By this stage in the College Conversation, you have encouraged your child to look inward and to reflect on the type of college environment (and the attributes of that environment) that might suit them best. They have dutifully logged those reflections on that initial index card and recorded their interests, ideas, and other I’s that serve as an inventory of themselves as individuals.
So, armed with the results of that self-reflection, how can you and your child use those insights to comprehensively assess and analyze the DNA of particular colleges and universities? Before you can generate a list of schools you might consider—as well as consider visiting—you need to first have a framework to evaluate individual institutions and then compare them to one another.
Here again, we’ll use an exercise that Eric has found helpful when he speaks to parent and student audiences. We’ll call these the Four C’s.
Culture: What is the history and mission of the institution? How does that mission resonate with your child, as a potential applicant, today?
Curriculum: Beyond a mere listing of majors and programs that a school offers, or even whether certain courses are required, what is the design and aim of the courses your child might take over four years?
Community: Who are the people who make up the campus, and what are the physical spaces that they occupy?
Conclusions: What are some of the outcomes (such as readiness for graduate school admission or career opportunities) that your child envisions at the end of their college experience?
For this activity, make a list of the Four C’s, with their basic definitions. Here again, feel free to tailor those categories and definitions to your child’s specific needs, and to then use this framing as a road map at every stage of their research. (One alert about those categories: there is a fifth C, cost, which we’ll dive deeply into later in the book.)
These prompts can most usefully serve as a reminder of your child’s preferences as they explore each college, whether on the most cursory visit online or a walking tour of a campus. They can also form the basis for questions to be asked by you or your child, such as in a group information session on campus or via the chat box on an admissions website. Consider leaving space for notes on admissions alignment on your Four C’s list. That information will come in handy during our discussions about both the creation of a college list and the application itself.
Let’s consider some additional context for and reflection on each of the C’s. How, for example, can you get a sense of a campus’s culture?
Every institution has a history, sometimes a history that is centuries old, and one of your child’s assignments is to determine whether and how that original purpose is sustained through its mission today. At the University of Pennsylvania, for example, the current administration and faculty seek to honor the legacy of founder Benjamin Franklin by finding practical applications for knowledge. The “A” and “M” of Texas A&M University reflect the fact that its original name was the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas. Founded in the mid-1800s, it describes its mission today as a “research-intensive flagship university dedicated to sending Aggie leaders out into the world prepared to take on the challenges of tomorrow.”
There are also institutions grouped into specific categories, such as historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, a federal designation applied to more than one hundred public and private institutions; Hispanic-serving institutions, or HSIs, each of which must have an annual student enrollment that is at least 25 percent Hispanic; and networks of religiously affiliated institutions, such as the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities and the National Association of Schools and Colleges of the United Methodist Church.
Other aspects of campus culture may be a bit more challenging to discern: overall campus spirit, degree of competitiveness and collaboration among students, general level of stress and anxiety, primary drivers of social life, options for religious observance and expression, and openness and acceptance of students with a range of opinions and perspectives as well as ideas and identities.
Obtaining information beyond a college’s marketing and messaging in these areas can take some digging. Jacques recommends using basic journalism tools to fill in some of these blanks. If your child is so inclined, they might seek out sources like student publications or contact leaders of campus organizations. Further along in their process, they might grab a notebook or the voice memo app on their cellphones and set about doing a few informal interviews of recent alumni and current students, including at the dining hall, on the quad, or even virtually. Informed by this fact-finding, as well as their self-reflection, your child may soon be able to determine not only how they might fit into a particular campus culture but ways they might advance it.
As your child thinks about curriculum, the question they might first ask goes to the very essence of a college education: What am I going to learn? Often that question leads to a natural follow-up: How is that learning going to lead to a career? On the latter point, we urge a bit of caution. Both of us are proud recipients of a liberal arts and science education, which has at its core a belief in the virtue of learning for learning’s sake and in the power of being trained to ask questions, to think, to write, and to be an active citizen. We are also realists, and we are well aware that colleges have never been under more pressure to answer questions from parents and students about the return on investment of their education. The point we wish to make here is that no one can say for certain what skills will be needed for the jobs of the not too distant future, and students shouldn’t take courses or enroll in programs solely because they believe they will land them their first job.
