Category Archives: College Advice

College Admissions Advice and Financial Aide Strategy from New York’s College Counselors

Three Tips For A Great College Essay

Writing college application essays is one of the most dreaded tasks of college applicants. We work with students all summer to help them craft their essays so they understand how to authentically show college admissions professionals a facet of their character and personality. Below, I’ve identified three key pieces of advice that will help kids manage the process so they don’t get too stressed.

Start Early. For high school juniors (rising seniors), time is your biggest ally. Most of you will not submit applications until November 1 at the earliest, some will submit later…so take the time this summer to begin working on your piece. Half the battle is determining your topic. Once you do so, begin to write. Even if you’re unsure of what or how to write, just get something on paper now. Once you find a good topic and begin writing, you’re more than half way done!
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to have had a traumatic event in your life to write a good college essay. Instead, write a big essay on a small topic. The key is to find a compelling way to show how unique you are. Sometimes picking a small, symbolic event that represents “the larger you” is an effective way of communicating your message. My high school AP English teacher taught me that the best literature is “unique, yet universal.” This is a great way to think about the essay. It needs to show who you are, why you’re unique, and it needs to be written in a unique, first person voice, while appealing to a wide (universal) audience. This is easier said than done, but once you get it, the essay will be much more manageable.
Write and re-write. We suggest that our students take 3 drafts to craft their piece. Like anything else, the more time you spend on your college essay, the better it will be.

Good luck!!

Hidden Gems

As I speak with groups about the college admissions process, I often ask: “How many of you have heard of Villanova University?” Typically, 29 out of 30 hands are extended. I follow up with: “How many have heard of Ursinus College?” Usually, 14 of 30 hands go up. The difference is astounding, considering the fact that both schools are less than a 5 hour drive from the Capital Region of New York – and within about 20 miles of each other! When I ask why so many know Villanova and not Ursinus, most everyone says because of basketball, as in NCAA March Madness.

It’s fascinating to me how an institution’s brand often determines how many students apply every year, as well as its selectivity. Villanova admits about 44% of its applicants. Ursinus admits 70%. I call Villanova a “name brand” school, which often has little to do with the quality of education at a particular college. In fact, Villanova is an excellent university for the right student, but then again, so is Ursinus. Ursinus is one of the “Colleges That Change Lives – www.ctcl.org. Check it out. It’s an excellent fit for many students, but it doesn’t have the brand name cache of Villanova in the eyes of the public.

Ursinus is one of dozens, if not hundreds of hidden gems across the country that many students and parents should consider, but they don’t simply because they don’t know about it. The goal of the college admissions process is to find best fit colleges socially, academically, and financially. Looking past the brand name, goes a long way in the college search. It could be a much less expensive option, and it could, literally, change someone’s life.

Three Reasons You Should Begin The College Search Early

Many people ask me when students should begin the college search/planning process, and the answer often depends on the particular student. Last week, I met with a young woman who is finishing 9th grade. She needed some advice on course selection for next year. She was also confused about possible careers. This student was goal oriented, and sought advice. We had also worked with her older brother, so she knew we were available to help.

But for most kids, 10th or early in 11th grade is the best time to begin the process. Why so early? There are essentially 3 key reasons:

1. It gives you plenty of opportunity to select colleges, and most importantly to visit. This is the most critical reason for starting early, because we suggest that most families visit 12-14 colleges. And we recommend that you do so while school is in session, so if you start this toward the end of the junior year, you won’t have much time to visit before application season in the fall of senior year.

2. It gives you a chance to assess your family’s college affordability at least 2 years before you get your first bill. That means you still have time to plan. You’ll be able to determine whether you’ll qualify for financial aid and scholarships, and you’ll have the chance to save more money, not to mention bracing yourself for the significant college expense that will be coming your way.

