What is a Self-Reported Student Academic Record

A newer movement in the world of college admissions is the concept of the self-reported student academic record. This is a clever initiative on the part of colleges who choose to use it and seems to be gaining momentum with larger schools.
The self-reported student academic record, often called SSAR, is essentially the student’s version of their transcript. In other words, the student inputs their course history into a college’s database themselves rather than that coming from the high school. Therefore, students who are applying to a school that uses a SSAR do not need to have their transcripts sent to the college from the high school like so many students and families are used to. Instead, students should request an unofficial transcript and use that to transcribe the information themselves. When I explain this, sometimes I get pushback from families who insist I send a transcript to the university. I promise this isn’t how this works. If the colleges who utilize a SSAR get a transcript in the mail for one of their applicants, they are going to throw it away.
When you think about it, using a SSAR is really a genius move on the part of the universities. Decoding transcripts is an extraordinarily labor-intensive task. High school’s use a wide array of databases to store their student information. Everyone is using a different system so the process is not as simple as just downloading a transcript and instantly having the information you want, how you want it. With the SSAR applicants are doing the hard work here for the colleges. They are decoding their own transcripts into the systems of the university.
So, isn’t easy for a student to, you know, lie? Well, yes, but the concept of SSAR has a safety net for this too. Students who are admitted will then be required to send in an official transcript from the high school. Those transcripts will be processed by the university and checked against what the student input. Getting caught in a lie would not have a good outcome for the student. Their admissions offer would most likely be rescinded. This is still a time-saving measure for the college. If they get 40,000 applications and they admit 10,000, they really only have to process 10,000 applications themselves. The applicants have done the legwork on all the others.
I suppose there is one downside to the SSAR. I find many families, who don’t deal with transcripts every day like counselors and college admissions offices, are paranoid they’ll answer a question on the SSAR incorrectly and their offer will be rescinded. “I said I took AP Microeconomics on the SSAR and I just realized I took AP Macroeconomics!”, “I was using a transcript I got over the summer for the SSAR and it said my rank was 14 of 228, I just got a new transcript and with all these new students my rank is 15/240! I lied on my SSAR!”  Don’t sweat the small stuff. The colleges understand they have people who are not experts completing the SSAR. If a question is a little confusing to you, it’s certain someone else is having a hard time too. If you made a D in a course don’t tell the school you made a B, but minor inconsistencies shouldn’t make or break you.

Don't Write Off Your English Teacher

Each year in school, students spend considerable time studying language arts. We pay a great deal of attention to this in early grade levels, but by high school, enrollment in yet another English class becomes rather rote to a student. To the adolescent, doesn’t that just mean they have to read more books written by some dead people? They can already speak, listen, read, and write. What else is there to do? Well….

This is where I see a lot of school high school students failing to see the value of what a class can give to them. They are right in that hopefully by high school they can communicate with others with just fine. However, this is the opportunity for them to hone their ability to communicate and become so much better at it.

This is particularly true in the area of writing, or composition, I should say. Composition is the basis of all our communication regardless of how we deliver it. Whether we are texting with friends or presenting at a formal work meeting, we spend tremendous amounts of mental energy in the art of crafting the messages we want to convey and high school is a time when we can really grow in our ability to do this.

I’m not so sure teenagers have a strong grasp on the quantity of important composition adults do on a daily basis. When I was in high school, I certainly didn’t consider the fact I would end up as a high school counselor sending countless emails a day, meeting with parents to discuss the struggles their students are having, texting families answers to college admissions questions, drafting recommendation letters to colleges and scholarship committees, and then writing about it all for you to read here!  Here I am though in a state of constant composition, and I consider myself fortunate to have been blessed with some high school teachers who valued teaching me how to communicate the right way.

It is difficult to quickly see development in language arts. It’s not like math or science where one day you don’t know what osmosis is and the next day you do. Learning language arts is a gradual process and it takes perspective to see improvements. As a high school student progresses, they learn more vocabulary, they have a better understanding of grammar, they read good writing and know what it looks, they become enlightened by the things they read, and learn how to find and research the things they don’t know. Language arts students develop a more mastered control of their language and therefore are better at communicating with the rest of the world.

So, my point here is don’t blow off your high school English class. Instead, embrace it as an opportunity to enhance the skill you’ll use more than any other for the rest of your life. Soak up the lessons from your English teachers and work with a mindsight that even if you “speak English just fine,” you can always get better. Who knows what you’ll need to say one day?   

What High School Students Should Be Doing Over the Summer

The summer break can be a useful time for high school students. It is a time students can pad their resumes, enrich their academics, and get some serious college planning done. Here is a year by year guide for what students could be doing over the summer.

        As soon as students walk out the door on the last day of 8th grade, high school has begun. Depending on your state, child labor laws can restrict the amount of time these students are able to work. This is a great time to begin amassing community service hours which might be required for scholarships down the road. Even if they are not required, they’ll look good on scholarship applications and college admission applications. If students plan to play sports in high school, they might want to inquire about any summer training programs students already at the high school are participating in. Of course, they should attend their high school freshman orientation as well, if one is offered.