For this exercise you might encourage your child to envision their entire classroom experience in college as consisting of about thirty-five to forty courses. Those can be roughly split into three categories. The first is general courses (or foundational courses), which are deemed essential building blocks by the faculty and include such classes as writing, foreign language, and quantitative analysis. Free electives are courses your child will choose to expose them to subjects and ideas that were likely not offered in their high school and might range as widely as documentary film, archaeology, international relations, philosophy, computer coding for the non–computer scientist, and nutrition. Finally, there is the major or concentration. For an undergraduate, this is the opportunity to go deep into a field of study and interest, as well as broad, considering that an increasing number of majors cross departments and disciplines.
The best way for your child to explore the curricular options at an institution is online. Here we suggest they toggle away from the admissions website itself to the homepages of the various schools within a university, which might have names like the College of Arts and Sciences, the Division of Social Sciences, or the Honors College. They should then explore the various departments (art history, astrophysics, religion) within those entities. These departmental websites are designed for current students, which will enable your child to imagine how they might pursue a potential course of study. Some college sites offer worksheets that enable current students to lay out options for the courses they might take in the three basic categories we identified above. Online visits can be followed up with actual visits to classes. Typically, admissions websites will have lists of classes for which professors have granted permission in advance for prospective students to attend. In some cases a professor might even respond to a query made after a class visit or via email.
We referred earlier to the responsibility that admissions offices have to assemble a first-year class that will become a community, the third C. In many respects this process occurs in the physical spaces that are unique to that institution. Some of these are found outdoors, like the main thoroughfare that threads through campus, the iconic green at the center of it all, or the statue or clock tower that serves as a beacon, sometimes from miles away. For an urban campus, it could be proximity to a downtown business district; for a more rural college, the nearby woods, perhaps threaded with hiking trails, and for a suburban college town, the main street.
Indoors, college communities are forged in spaces designed for just that purpose: athletic arenas, museums and performing arts centers, as well as residence halls and lounges dedicated to affinity groups (LGBTQ, women’s center, intercultural center) and thematic learning (sustainability, technology, language immersion). Some of these spaces may have immediate appeal for your child, while others may become more relevant as their experience proceeds.
The physical space where they will likely spend most of their time is on-campus residential housing, particularly during their first two years. For many institutions the college housing experience is a signature offering, not only of the community but the culture of the institution. Some colleges group dorms into clusters and have faculty in residence, programmatic offerings, and even dining halls.
By conclusions, our final C, we mean something broader than just endings or culminating experiences. Your child might consider their college years as a sequence of incremental steps and achievements that build on one another. For example, they might take note of the percentage of full-time first-year undergraduates who succeed in advancing to the second year at that institution. On average, nationally, that figure is 74 percent, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. Families should ask pointed questions about an institution whose first-to-second-year retention rate is markedly below the national average.
Another marker relevant to conclusions is an institution’s completion rate—the percentage of students who succeed in graduating. Because an increasing number of undergraduates nationally are taking longer than four years to complete a bachelor’s education, a key metric on which colleges are measured is the percentage of students who graduate within six years. Nationally, that percentage is just below 60 percent. Here, too, we advise that you and your child do your best to understand the factors that underpin an institution’s graduation rate, particularly for schools with high dropout rates. A bit later, we will talk about the range of academic and social-emotional support services available at colleges and universities, which can make the difference in a student’s earning a degree or other credential.
Retention and graduation figures for individual schools can typically be found on the websites of the schools themselves, using “Common Data Set” as a search term. For national statistics, go to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
What are other ways to track the conclusions at a college or university? A quick scan of its website, perhaps on a page for career services, or a question posed at a group information session, might yield information on graduate school placement rates and popular first jobs after graduation. Many institutions will survey students at the end of their first year, as well as their senior years, and sometimes into their early years as alumni. The questions in such surveys often center on students’ satisfaction and are sometimes even broadened to include parents to ask how they felt about their child’s experience. If an institution posts results like these online, they may be found on the school’s pages devoted to institutional research. They are well worth searching out.
Harvey Fields, associate dean for student success at Washington University in St. Louis, suggests that parents and students also explore the degree to which an institution provides support for students’ career and graduate school ambitions. To what extent are the offerings of the career center integrated into the overall educational experience, including through local internships, possibly for pay or credit? And for students planning to attend graduate school, is there a preprofessional adviser who is making sure that they are taking the requisite courses in preparation and staying on track, and who will write their letter of recommendation on behalf of the institution?
