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Katie Ryan, Director of College Counseling.jpg)
Noel Blyler, Associate Director of College Counseling
We see college admissions in terms of "best fit", not "best colleges"; a match to be made, not a prize to be won. We resist college rankings and media hype. We challenge prevailing myths and trendy approaches, testing the worth of various options to determine what appears truly in each student's best interest.
We recognize that there is a broad range of developmental readiness among students for the college search, and that beneath all of the usual conversations about applying and getting in is the subtext of leaving friends and family and living independently away from home.
We regard college counseling as a natural series of steps in each student's continuing development. We encourage students to use the counseling process as a means to know themselves better, to ask, "Who am I?", "What do I do best?", "What makes me happy?", "How do I learn best?", and "What is most important to me?"
We serve parents as well as students, and the scope of our activities includes financial aid, standardized testing, college athletics, and how to identify resources available to help navigate the sometimes-turbulent waters ahead in order not to be overwhelmed.
What parents and students should know about our college counseling program:
CWA's Four -Year College Counseling Program (pdf)
How colleges get to know our students:
Colleges visiting CWA in the Fall of 2010 (pdf)
Colleges attending CWA's College Fair in October, 2011 (pdf)
What we tell colleges about our students:
Our 2011-2012 Report to Colleges (pdf)
What we tell our students about colleges:
The 2011-2012 CWA College Handbook (pdf)
Where our grads go to college:
An interactive online map
What we've heard from college admissions officers:
"At small selective schools like Bates, we take pride in really getting to know our territory. For many (high) schools, we have the opportunity to develop an understanding of a school over the course of many years, with dozens of applications. For other schools, we might only receive one or two applications in a given season. In these cases especially, we pay close attention to the school profile. We actually sit the profile next to the student's transcript as we read the application. We get a sense of the context: what is offered for courses, any special programs, how many students go on to 4 year institutions, where and so on. Once we have that background, we can assess what was available to the student, and what did he take advantage of. We also use that information to determine how prepared that student would be for the rigors of Bates academics. We know that a student ranked #49 out of 50 from a school that has very rigorous courses and sends all of its students on to 4 year institutions is still prepared for a challenging college." - Johanna Farrar, Bates College in Lewiston, Maine
"We get applications from over 4,000 schools from around the world and have seen every conceivable grading scale and weighting scheme imaginable. It's the curriculum that's behind the GPA (Grade Point Average) that is most important. The question we ask is what has the student done with what is available to him or her." - Mike Sexton, Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California
