you can probably get into but not definitely. Your list of target schools should be around four schools that you would like to get into and would definitely consider attending for college. Finally, the safety school is the school which you can definitely get into based on the fact that your grades and test scores are over the average scores that the particular school has deemed as their average incoming student. The safety schools you need to apply to just in case you don't get into your reach and target schools.