Equipped with the Four C’s, we hope that you and your child are well positioned to take a more critical look at colleges and universities that may soon be potential candidates for your child’s college list. A lot will also depend on the potential fit for your child, and let’s turn to that concept now.
If it hasn’t happened already, you and your child are about to be inundated with references to “fit” in the college process—including the exhortation to find a dream college that is the perfect match.
You may have already figured out by now that the insights gleaned from your child’s initial index card and Five I’s exercise, when combined with the Four C’s, can provide a pretty good indicator of potential fit. One note of caution: as the words “fit” and “match” are bandied about, we recommend that both you and your child steer clear of any expectation of finding an academic home that is perfect in every respect. Let’s say, for example, that your child has narrowed down to six the number of attributes or qualities of a college or university at which they can see themselves. As a next step, they might rank those attributes: is proximity from home, for example, at the top of that list, or are size or setting more important?
Here, as an analogy, you may be able to share with your child the experience of buying or renting your first home or apartment. There were surely factors you ranked above others with the understanding and expectation that no home or community was going to meet every criterion, particularly at your price point. While your child should come to accept that no institution will be ideal, they shouldn’t simply settle for the easiest choice. As they continue to get to know themselves and what matters most, they should hold out for a college with those attributes that they consider essential. All we are preaching is a managing of expectations.
One key component of fit, as noted above, is a college or university’s location. For any parent whose child is contemplating attending a college that is a long bus, train, or plane ride away, the mere idea may be enough to put a lump in the throat. This is especially true for parents whose children would be in the first generation in the family to go away to college.
If you are a parent who did not go away to college yourself, the prospect of your child doing so could prompt a range of emotions: a fear of the unknown, and perhaps even for your child’s safety (a feeling all parents share); a concern over a loss of control; and anxiety about the economic impact. The latter could be a result of additional transportation and housing costs that you anticipate, as well as, perhaps, a loss of the income that your child might be providing, either through their work for a family business or in a part-time job.
For some readers, there simply is no choice: for many of the reasons cited above, and others, too, your child must attend a college or university nearby. But for others, we want to make sure that you and your child consider keeping the door open to the possibility of at least including on your college list a few institutions that might be quite far away.
Chris White, the college counselor at High Tech High, has worked with a number of first-generation families over the years and counseled many of them about the distance hurdle. He advises such parents to be conscious of whether their own fears are standing in the way of potential opportunities for their children—including the prospect of attending private institutions that may have compelling financial aid packages, with line items for housing, meals, and even transportation, even if they are some distance away.
“And they never would have believed me, obviously, until we had proof in the end,” Chris explained.
One mother who needed convincing was Monica Mendez, whom we met earlier, who sent two daughters across the country from San Diego to Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. Her agreeing to do so took a fair amount of convincing from Chris, the children’s college counselor. When Chris suggested Gettysburg as a potential option for her older daughter, Monique, Monica said she had a ready response: “How dare you try to send her over there!”
“That was scary for us because this is our baby going to faraway places that we’ve never even been to,” she explained. But Monica was ultimately won over after Monique first visited the school (with a plane ticket provided by Gettysburg) and then the entire family itself traveled there as well. Indeed, Monique’s younger sister, Julianna, was later admitted to Gettysburg and enrolled there in fall 2019.
When we asked Monica if she had advice she wanted us to convey to other parents with similar concerns, she said, “Let them do it. Because it opens up everything for them.” She added, “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
We can imagine, at this juncture in the College Conversation, that you or your child may be eager to start building a college list. Before we turn you loose, though, we want to introduce a few supplemental resources that may be of help, as well as a discussion of the critically important factor of cost—the fifth C.
Up to this point in the book we have framed the College Conversation as one primarily taking place between readers (and perhaps their spouses or another adult) and their children, as well as an internal dialogue between your children and themselves. At this stage, if you haven’t done so already, your family might consider broadening those discussions to include others, and other resources.