3. The fact is that the more time you put into any project, the better the outcome. College is a life shaping, significant investment of time and money. The more you approach it strategically and thoughtfully, the better the decision will be. You wouldn’t decide on a home to buy based on visiting two houses in two different neighborhoods over a month long period, especially if you were moving to a new city. Instead, you would take your time, and think hard about all the elements you want and need in a home, neighborhood, school district, etc…You should take the same approach to helping your child through the college planning process.

The bottom line: Start early, take your time, and think thoughtfully and strategically about which colleges will be a great fit for your child. Doing so will ensure that the college search will be fun and fruitful.

Three Ways to Cut The Cost of College

With the cost of college reaching $60,000/year at some schools next year, finances are on every parent’s mind. To reduce what you pay for college, here are three factors to consider:

1. Scholarships for B students: Even if your child is not an A student, he or she can get scholarships. The trick is to figure out which colleges want your child. Maybe they want or need athletes (even Division 3). Perhaps they’re looking for musicians, or a pep band participant. With a sport such as cross country, go to the athletics page on the school’s website and compare your child’s performance to posted statistics. It gets more difficult with a sport like baseball, but that’s where a coach can help you understand which schools might need you. Know who wants your child in terms of academics by looking at the college’s average grades and understanding where your child fits in. Some schools offer tuition discounting to try to entice certain students to enroll.

2. Understand early whether you’ll qualify for need-based financial aid, and get a sense for how much. By early, I mean when your child is a high school sophomore. As long as you understand affordability early in the process, you will know what the bill will be and can possibly restrict the list of schools to a certain segment. Go to collegeboard.com to find a calculator. Search under “college planning” and then “pay for college.” Keep in mind that different schools calculate your ability to pay differently. For example, some colleges assess your net home equity in their formula, and others do not. Some schools provide a larger allowance for certain assets, and others do not. If you take time to examine this issue early enough, you can implement strategies to qualify for more financial aid.

3. There are hidden gems. Kiplinger, a publisher of business forecasts and personal finance advice, compiles a list of best college values. One is SUNY Geneseo, another is Binghamton. Siena can be a great value for the right student. And Hartwick College offers a three-year degree program, which can cut the cost of college by 25 percent. But there are hundreds of other gems out there that you probably have never heard of. Don’t presume that a public college will be your least expensive option. This is often not the case. Consider consulting with a college advisor to help you identify which schools will be a good fit for your child.

College Decisions: The Right College At The Right Price

It’s that time of year again. By Tuesday, May 1st, all college bound high school seniors must submit their deposit to the college of their choice. For some it’s a difficult time; for others, it’s a time of joy, but for all it’s the beginning of a new chapter.

For the parents of this year’s high school sophomores and juniors, it’s instructive to learn from others’ mistakes. To illustrate this point, consider a family we advised this year. Let’s call them the Joneses. They let their child, Jenny, handle most of the college search. They chose only to work with a college advisor at the end of the process – for help on the applications and essays. They figured their daughter could select the best school for her. Jenny was a bright student who had a 94 average and a 2010 combined SAT score (1280 – Reading and Math). She applied to only 5 colleges, four of which were stretch schools. The other was a safe, Providence College. She was accepted in January to Providence. This proved to be very trying for her, because she wasn’t thrilled with the choice, but at least she knew she was admitted to one college. On the plus side, she did receive a scholarship of $8,000/year. She didn’t hear from any of her stretch schools until April 1st. That was 3 months of waiting and hoping, When she did finally get her letters, she was admitted to only one, Wake Forest University, and was not admitted to Boston College, New York University, and Colgate.

This scenario posed a dilemma for Jenny Jones. She had visited Wake Forest once last April. At the time, she loved it. But a year in the life of a teenager is a long time, and by the following April she realized that North Carolina was a little far for her and her parents. As for Providence, it was really just a placeholder in her mind. Everyone told her she needed a safe school, so she found one and didn’t think much of it. She had visited Providence the summer of her junior year, and while she liked it, the major she ultimately decided on – 8 months later – was not offered there.

