Inside
College Counseling, with Director
Sean Logan chat with current students, and realize, “Wow, the financial aid is good, it has great programs, and I have a pretty good feel for the place, I’ll apply.” The Internet also has allowed international recruitment to flourish. SH: What else has changed?
Sean Logan became Andover’s College Counseling Office director in the summer of 2011. He took time out of his busiest season to explain how the process is changing and its challenges. He spoke with magazine editor Sally Holm. Sally Holm: What are the biggest challenges overall in college counseling right now? Sean Logan: Educating students and families to the realities of the current climate. Admission has changed dramatically in the last 15 years. For example: I worked at Occidental College in1997. We overlapped a bit with Pitzer College, a great small school that was admitting around 65 percent of its applicants; I believe it admitted 18 percent of its applicants last year. Take Vanderbilt—25 years ago people said, “It’s a regional Southern place, not particularly diverse, not particularly interested in getting outside of that region.” But Vanderbilt, in the last 15 to 20 years, has changed remarkably. They’re more selective than Georgetown now, admitting 15 percent of their applicants last year.
SL: I am in the generation where deans of admission have become deans of enrollment management—a very different animal. “Demonstrated interest” has become a big buzzword. Are you a competitive applicant and have you shown the proper interest? SH: Which consists of… SL: Visiting is very important. Phone contact. E-mailing. Some schools will look at how much you’ve been on their website. Have you signed in? How many clicks did you go through? If you came and visited, did you stop by the admission office? How about interviews? If it’s strongly encouraged and you don’t, it sends a message: “I guess you’re not as interested in us.” You have to pay attention to those things. As admission deadlines approach, we frequently ask students to add “Likelies” (80 percent chance of admission) to their list, but it’s almost too late to add them anyway, because there’s no contact history. SH: So how do you address this issue?
SL: Right. Schools have spent millions of dollars for improvements in academic programs and facilities. Also, applying has gotten easier. The Common Application now has close to 500 schools.
SL: We have to make sure that kids understand that it’s not enough to say, “I’m at PA, and I’m an A–B student.” The pool that applies to boarding schools is a sliver of what applies to highly selective colleges. It’s a very different group of kids you’re competing with. The idea that “I was admitted to one of the best high schools in the country, so I should be competitive at the top colleges” doesn’t mean as much now. I tell parents, “If your main reason for sending your student to Phillips Academy is to get into a great college, that is a mistake. I can’t guarantee that.” I can guarantee they’re going to get an amazing education, and I can do that because I’ve visited well over 300 high schools in my life—domestically and internationally. This is a really unique community, and our kids capitalize on that.
SH: And the Web…
SH: So there’s a big education task here—kids and parents.
SL: The Web has dramatically increased applications. You can be a kid in rural Iowa, get online, tour a school virtually,
SL: We cannot college-counsel a student without collegecounseling the parent. We spend several months working
SH: Multiple factors must contribute to this. Some schools have improved that much…
46
Andover | Winter 2013