Whether your child attends a public school or private school, make it a point for you both to get to know the college counselor assigned to them and take advantage of every bit of knowledge, expertise, and experience that person has to offer. Some schools will post a detailed, year-by-year timeline of the college process on their counseling site. Whether you or the counselor arranges the initial meeting—and it could take place as soon as sophomore year—it is critically important that the expectations that you and your child have for the counselor are clear.
Be sure to put key dates on your calendar as soon as they are available. These could include a student-parent college night, which may feature a panel of admissions and financial aid experts; a college fair, where representatives from a number of institutions may visit and engage with your child in a process that is like speed networking, and where you may learn much as well; sessions led by visiting college admissions representatives during the school day; and a financial aid information night. Your school may also offer free proctored practice exams for the SAT and ACT, under conditions that simulate the actual test. Encouraging your child to participate in the equivalent of a full-run dress rehearsal, or full-length scrimmage, can be extremely helpful in preparing them for what to expect during the real event—and in identifying gaps in their readiness they might need to address beforehand. Your school counselor may also provide deadlines for registering for standardized tests and for the FAFSA, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, as well as for submitting early and regular college applications.
College counselor caseloads vary widely, from a ratio of just a few dozen students per counselor at a well-resourced private school to caseloads that average well over a thousand in large public school districts. Please be mindful of the realities of what your counselor may be up against—and ways you can support each other to support your child.
Chris White, who is the sole college counselor at High Tech High, asked that we encourage parents to either take the initiative in reaching out to their child’s counselor or to be responsive (and proactive) when that counselor reaches out to them, either individually or through a mass communication. “We just want to be here to inform you,” he stressed. “And we need your support in this process.”
Regardless of the number of families your counselor is advising, your school itself may offer online resources that can help guide you and your child through the key steps in the college application process. Among them are products with names like Naviance and Scoir, which are provided to parents at no charge. Using Scoir, applicants and their parents can manage college lists, track college visits, and ultimately follow an application from submission to decision through enrollment. Naviance provides similar features, including its signature offering of “scattergrams,” which plot admission outcomes from members of previous graduating classes at the high school against factors like grade point averages and test scores.
To the extent that your school or district has subscriptions to these services, or others like them, your school counselor should be able to point you toward a tutorial and instructions on registering, including as a parent. We’ll have more to say about your conversations with your child’s college counselor in upcoming sections of the book, including those related to building a college list and making a final decision.
For first-generation parents in particular, the college counseling office can help connect you with yet another valuable resource: other first-generation parents whose children went away to college in prior years. Neyl Montesano, a parent at High Tech High who describes himself as a self-taught specialist in welding, automation, and other technical fields and whose own parents advised him not to go to college, sought to “plant a seed” with his own children by invoking the stories of successful first-generation college students. His son, Jack, acknowledged that his father’s efforts contributed to his applying to the University of California, Berkeley, and he was not only accepted but received a Cal Grant, the largest source of California state-funded student financial aid.
Omar Monteagudo, the principal of the School for Advanced Studies in Miami, facilitates conversations between current and prior parents through one-on-one meetings and panel discussions. You might ask if your child’s high school offers similar programming, and, if not, whether they would be open to doing so.
We hope it doesn’t sound trite or out of fashion to remind readers that local public libraries may have a trove of information related to the college process, including guidebooks and test-prep workbooks. It is also worth asking if there is a librarian who is familiar with these resources.
You may have even more success reaching out to one of the hundreds of community-based organizations (CBOs for short) in cities and towns around the nation that make available resources related to college access and affordability, particularly for students from low-income, first-generation, rural, and other backgrounds historically underrepresented on the nation’s college and university campuses. Jacques left The New York Times in 2013 to join the senior management team of one of these organizations, Say Yes to Education, which supports young people from early childhood through college or other postsecondary completion in the cities of Buffalo and Syracuse in New York; Guilford County, in North Carolina; and Cleveland, Ohio. Other organizations doing similar work include A Better Chance, College Track, Harlem Children’s Zone, Posse, QuestBridge, and Reality Changers. For a more complete listing—and to see whether your community has such an organization—consult the website of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, or NACAC, specifically the page titled “Directory of College Access and Success Programs.”
With the democratization of information about the college admissions process in recent years, there is a bounty of sites across the web and social media offering guidance, often at no charge. While we don’t intend to single out or endorse any particular site, we do want to discuss a few online resources from what is an admittedly incomplete and selective list that may be worth a look. But we should note that we often have some firsthand knowledge of the people working in each of these organizations and their methodology.
