Upper School
For Parents of Bush School Students
Please feel welcome to browse the College Counseling web pages for an overview of the process and philosophy of college advising at The Bush School. They should answer many of your questions about our process and about college admission in general.
An informed approach to discussion of higher education provides for a more positive Upper School and college application experience.
There is a great deal of anxiety-provoking misinformation surrounding the college search and application process these days. Most of this propaganda is generated by the news media and by providers of resources that are advertised as beneficial to a student's college preparation. Both of these information sources are motivated, above all, by the need to generate revenue. Our hope is that as families enter the college search, we can provide resources to help our community members educate themselves on the realities of both what constitutes a good college fit, and on the factors that genuinely impact quality in undergraduate education.
With that in mind, we suggest the following additional resources as guides for parents preparing to join their children as they embark upon the process of finding a college.
Books on the college admission process
- Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding Your Teen Through College Admissions and Beyond,
Marilee Jones and Kenneth R. Ginsburg. - College Unranked
Lloyd Thacker, ed. - Harvard Schmarvard, Jay Mathews
- The College Admissions Mystique, Bill Mayher
- Colleges that Change Lives and Looking Beyond the Ivy League, Loren Pope
- The Gatekeepers, Jacques Steinberg
- The Fiske Guide to Getting into the Right College, Edward B. Fiske and Bruce Hammond
Books for parents on the transition from high school to college
- Letting Go, Coburn and Treeger
- The Launching Years, Kastner and Wyatt
Online Reference
The Education Conservancy
By affirming educational values, The Education Conservancy helps students, colleges and high schools overcome commercial interference in college admissions.
Colleges That Change Lives Resources
The Common Misperceptions and Parent FAQ pages provide useful reading for early stages of college preparation.
The Bush School provides a solid foundation and comprehensive support for the college search and application process.
The best preparation for college is the kind of hands-on, choice-rich, and discussion-intensive education we provide at The Bush School, combined with a healthy engagement in co-curricular activities that are meaningful to the student. The College Counseling Office at Bush provides a comprehensive support to the college search and application process, beginning in earnest in the junior year-the appropriate time for students to concern themselves with these matters. It is our sincere hope that the ninth and tenth grade years can be preserved as a time for students to be fully engaged in their academic, extracurricular and social lives at school, without external distractions from "college preparatory" pursuits. Our office is in continued, direct communication with college admission officers, and can serve as the best gauge of which activities will truly impact a student's preparation for college and the admission process.
The college search provides us with an opportunity to celebrate a student's achievements and uniqueness, and to enjoy learning about the richness and variety of higher education.
Now more than ever, the range of options available to our students, and the quality of teaching and resources available across a huge spectrum of institutions, are overwhelming. Our challenge is to help students assess themselves in order to seek out, with confidence, the places that will suit them best, and to manage, independently, the responsibility of leading this process. I look forward to working with your family through this exciting journey.