The Integrated College Counseling and Social Emotional Counseling Model: Addressing the "Groundhog Day" of Admissions Anxiety in High-Pressure Schools
Nikki Magaziner Mills & Carrie G. Friend, St. Albans School

We don’t have to tell the counselors of ACCIS that in our high-achieving ecosystem of independent schools, the college admissions process is one fueled by emotion. Applying to college is and always has been a big life transition, a moment of growth and introspection, and an opportunity. But increasingly, in this ultra-competitive, changing, and uncertain admissions landscape, anxiety and self-doubt and expectation can shift a year-long rite of passage into a mult-year crisis of personal and family identity. 

Many years ago, we in the College Counseling Office and the Counseling Office at St. Albans School realized that our offices were having similar conversations about disappointment and stress with the same families. In a moment that has since enriched our work immeasurably, we decided to start collaborating to directly address the real and big emotions that are infused into every step of the process of applying and going to college. The practical and emotional coexist for the people going through this process, and we realized that addressing one without the other was only talking about half the story. 

In the sequential, laddered programming we have developed, we attempt to provide practical suggestions and emotional grounding for students, parents, and teachers at this important developmental stage. We have tried valiantly to mitigate the Groundhog Day moments when kids and parents lose the plot of what they are actually doing (growing! finding themselves!) and fall into the predictable and avoidable pattern of focusing so much on process and rankings and results that relationships fray. Our goal: to keep kids happy and confident, our senior classes cohesive and supportive, and families intact. Spoiler alert: it’s working!

It Is What It Is: Naming What is Happening
At our all-boys 4-12 school, we live in a wonderful bubble where 100% of our graduates go to college at some of the best colleges around the country and the globe. Like your school, ours is a place where students are highly motivated, thoughtful, and kind; this is a place where it is cool to be smart, where our graduates truly set out after graduation to affect change and to do great things. But it is also a place where the historic strength of our colleges list creates a reality that isn’t real, where kids' identities can be connected to their college of attendance, and where kids can identify one another based on which college they are attending. It’s a place where parents feel immense social pressure for their kid’s process to go a certain way, where at college decision time, the reactions are both celebratory and comparative (did we do as “well” as the high school down the street?). It’s an environment where families try to come to terms with the fact that they can’t control a difficult-to-understand process influenced by increased application numbers, test-optional policies, Supreme Court decisions, A.I., enrollment management, and tracked demonstrated interest. Emotions are strong. When parents and kids suppress their real sadness, excitement, worry, about the elephant in the room – that the family is about to change as a child leaves home – those emotions can upend everything.

And so, we name those emotions and reactions. Again and again and again. And what we found is that naming reality and naming emotions takes away their power. Students and parents feel less surprised by their feelings and more in touch with all that’s behind them. We have moved away from waiting for individual family crises to emerge and instead developed our four-part Emotions of the Process curriculum.

For Parents: The Mirror
In March, we start with a program for junior parents titled Autonomy Under Construction: Supporting Your Sons Through the College Process. This, our newest talk, is designed to acknowledge early on how parent expectations and biases can infiltrate the smoothness of the process as a junior begins to self-reflect and identify colleges of interest. In October, we host a seminar titled The Emotions of Senior Year for senior parents, a program where, rather than talking about the Common App, we talk about the family dinner table. We encourage parents to prioritize their relationships with their kids, which can get lost in the melee of senior year. In the spring, we run a Transition to College session that focuses on the real but hard parts of soon-to-be empty nesting. 

In these talks, we ask parents to pause often and identify their own behavior, and to ask often: Am I doing/saying this for me or for him? By describing healthy behaviors and also unhelpful ones – like how to practice their faces in advance of a college decision appearing on a screen or why they are obsessing over their kids’ friends’ college list – we give parents a mirror to see themselves in our examples as they progress through the roller-coaster of the final two years of high school. We talk about how parents often dive into the "weeds" of an application, not out of sheer delight in micromanagement, but as a subconscious way to cope with the impending grief of their son leaving home. In showing them all the things we see, we hope that they will recognize when they are straying from the path and self-correct before any damage is done. We are careful not to shame parents if they get stuck in some common traps here, but we are clear and strong in our messaging that unaddressed “stuff” can do real damage. 

For Students: The Pressure Valve
In November, just before the first wave of Early Decision results, we gather the seniors (usually with donuts) to name all of the things that they may be feeling but may not be articulating. We tell them plainly that this process is often nonsensical and influenced by factors they can't control. We encourage them to focus on the "what" (their interests) rather than the "where" (the brand). We teach them how to support a friend who gets a "No" while they get a "Yes," and vice versa, acknowledging that both experiences can be complicated. We alert them that sometimes a joke-y comment about someone’s college or decision can land in a different way than they intended. We survey the class before this meeting to ask them what they like most about their class: the answer is often how close they are and how supportive of each other they are. And so we remind them that being close and supportive during the college process may be more important than at any other time of their high school career.

For Faculty: The Sanctuary
Teachers are often the first responders for our students. Our faculty session, which also happens close to the first round of decisions being released, focuses on ensuring that all of the adults at school are working together to ensure the classroom remains a safe space, separate from college admissions.We provide faculty with a "script" for support: Listen, don't fix. We urge them not to bring up college unless the student initiates, ensuring that class time remains focused on the present intellectual growth rather than future placement. We also say that faculty are invested in this process and are curious about the news, and remind them again that the student’s emotions, not the adult’s, are of primary importance here.

What We Are Seeing
None of this is news to you; you all are, of course, living all of what we have said day by day. But in joining the forces of our two offices, the college process at our school has changed. It has become a little healthier, a little less intense. By naming the dynamics that we see early, we have seen a measurable shift in school culture. Families who attend the programs report having a "vocabulary" for their stress, leading to fewer crisis-level interventions in the counseling office(s). Even in highly competitive cohorts, students have shown increased capacity to support peers through "No" results, largely because the "No" was previously normalized as a possibility. Teachers report feeling more empowered to handle emotional outbursts in the classroom when they understand how every college result – Yes, No, and Maybe – may land heavier than they think.

We hope that, through all of these talks, we connect with a few. That in some way we help a process that can stress kids out, fracture relationships with their peers and their families, and affect the mood of the entire school, become less stressful, more joyful, and more based in reality. If we can get kids, parents, and faculty to understand some of what is behind all of their feelings about applying, getting in, and going to college, we feel like our school will be a healthier place.

We’ve always known that the college process is coming for our families. It made sense to us when we started talking with parents that we needed to get in front of it a bit, and we’ve moved closer to a holistic approach - including the parents, the kids, the faculty in group conversations that used to be more individual and more crisis-initiated. The more we can emphasize to everyone that everything they say is loaded and that thoughtful messaging is mission-critical, the more the kids can have the process be what it should be - a personal exploration of what’s next. 

We’re proud that these presentations and talks have seemed to make some real differences in the community, and we’ll keep building on this work to expand as those needs expand. Combining the wisdom, experience, and perspective of the collective counseling resources at our schools has been transformative. It’s also been really fun! If you haven’t already considered bringing college counseling and social-emotional counseling together at your school, we highly encourage it.