College Factual (collegefactual.com)
Browse around this site a bit and you will find a series of decision tools, including one called College Matcher. Among its six components for fit are those labeled with the headers “Location,” “Majors,” “Social,” “Academic,” “Financial,’’ and “Outcomes.”
BigFuture (bigfuture.collegeboard.org)
Offered by the College Board, the purveyor of the SAT and the Advanced Placement program, this search engine provides information on qualities and characteristics of thousands of colleges and universities. With My College Snapshot, users can walk through a six-step college search: types of colleges (including two-year and four-year, private and public); location, including proximity to home; campus setting; cost; majors; and learning environment (including balance between studying and social life).
Common Application (commonapp.org)
While this is the site that makes it possible for students to apply to nearly nine hundred colleges and universities, it is perhaps less well-known for its comprehensive planning tools and information on its partner colleges. Among its resources are guides and videos for how to begin thinking about the college process in middle school, how to prepare for college and how to pay for it, as well as a live chat function.
Colleges That Change Lives (ctcl.org)
Based on the guidebook of the same name, this site provides profiles of just under four dozen private colleges selected for their focus on instilling a “lifelong love of learning” in their students. All are viewed through the lens of a student-centered experience and outcomes (or conclusions, our fourth C) once students have graduated. Among the resources listed on the site’s events page are college fairs in more than a dozen big cities around the country.
How to Apply to College (coursera.org)
This is an on-demand online course, available free of charge, that Eric codesigned and coteaches in partnership with Dr. Sean Vereen, president of Steppingstone Scholars, a community-based organization. Among its objectives is to demystify the college admissions process.
Having considered all these resources, you may still feel that you and your child need additional individual support from an independent college counselor. This is likely someone unaffiliated with a public or private high school (although they may well have worked at a high school or in a college admissions office in the past) who has a consulting practice intended to provide guidance at every stage of the admissions process. The services they may provide, for a fee, include test prep, essay coaching, college list creation, interview techniques, and drawing up a long-term plan, including for college visits and the filing of applications.
One indication of an independent counselor’s qualifications is whether they are a member in good standing of a professional organization like the National Association for College Admission Counseling, the Independent Educational Consultants Association, or the Higher Education Consultants Association. The IECA and HECA websites feature simple search tools that enable you to verify a counselor’s membership, or to search for a counselor in your area.
As with anything related to college admissions, approach any potential engagement with a counselor with due diligence regarding any promises that might be made as well as the fees being charged. For example, no counselor, independent or school based, is in any position to guarantee your child admission to a particular institution or even to one of their three top choices. And make sure you and your child have an understanding up front with the counselor that while they may provide editing advice on drafts of a college essay, the original and final versions of that piece have to be the child’s own.
We are in no position to advise you on how much you might pay an independent counselor, because so much depends on your budget and the relative value you place on the services being provided. But if you do wish to go down this path, we recommend that you talk to other parents, as well as students, about counselors they may have engaged and their experiences with them.
There are some basic ethical lines, related to maintaining the integrity and authenticity of your child’s application process, that should not be breached by you, your child, or a counselor. Any temptation to cut corners on your child’s behalf can have repercussions well beyond high school and college.
Before embarking on the initial assembly of a college list, the subject of money—including how much you and your family can afford to pay for a college education—should be addressed. Financial considerations are every bit as important as an institution’s culture, curriculum, and other attributes.
Paying for college was likely one of the points you listed on your index card early on as a source of anxiety. This may be the first time that you as a family have talked seriously about money, including your earnings and the savings that you have on hand to spend on college, as well as what you are willing to pay and your tolerance for borrowing. Also up for discussion is what you’ll expect regarding your child’s working part-time while in college or contributing their personal savings.
For those of you who will need some form of financial aid, take comfort in the fact that there are likely any number of resources you can draw on—whether from the federal government or your state, or from the institution itself and outside scholarships.
We’ll begin this section with a few tips and prompts for initiating this conversation with your child. Have this talk as early as possible—even before they have started the college list, and well before they push the “submit” button on their application. Doing so can go a long way toward managing their expectations, as well as yours, of what is possible. Unless you have the capacity to write a check for as much as $80,000 a year (in the case of some private colleges and universities), “Don’t worry, we’ll make it work” may not be the soundest strategy.