After freshman year, the things above hold true. Students might also consider taking
additional classes online. In this regard, it might be a good idea to have a rough
draft of all the courses a student plans to take for the rest of high school.
There might be some courses a student wants to take but that don’t fit nicely
into the traditional school year. Thus, squeezing something into the summer to
make room for such a course is often the way to go. The summer following
freshman year can be a great time for this as work restrictions might still
exist, there aren’t some of the other demands below, and students have experience
in high school level work. This is also an ideal time to take driver’s ed.

After the 10th grade, many students will hold jobs, they should still work to acquire
community service hours, and perhaps take coursework online. This is an
important time to start touring colleges. These students are just over a year
out from completing college applications so it is crucial that they begin to
put the list of colleges together they plan to apply to. Parents can take a
hand in this by scheduling college tours to coincide with summer vacations. All
colleges offer formal tours and you’ll probably gain more insight with these
than just walking around campus on your own. Lastly, rising junior students would
do well to spend some time studying for college admissions tests like the SAT
and ACT

Such tours can continue into the summer after the 11th grade. This is a good time to
reflect back and verify there were no failed classes that need to be retaken in
order to graduate. Students can also spend time reflecting and putting together
a list of accomplishments and points they want to be sure to include on their
college and scholarship application which will come as soon as school starts
back in the fall.

Just because school is out for summer doesn’t mean high school students don’t have anything they need to do. There are plenty of small tasks that can add up to big
accomplishments on the road to graduation and beyond.

Applying to International Universities

  The United States is full of great colleges and universities. However, America high school students aren’t limited to those. Indeed, the world’s professionals are being trained somewhere and that’s often at the quality colleges and universities in other countries. American students might find an international university is the right fit for them and here are some things to consider when seeking admission at one of these schools.

To begin, attending an international college should not be a haphazard decision. This needs to be a well thought out and targeted objective. After the all, the most important thing I can tell you about applying to an international school is to research, research, research. Everything you know about American college admissions may or may not hold water on the international stage. The importance of standardized test scores, academic performance, strength of courses taken, and extracurriculars can be vastly different than what you find in the American system and the value of these things can vary from one country to the next. You have to know what a specific college values in their selection process and you should never assume an international university considers the same thing in the same way as an American school does.

In order to do this effectively, you need to have a clear idea of what you are trying to do. It is not enough to say, “I want to go to college abroad. Maybe in China, Europe, or Australia.” You need something much more concrete than that. You need to be able to say, “I want to attend college in England and study international business.” That sort of direct approach will give you the ability to narrow your search and focus on a small number of similar schools. I should mention here too that no international university should ever be considered a safety school. If an American high school student intends to go to college but is overwhelmingly convinced they’ll attend an international school, they would be a fool to not apply to at least one stateside university. That’s just good practice and will provide an option down the road if something unexpected comes along.

The last point I want to make here is that if a student is choosing to attend an international school, they really need to tour it. Too few students take the time to tour American universities and there is much more involved in selecting an international school.  Just because you went to Dublin, Ireland in middle school or your aunt sent you a pretty postcard from there once doesn’t mean you are going to like the college in the city of Cork if you decide to leave everything behind and move there. It’s probably going to be an expensive trip, but you need to go feel these places with your own senses and with a college-bound mindset before you make this sort of monumental decision.

Of course, there is much more that could go into this topic but those factors can be too varied to explore here. With that being said, I’ll go back to my main point which is to narrow your search and do a ton of research. Only by doing that will you be prepared to seek admission to a four-year school and know that you are making an informed decision about a huge step in life.  

The College Board's Search Engine

As a student approaches college, it is crucial that they begin to prepare by researching institutions that are an appropriate fit for them. In the early goings, this can be done online and there are a multitude of resources on the internet that discuss the differences in individual colleges. There is one such resource in particular that I have found to be user friendly, comprehensive, and powerful.

        The College Board’s college search engine can be found bigfuture.collegeboard.com. This website is the landing page for the College Board’s post-secondary planning tool which includes excellent information on careers and steps on how to reach those careers. Perhaps, I’ll discuss those in-depth in the future. When, at this site, I find that I spend most of my time on the college search engine.

        This is a terrific tool. You’ll find it associated with the words “Find Colleges”. Once you access the search engine, you’ll find a series of filters on the left side. These are what make this site so great. The search engine starts with over 3700 institutions of higher learning in the United States. The filters allow you to boil that number down to a list of schools that might meet a variety of very specific needs.

        For many, this starts with geography and, indeed, that’s one of the filters. If you are certain you want to go to college in North Carolina you can search for only schools in North Carolina. Or, you could expand that to schools in the South. If you’re certain you want an urban setting, you can adjust your filters to that. Next, suppose you’re convinced you want to study geology--filter for that. If you’re hoping for a chance to walk on to a women’s lacrosse team, you’ll need to make sure your school has a program in that so you can adjust your filter accordingly. Lastly, what if you’re SAT scores are quite where you’d like them to be? You can plug those numbers into the search engine too and find schools that fit your academic capabilities.