The second problem was even bigger: cost. This family, like most of the clients we work with, did not qualify for need based financial aid, yet they could not really afford the $58,260/year, or more than $230,000 over four years at Wake Forest. Providence proved to be not much less expensive at $55,600, minus the $8,000/year scholarship. This would total $47,600/year or just under $200,000 over 4 years. These numbers are not typos. College really is that expensive.

In the end, Jenny chose Providence due to proximity to home and price. This was not a choice, however, she was pleased about. Nor were her parents. They had saved less than $50,000, so they were faced with taking out more than $150,000 in loans. This is a situation I would advise against.

So, the bottom line for Jenny was: She didn’t have enough viable options because her college search was not systematic, strategic, and well informed. A professional, ethical college advisor would have helped the family understand fit, expand the student’s options, and would have prepared Jenny more for admission to her stretch schools. They would have also advised the family about safe and probable schools, so that they had options at the end of the process. Some advisors, like The College Advisor of New York, also help students maximize scholarship and financial aid opportunities as well, thus lowering the net cost.

Some families can navigate the college admissions process on their own, others choose to hire an advisor. Chances are, a college counselor can help save you time, angst, and money, while guiding your child to a college that’s a great fit for them, socially, academically, and financially. I urge you to consider hiring a college counselor for your child’s college search.

Rising Student Loan Debt Vs. Falling Salaries

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article about the problem of student loan debt. The graphic below sums up the issue in a powerful way. As student loan debt has increased dramatically over the past decade, salaries of young adults have also fallen. I was recently interviewed about this issue by a local TV News station. After the camera was turned off, the reported explained that she had $96,000 in student loan debt. She is 30 years old and her monthly student loan payment is higher than my mortgage payment. This is clearly a significant and growing problem. As the cost of college has increased exponentially over the past twenty years – by more than double the rate of inflation – it takes more of a family’s income to pay for college than ever before. So naturally, parents and students turn to loans. Since many parents have run out of home equity on which to draw, they pass the loan burden on to their children.

While this may seem like an intractable problem, there is a solution, one which many families won’t enjoy reading. Stop overpaying for college! In the same way that debt counselors tell consumers to cut up their credit cards, I advise my clients to stop taking on unecessary debt. I recently told a client with significant debt issues not to send their son to his number 1 college choice as it was the most expensive option of the 8 schools to which he was admitted. This family was considering taking out $160,000 in loans to pay for college, when they could have opted for their cheapest option at a total cost of about $68,000 over 4 years. By the way, lest you think that public universities are always the lowest price option, that was not the case in this instance. The first school mentioned above was a public university. The second, lower priced option was a private, liberal arts college!

The key is to strategically and systematically search for colleges at which your child will be an appealing applicant. This means different things to different colleges. Some schools want and need world class athletes; others seek strong academicians. Still others are seeking “geographic diversity,” and the list goes on. The more colleges value the applicant, the better the aid and scholarship packages will be.

See the graphic below, and then avoid that situation at all costs!

Selective College Admissions And Who We’ve Become

“A 35 on the ACT Math Test is no good.” So said my student, Jenny, from Shanghai via our effective, but somewhat blurry Skype connection last November.

Trying to boost her confidence, and add some degree of accuracy to her statement, I said, “I’m not sure you understand. A 35 is at the 99th percentile. You scored better than all but one percent of U.S. test takers,” to which Jenny replied: “In China a 36 (a perfect score) is the only good score on the ACT Math and Science tests.”

And then it hit me. The ACT, SAT and many tests like them are normed largely on American students. In comparison with U.S. kids, Jenny’s 35 was extremely strong, but give that test to a million Chinese students, and her score may have fallen in the 65th percentile. Chinese students and others across the world score, literally, off the charts, or at least off our charts.

That same week, my first grader’s class planned, organized, and executed a “Pow Wow” to help them learn about Native Americans, the pilgrims, and early American History. I couldn’t help but think that while he was dancing and socializing with his friends, a class of first grade students somewhere in the Pacific Rim was getting drilled on Trigonometric functions. And we wonder why our kids rank 32nd among industrialized nations in math proficieny and 17th in reading.