This conversation may require some advanced preparation, including number crunching, by you and your spouse or other partner. “If you have a plan, I think it’s easier to talk about the tougher stuff with your child,” parenting expert Carol Sutton Lewis explained. “Even if you have multiple plans, I think if the child can see that you are serious about making this work, it’s an easier conversation to have.”
Given that this could be an emotional conversation, set aside an extended period of time when you’re neither tired nor hungry nor preoccupied with any number of other competing stresses. Also take into account your child’s current anxieties and high school deadlines that may be looming. You might also give serious consideration to limiting this particular conversation to you, your spouse or partner, and your child, leaving out other children or other relatives who may be living in the home.
Open the conversation by helping your child understand that the cost of their higher education might be a shared responsibility, while emphasizing your belief in the value of that education. This is not meant to cause them guilt or anxiety, but to enlist them as a partner. It may be appropriate in this initial conversation to introduce the possibility of a family sacrifice over the next few years, whether it involves a vacation or a discretionary purchase, as well as the need for your child to get a summer job or plan to work part-time once in college.
“You don’t want to burden them,” Carol says. “But if they understand the degree to which the family has had to sacrifice and focus to pay for their education, this might give them additional motivation while they’re in school, and maybe make them think twice about deciding to blow something off.”
One objective for this particular conversation is to introduce the broad range in sticker prices for four-year colleges and universities, which is basically the annual cost of attendance (tuition, housing, meals, mandatory fees) that the colleges cite before any financial aid has been taken into account. These can range widely, from as little as $25,000 (at an in-state public college or university) to nearly $80,000 (at a private institution).
You and your child will have an opportunity during the construction of their college list to plug a few basic financial variables, such as your adjusted gross income, into the net price calculator that every college is required by the federal government to have on its website. By using this tool, you can get a general estimate of how much a particular college might actually cost you, though with the caveat that this is by no means a full financial review.
Before discussing potential options for financial aid, whether in the form of scholarships, grants, or loans, take a moment to rough out a sketch of your family’s own annual income and expenses, as well as savings and investments.
We’ve cast cost as one factor against which colleges can be differentiated. The first step in roughly calculating the actual expense you’ll face entails determining the availability of, and criteria for, what is known as need-based financial aid, which is awarded by an institution based on an assessment of a family’s finances. Do bear in mind that no two institutions have the same definition of need, nor are those definitions necessarily hard and fast. Some schools’ need-based financial aid packages are far more generous than others, and open to families at different income levels, based, in part, on the institution’s financial capacity, including its endowment and fundraising.
Merit aid, which is offered irrespective of financial need, is based on such criteria as a student’s classroom academic achievement, test scores, outside research experiences, and talents, including those that may be artistic or athletic. This is another important area where you and your child need to do your homework, whether through research online or in conversation with an admissions officer or your college counselor, to determine whether the institution makes available financial aid based on merit. (The eight colleges and universities of the Ivy League, for example, are among many that do not offer merit aid.) Don’t be shy about asking any college of interest whether they offer merit aid, and if so, the criteria for those awards.
You can also determine, by research or by asking a college directly, whether it is need-blind in its admissions, meaning it does not take into account a family’s ability to pay when making an admissions decision, or need-aware, in which the need for financial aid is a factor in at least some admissions decisions. The overwhelming majority of colleges are in the latter category, often because of limited resources. The reasons why an applicant chooses to check the box indicating a desire for financial aid are both personal and practical. But families should take such policies into account when assembling a college list.
To further prepare you for an initial talk about money and college, you might have a look at the website of Frank, a financial aid information platform we mentioned earlier. It has a number of free videos and other resources—under tabs labeled “Parents” and “How to Pay for College”—that can help acquaint you with the various expenses of higher education and ways to finance them. It has additional services that are available for a fee.
Charlie Javice, the founder and CEO of Frank, suggested to us that as parents guide their children through the search phase of the college process, they might bear in mind the subjects their children intend to study in college and possible majors (if they know at this early stage, which they may well not), as well as even careers they might be contemplating.
“That’s going to drive a lot of the value that you’re going to get from the institution,” she says.
