After 31 Years, a College Counselor Takes Stock

Mary Beth Kravets has a rule: those who visit her office must leave certain things outside. Among them are the words “ranking” and “tier.”

Ms. Kravets, a college counselor at Deerfield High School, in Illinois, has long encouraged students to look beyond top-25 lists of colleges, beyond the shimmer of prestige. To that end, she asks parents where their doctors attended medical school. “Ninety-five percent of them have no idea,” she says.

If mothers and fathers are willing to put their lives in the hands of those who may or may not have attended a famous college, then why do so many fret so much about where their children will enroll? The answer, Ms. Kravets knows, is complicated. Over the last three decades, she has seen the admissions atmosphere change, and the barometers of pre-collegiate angst go off the charts.

Recently, Ms. Kravets announced that she will retire at the end of the school year. On Tuesday, I talked with her about her career, during which she served as president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, and visited thousands (she swears) of colleges and universities. Along the way, she has become an outspoken member of her profession.

When Ms. Kravets started at Deerfield, there was no computer on her desk – just hardcover college guides with the obligatory photographs of professors teaching classes under a tree, students clustered around, wearing those lost-in-learning expressions. Back then, people did not yet know the terms “demonstrated interest,” “need-aware admissions,” or “single-choice early action.”

In many ways, her job was easier then, she says. Other than a few catalogs and those ubiquitous viewbooks, counselors were the main source of information about admissions. Today, chatter about choosing a college comes from many corners, and the bombardment of information starts years before students apply.

“We have to work very hard as counselors to make sure that there’s interaction with students because it’s so easy for them just to revert to the Internet,” she says. “It’s important to make programs interesting and awesome to get them out of their houses and off the computer.”

The other night, Ms. Kravets spoke at a college-planning session for sophomores and their parents. She began by reading a top-10 list of lessons that graduating seniors said they wished they had learned sooner. One was that most applicants get into one of the their top three choices. “Once you cross that stage, get that diploma, and everybody claps, no one ever remembers where you’ve gone, the name of that college,” she tells her students. “It’s ‘What are you doing? Where are you working?’”

A few years back, Ms. Kravets suggested that one of her students check out Landmark College, a Vermont liberal-arts institution that serves students with learning disabilities and AD/HD. Some of the young woman’s friends — as well as a couple teachers — were chagrined when she chose Landmark over several highly-selective colleges. After all, she was the valedictorian. Recently, the student wrote Ms. Kravets to thank her for the advice.

Ms. Kravets is an expert on students with special needs. It all started years ago when Imy Wax, the frustrated mother of one such student told the counselor, “There’s no college for my kid.” So Ms. Kravets decided to find out more about the kinds of programs and services different colleges offered for students with learning disabilities. Ms. Kravets designed questionnaires and sent them to thousands of colleges.

Hundreds responded, and Ms. Kravets and Ms. Wax decided to compile the responses in a book, which they published themselves under the title The K&W Guide to Colleges for the Learning Disabled. Before long the authors appeared on the Today show. They were given about five minutes in between a performance by Boyz II Men and an interview with a Sumo wrestler who had married a model. Days later, several publishers called, and eventually Princeton Review published the book, now in its 10th edition.

The book is a visible reminder that good students come in many forms, a simple fact that Ms. Kravets believes admissions officials too often forget. “Everybody’s looking for the same kids,” she says. “The student who’s in the top quarter of the class, who has top ACT scores, and who’s taken four years of everything.”

Before she became a counselor, Ms. Kravets shrugged off other peoples’ expectations about her own college path. The headmistress at her all-girls academy assumed that she would apply to a women’s college; she applied to Big 10 universities instead. “I had never been in school with a man,” she says.

After graduating from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Ms. Kravets taught elementary school, then high school. For six years, she traded commodities-hogs, soybeans, corn, and silver. One night, she had a dream in which she walked out her front door to find thousands of hogs in the yard. This told her that she needed to change careers.

With a Master’s degree in counseling, she started at Deerfield 31 years ago. She would hear admissions officials from selective institutions talk about “crafting” a class, choosing only the applicants they wanted most. As a counselor at a public high school, however, Ms. Kravets had a different kind of job.

“You get whoever moves into the neighborhood,” she says.