But the issue goes further than underperforming teachers and schools. It goes to what we’ve become as an American culture. The New York Post reported yesterday that officials at several elite Manhattan high schools have banned seniors from wearing the sweatshirts of selective colleges to which they’ve gained acceptance. Nor were they allowed to post their admissions decisions on Facebook or MySpace. I wonder what George Orwell would think! The rationale behind the policy is that doing so will hurt the feelings of others who were not so successful in their college admissions quest. Yours truly was interviewed for this story, and I expressed my disapproval of such a policy.

So I began to think: Are we punishing students for their achievement? Are we so cautious about not hurting the feelings of others that we fail to celebrate our own accomplishments? Why do we give trophies to every child who took part in a sport? Webster’s Dictionary defines a trophy as “anything serving as a token or evidence of victory, valor or skill.” Clearly, every child on every team in my son’s Little League does not finish the season victorious – and many have no skill at all! But this does not mean they will be scarred for life. Quite the contrary. It means that given the opportunity, and the right kind of encouragement, they will feel compelled to find a new activity in which they can excel. An activity they enjoy. For true self esteem is the product of hard work and achievement.

In short, I believe we’re coddling our kids into mediocrity. This must stop or our Asian friends will continue to surpass us, and this could mean even darker days for our education system, our economy and the very Country we value so much.

The Financial Crisis And Paying For College

With family investments and home values battered by the recent financial crisis, colleges and universities around the nation are seeing an increase in students seeking financial aid and are bracing for even more.

A panoramic picture of the Angell Center courtyard at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At the same time, higher education’s ability to meet that extra need is in question because the value of most college endowments has dropped as well. Nationwide, applications for financial aid jumped 16% last fall compared to the previous year. Some colleges may need to cut back on other spending to fund extra scholarships. Others are increasing grants and boosting staffing to help students find loans if their families’ college savings accounts have been hit by Wall Street losses or if they can no longer borrow against their homes.

Before taking steps to reduce financial aid, schools will probably first postpone new construction and stop hiring new faculty. BostonUniversity, for example, announced a construction and hiring freeze, and other schools may follow suit if the situation does not improve.

In recent years, universities with significant endowments have faced pressure from Congress to spend more of the investment returns on scholarships or risk jeopardizing their tax-exempt status.

Another concern is that some financially stressed families may push current high school seniors to apply only to public institutions, like the SUNY (State University of New York) system. I have seen this occur with some of our affluent clients. Despite being able to afford it, they simply cannot justify spending almost three times the money for a selective private college. This has resulted in the SUNY schools, and many out of state publics, becoming highly selective. So parents hoping to send their children to what used to be a “safe” SUNY school, in terms of selectivity, may not have that option. They will still have to pay the going rate for a private college, which can run close to $60,000/year.

The result: More loans, at a time when concerns persist about loan availability if the banking system remains unstable. In addition, many experts are now warning that the student loan bubble will be the next debt crisis in the United States. Average student loan debt has increased to close to $30,000 and many students graduate with more than $50,000 which makes it much harder to start out in their 20s.

At Northeastern University in Boston, about 10% more students than last year have asked for additional midyear aid. Many parents are asking “what if” questions about whether reduced investment values could make them eligible for more aid. So far, Northeastern has been able to meet all legitimate needs.

So what’s the best course of action for prudent parents and students? First, continue to save early, and save often. Second, make sure you begin the college search in 10^th grade, or 11^th grade at the latest. There are many strategies available to reduce a family’s Expected Family Contribution (EFC), but this must be done before the middle of a student’s junior year. Third, in most cases, saving should be done in the parents’ name. Fourth, depending on the college that students select, home equity or business assets may be included in the financial aid formula. Make sure you understand how the equity in your home or business will affect the college’s estimate of your ability to pay. Finally, consider contacting the College Advisor of New York where we specialize in finding best fit colleges socially, academically, and financially for families of all incomes.