With this insight, Charlie adds, a parent could begin to imagine, however roughly, their child’s potential first-year salary in a career of interest—which could, in turn, inform their tolerance for debt and their capacity to repay it on a monthly basis.
While we’ve shared at several points our perspective on college as a laboratory for your child to explore learning for learning’s sake, Charlie emphasizes a decidedly pragmatic approach.
“The first question you need to ask,’’ she says, “is what do you want to study? Because if you’re studying something with good job outcomes, you have a lot more flexibility in terms of where you want to go because you could choose to stretch financially.”
She adds, “The only thing you should care about is basically the affordability component. And it’s a privilege not to care about it.”
One last tip from Charlie: as your child begins to assemble their college wish list, it should include at least one in-state public college or university—which will typically offer lower tuition, as well as aid, to state residents.
For now, bring this initial conversation to a close. Assure your child that there will be options for them to attain an affordable higher education. But critical to that process will be the drafting of a college list that takes cost, among many other factors, into account, which is where we turn now.
As you and your child have made your way through the exercises and activities we suggest above—and perhaps have had conversations with their college counselor and others—the names of more than a few colleges and universities may have been discussed.
It is finally time for your child to begin to put those names to paper—or, more likely, to tap them into a new Google Doc or an Excel spreadsheet. Among our objectives in this section is to help you as a parent to support your child in this endeavor and to provide you with a few conversation starters to ensure that your voice is heard. While some advisers counsel parents to take a backseat through much of this next stage of the college process, we believe it is a healthy time for collaboration, while being mindful of the guardrails and rules of the road that you and your child established earlier. Ideally the conversations you’ve had thus far during the process have forged a level of trust that can be leveraged here.
At this stage—and let’s say, for argument’s sake, you are reading this book sometime during your child’s junior year of high school—you’re probably working toward compiling a rough draft list of twelve to fifteen colleges and universities, based on the exercises you’ve completed. This preliminary selection doesn’t mean you and your child are going to visit all those schools, or that your child is going to apply to that many. While there are no hard and fast rules about how many colleges to apply to—like so much in admissions, this decision will be extremely personal and tailored to your child—we recommend, as a guide, winnowing your rough draft list down to something in the ballpark of eight to ten schools. While you have surely heard about the outliers in your community—the children who applied to more than twenty schools—we want to caution you that preparing each application produces a great deal of mental and emotional fatigue. The average number of applications submitted by each applicant through the Common Application portal is five, a number that has remained consistent over time.
We’ve spoken earlier about the concept of alignment—including in the context of you and your child being aligned in your approach to the admissions process (family alignment) as well as you and your child having a realistic understanding of statistics, like the standardized test scores of the middle 50 percent of admitted students at a particular institution, which can be a gauge of their relative competitiveness (admissions alignment). Your aim in the next exercise will be to develop a list of schools that are aligned in both those ways.
To that end we recommend sorting the colleges on your child’s list into three categories: sweet spot, likely, and aspirational. For this round, set aside sticker price as a factor, with the understanding that it will be among the issues that come into play as your child winnows the list further, or perhaps augments it.
Sweet spot—We all probably have our own definition of a sweet spot. If you play sports, the sweet spot of a baseball bat, golf club, or tennis racquet is the point on its surface that will yield the optimal hit or shot. For recording engineers it’s that magical area between two stereo speakers where the listener hears the sound mix exactly as intended. In business it’s the price point for a product that leaves seller and customer equally satisfied. For applicants, colleges in the sweet spot exhibit a harmony between admissions alignment (the chances that you think you’re going to get in, based, among other things, on the test score bands we referenced earlier) and the attributes you’re seeking in a college. These schools are by no means a certainty for acceptance, and many college counselors refer to them as “targets.”
While test scores are only one of many elements in the admissions process, your child’s results should fall very roughly within the middle fiftieth percentile range of a recently admitted class at a college deemed in their sweet spot. If your child’s college list has been narrowed down to eight to ten schools, consider having roughly five or six of them fall in the sweet spot.