I used SAT scores of 500 Math and 500 Reading and Writing as well as the other above criteria which is all pretty specific. That gave me a list of eight schools. There are some more filters I didn’t even use but maybe you’re not familiar with the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. That was one of my results. It’s a school I think I’ve heard of but don’t know much about. After all, no one can know everything about all 3700 colleges in the United States.

However, if I’m a future lacrosse playing, geology major with a 1000 score at an urban campus in the South, UNC at Greensboro is a school I need to know about. Now, I do and I can link directly to more information and the school’s website from the search engine. Maybe, I wouldn’t end up at a school like UNC at Greensboro but at least it’s on my radar now and that’s really the point of this exercise. Using this tool can expose the student to schools that are actually a really good fit for them but that they might not know about. I’d encourage any student to play with this early on in high school in order to find a crop of schools to consider as they move closer to graduation.

The Economics of Skills

As graduation approaches, I let some of my seniors in on a little secret. As a high school educator, I didn’t adequately prepare my students for the workforce. I don’t feel too bad about myself for that though. I don’t think I was supposed to.

I don’t believe the American educational system is designed in a way that charges high schools with providing most students with the skills they need to be competitive in the workforce. The keyword there is competitive and there are economics tied to this. In my view, the role of a high school education is to provide the foundation upon which employable skills are built. Those skills are what separate us, gives us specificity, and puts us in a position where we can command more pay for what we do because not everyone can do what we do as well as we do it. That’s a little wordy. What I mean is, we pay brain surgeons a lot because when you need a brain surgeon, you really need a brain surgeon, and there are few people who have the education and skills to pull off brain surgery. The person who scoops mashed potatoes onto plates in the cafeteria at that same hospital? Well, there is not much skill involved in mashed potato scooping so there are a lot of people who can do it. Their pay is low. Supply and demand.

High schools don’t teach a lot of skills that are in demand. Yes, a lot of schools have some vocational programs or courses that can lead to some industry certifications. However, if high schools are teaching it, there are a lot of people learning how to do it so that affects your supply. I think high school vocational programs are better than nothing and can provide high school graduates some skills right off the bat, but I think high school vocation can best be utilized when it is used by a student as a slingshot to accelerate the acquisition of skills in a given vocation at the post-secondary level.

Again what is most valuable from high school is that it builds the foundation. High schools teach students how to read, how to do math, and provides the general knowledge basis that students will need to learn their employability skills. For example, I’m not an economist, but I took economics in high school. Without that course, I couldn’t compose this writing, as a guidance counselor, about the economics of skills. I learned what I know about being a guidance counselor from college and my work experience. However, my high school education is really important to me because it provides all the general knowledge I use for all the little pieces I pull into my role as a counselor. Nevertheless, despite their incredible value to me, I don’t think anyone would pay me very much to put all those little pieces of knowledge to work by themselves. It is the skillset I built on top of those that I am really paid for.

So, my point here is that high school graduates should feel accomplished and they should value their high school education. But, they shouldn’t rest on those laurels or think they are done with their education. They really need to get out there and go acquire some special skills that not everyone else has. That’s how they are going to make themselves competitive in the workforce and produce a livable wage.     

Taking Unfamiliar High School Courses

Okay, so not too long ago the National Institute of Health issued new guidelines that suggest introducing babies to peanuts early on can prevent them from having peanut allergies later in life. In other words, early exposure to something potentially harmful can actually have positive long-term effects. Well, I think this same principle can apply to course selection in high school.

When I discuss course selection with families, I often hear something along the lines of “Well that class sounds hard and I don’t want to hurt my GPA. Besides, I don’t know anything about it.” I understand that argument and can see some merit in it, but I think it undercuts the big picture of what a child’s education is supposed to do and doesn’t benefit a student long term. High school is exactly the time when a student should be challenging themselves and trying out new courses and subject matters.

At my school, I see this most often as many rising seniors choose either calculus or statistics. These students would have already had pre-calculus but would have had little to no in-depth statistics throughout their entire academic career. Nevertheless, a great number, I’d say a majority, of college majors will require at least one statistics course. Thus, in this example, I think exposure to statistics in high school is highly beneficial to my college-bound students even if it’s a challenging course and one for which they have no prior knowledge.

In struggling through a new area, I believe students will be more prepared when they take a course in college. I also believe that, if I must choose, success in college is more important than success in high school. This can be a difficult concept for a student and family to accept. It’s taking on some potentially short term consequences (a tough school year, grades that might not be what one is used to) for long term benefits (an easier trip through college and a better more, well-rounded education). It is also human nature to gravitate towards what is familiar and known rather than what is new and different. However, that aspect of ourselves really runs entirely counter to the pursuit of knowledge.

So, give your babies some peanuts. Force a big spoonful of physics in their mouths. Give them a computer science cookie, or even just a little cup full of creative writing to munch on. Let whatever courses your student doesn’t know anything about be what guides your course selection, especially if it is one that could have anything at all to do with potential college majors. Sometimes we have to choose between what we like and what we need, and that’s exactly what needs to be done here. Go for the early exposure.