Many of America’s highly selective universities ask for two teacher letters of recommendation and a school counselor letter of recommendation. Each of these letters serves as a window into the heart and mind of a college applicant, and each serves as a critical piece in the admissions process.

What Admissions Officers Look For in Counselor Letters of Recommendation

So, what are elite college admissions officers looking for when reading letters of recommendation from school counselors?

What Good School Counselor Letters Convey

Above all, a good letter of recommendation from a high school counselor addresses a student’s hook or singular focus in their extracurricular pursuits.

While good teacher letters of recommendation are windows into how a student performs in a discipline within the confines of a classroom, good school counselor letters of recommendation offer a window into the student’s extracurricular pursuits. Ideally, those pursuits are not all over the place but instead focused within a specific area that will interest our nation’s most selective institutions.

The school counselor’s letter is a terrific opportunity to showcase a student’s singular hook through several of their activities — both within the school and the larger community. In a student’s activities section and their many admissions essays, they’ll be asked to share a vantage point into their world — much of which should focus on their singular hook — but this is one of the few opportunities to learn about the student’s pursuits from another point of view.

What Bad School Counselor Letters Convey

Yet most school counselor letters of recommendation, like most teacher letters of recommendation, don’t significantly boost a student’s case for admission — even though these letters have the power to do so! But it’s not the fault of school counselors and teachers.

Think about it. A school counselor is typically tasked with writing dozens of letters of recommendation annually. Such work can get tiresome and monotonous quickly. In fact, school counselors often don’t even really know some of their students that well because these students never took the time to meet with them and get to know their counselors on a personal level.

When a school counselor doesn’t know a student especially well, it’ll shine right through in their letter of recommendation. The letter will read as generic — another letter filled with adjectives but not many stories to back those words up. But that’s not the counselor’s fault! No, that’s the student’s fault!

It is a student’s responsibility to get to know their school counselor. They should really take the time to sit down with them from time to time — and not just when the student needs something from the counselor. It’s an opportunity for the student to get to know the counselor and the counselor to get to know the student. It’s an opportunity for the counselor — dare we say it — to grow to like the student. Hey, that matters big time in the highly selective college admissions process!

Of course, even then, students should not leave anything to chance. It’s a critical mistake for students to simply ask a counselor to write a letter of recommendation on their behalf. Instead, counselors often give students (and their parents) forms. What’s conveyed in these forms can serve as the foundation for how the counselor ultimately approaches their letter of recommendation.

Fill it with woe-is-me stories about why you got terrible grades over sophomore year, and you’ll end up with a letter of recommendation featuring such woe-is-me stories that will paint you as unlikable to admissions officers. Fill it with stories that showcase your singular hook — through your extracurricular pursuits — and you’ll end up with a powerful letter of recommendation that can bolster your candidacy. You can take control of your counselor’s letter of recommendation.

Ivy Coach’s Assistance with Shaping School Counselor Letters of Recommendation

Through Ivy Coach’s packages, we assist our students and their parents with preparing forms for recommenders that showcase a student’s wonderfully weird singular hook and wow admissions officers at our nation’s elite universities.

While students will never know with certainty what their school counselor ultimately includes in their letter — since they waive their FERPA right to see their recommendations — in our experience, school counselors generally want to help their students. They’ll thus use great anecdotes when given such material.

If you’re interested in learning more about Ivy Coach’s services, fill out Ivy Coach’s complimentary consultation form. We’ll then be in touch to outline our college counseling services.