Even with the assistance of college advisors (plural), I felt unempowered when making the pivotal college choice decision.
This is the story of why I wish I had a product like Path when I was applying to college and why I'm passionate about what we're building today.
In high school, I loved every single subject I took. I know, huge nerd. But I was passionate about school as well as my own personal growth and academic success, and that drove me to dedicate myself wholeheartedly to every single one of my classes. This led to two issues when it came to college choice:
I couldn't choose a major.
Every major from History all the way to Astrophysics sounded exciting and interesting to me. I wanted to explore them all. Like my good friend and co-founder mentioned in his previous post, I tried everything from lengthy discussions with teachers to "What Major are You?" quizzes (surprise, I was Math!) to little or no avail.
I felt immobilized when it came to college choice.
I won't spend too much time feeding a fed horse here, but it was simply the case that the proper tools didn't exist at the time to help me make what felt like the biggest decision of my life. And with my choice of major being the primary decision point before even starting to look at colleges, I felt immobilized when it came to college choice.
This was all compounded by the fact that:
I was incredibly busy.
Between balancing school, sports, and extracurriculars, I hardly had time to see friends much less sit down and evaluate the thousands of potential U.S. college contenders. And it certainly didn't help that every time I sat down to start, I was overwhelmed by the inordinate and disjoint amount of information for each college for factors that I felt didn't matter (at least up-front) to me.
Everything I read felt fixated on how I could get into these 'top-ranked' schools, but I didn't even know if I wanted to go to any of them yet!
Things like acceptance rates, average test scores/GPAs, and costs appeared on every rankings site I visited. I was baffled. Everything I read felt fixated on how I could get into these 'top-ranked' schools, but I didn't even know if I wanted to go to any of them yet! How does that work?
Regardless, it was clear to both my parents and me that I needed help with this decision. In order to facilitate my decision I ended up working with three separate advisors: Two from my high school and one private.
My High School Counselor Experience
My public high school had over 2,000 students with only 2 college advisors for the whole student body. Given this tight resourcing, these advisors actively prioritized meeting with juniors and seniors to provide timely admissions support to those closest to heading off to college, but it also meant I was forgotten as both a freshman and a sophomore.
We also had six school counselors, but their time was stretched thin between making sure every student was meeting graduation requirements all the way to mental health check-ins. Booking a session with these counselors was difficult, and leading up to my senior year, I had only met with a counselor for a handful of 30-minute sessions, none of which focused on college.
I was forgotten as a freshman and a sophomore.
Now, this portion of the post is not meant to be an attack on my high school. I LOVED my high school and I full-heartedly believe it prepared me academically for college. This section does, however, paint a common picture of the public school situation when it comes to college advising. As our team's previous blog on counselors highlights, the national average of counselor-to-student ratios reaches upwards of 1:400 meaning that millions of students are facing similar struggles to meet with their advisors. And while it's not the purpose of this post, these counselors could certainly use some support.
With my junior year coming to a close and no decisions made yet about majors or colleges, both my parents and I were growing antsy. And so they did what any parent would to help their child in that scenario: they hired a private college counselor.
My Private Counselor Experience
I'll start off by saying that I know how fortunate I am to have had access to a private college counselor and at Path we recognize that this is not a luxury afforded to millions of U.S. students.
That said, even with the support of a third counselor, my college decision didn't become any easier. For my first session's 'homework', I had to identify ten schools that I wanted to be the focus of our first meeting. Ironically, this felt like the whole reason I was coming to her in the first place, but oh well.
In essence, the presence of a dedicated advisor simply provided perspective on my evaluation criteria and compelled me to make decisions
After taking some shots in the dark and choosing 10 schools straight from the top 25 list of US News Rankings, my advisor spent the full hour of our first session analyzing my choices and together we crafted her interpretation of my decision criteria.
Realistically, this was the directional push I needed, so that night I went home and tried to apply that same decision criterion to the rankings websites I had already been looking at with only moderately more success and focus than I had previously.
I still felt I was missing important information that I needed to inform my decision: What did life look like after I graduated? Nevertheless, I pushed forward with the tools at my disposal, and every month for the next three months, I came back to the counselor until we narrowed down a list of 13 schools (I know, still too many) that felt like 50% mine, 25% my parents, and 25% my counselors. I remember looking at my final list and feeling a troublingly unsatisfactory feeling.
In essence, the presence of a dedicated advisor simply provided perspective on my evaluation criteria and compelled me to make decisions. I still had to make the decision for myself and I did the best I could with the limited time and tools available to me.
My experience is not unique. Regardless of your situation, advisors or counselors are not a fix-it solution for college choice. They can certainly be an asset, but only you can make the right decision about your path and that decision requires the right tools.
I didn't have them at the time, even when it felt like I did.
That’s why we’re building Path. We want to be the virtual college counselor assistant in every student's pocket, helping them make what may be the most important decision of their life. We can't make the decision for you, but we can give you direction and information so you can tactfully chart your own path.
Tynan Dewes is the Co-Founder and CTO of Path Technologies. Images generated with our new robot friend, Midjourney.
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