Likely—Some refer to schools in this category as “safeties,” which is a label we avoid only because it implies an assumption about admittance that simply may not be true, especially in the current admissions climate. That said, applicants should feel confident that colleges and universities they place in the likely bucket are indeed institutions to which they will probably be admitted. Again, while the admissions process involves a lot more than standardized test scores, we do recommend that for a college to be deemed by your child to be a likely, their standardized test scores should fall roughly within those achieved by the top quarter of a recently admitted class. A winnowed-down list of eight to ten colleges should contain about two or three likelies—with at least one of them a school where their standardized test scores would place them even higher than the seventy-fifth percentile, perhaps even close to the ninetieth percentile.
Aspirational—This is the part of the college list where we feel a personal and professional obligation to manage expectations. Some counselors refer to these schools as “reaches.” In one respect, an aspirational choice may be self-selecting: your child knows that their grades and/or test scores might place them in the bottom quartile of its applicant pool, yet the qualities of that school align so closely with their own interests and ambitions that they wish to go for it. For some schools, being a reach is no reflection on the applicant—indeed, perhaps 80 percent or more of applicants to that institution would be deemed admissible by the admissions committee, and would do well on campus—but there is simply not enough space in the class. These schools may turn away upward of ninety-five of every one hundred applicants.
While we do wish to manage expectations, we certainly want to encourage those who are so inclined to aim high. We hope your child will end up applying to one to three schools that they consider aspirational—fully in alignment with what they are seeking from a college experience, but understandably difficult to get into.
A few final thoughts before embarking on our list-building activity:
First, we want to briefly elaborate on some of our comments above related to using test scores or grades as a rough barometer of admissions alignment. These are but two factors in an admission decision, but they happen to be quantifiable. (And for those parents whose children have not yet taken the SAT or ACT, the PSAT or the PreACT can provide benchmarks.) The qualitative parts—the person who your child is, the level of their community engagement, their life experience, what they value—all contribute to the decisions made by admissions officers and are also factors in whether a particular college is ultimately in your sweet spot or where you might be a likely admit. Which means that these decisions can be highly subjective, and therefore unpredictable.
Which in turn leads to a point about your tolerance for risk. As an analogy, you might share with your child that putting your hard-earned money in a savings account at the local bank may be less risky than spending it on lottery tickets or a neighbor’s surefire investment scheme. In that spirit, we strongly caution against assembling a college list that is light on schools in the sweet spot, or likelies. Not only should your child include at least a few likelies in their portfolio, but they should be able to imagine themselves at those institutions and be excited by the prospect of attending any one of them. If none of their likelies clears that threshold, they should be replaced by others that do.
This is an activity for you and your child—and one that either or both of you may have already begun in partnership with your child’s college counselor. For those already well on this path, feel free to adapt this exercise as you see fit. But for those parents of children who do not yet have a college list, we suggest that both you and your child set about roughing out a draft. You can do so together or separately, comparing notes afterward.
Prepare by retrieving your respective index cards. Your child should also have their I’s and C’s at the ready. As resources you can draw on the websites mentioned earlier as well as books like the Fiske Guide to Colleges and Colleges That Change Lives, among many others—along with research you’ve done with your college counselor and perhaps organizations in your community.
To get started, arrange a legal pad or spreadsheet into three sections—sweet spot, likely, and aspirational—and spend about thirty minutes brainstorming. A reminder that, at this early stage, you and they should be aiming to put together a list of twelve to fifteen schools, to be winnowed or augmented during the due diligence phase. Neither you nor your child should overthink any possible choice right now. This stage is meant to establish a framework for the next phase of research.
As you and your child discuss your respective lists, you might review your original index card and ask each other questions that draw on the potential alignment and divergence of particular schools from the interests and school attributes you’ve discussed thus far. Some questions you might pose to your child could include:
How does this school’s community align with your interests and offer opportunities to widen your circle?
Would this school’s curriculum challenge you intellectually and push you to broaden your thinking?
Are you inspired by the school’s culture, including its founding mission and history, and do you consider those values to be relevant to you and resonant today?
Does the prospect of attending any of these schools exacerbate or mitigate some of the anxieties that have surfaced early on in this process?
Do you believe that each of the schools you selected is appropriately placed in the respective categories of sweet spot, likely, and aspirational, and based on which factors?
You’ll surely have additional questions for each other beyond those suggested above. It may not even be possible to answer some of these questions at this point in your process. But they represent a strong start.
So where do you go from here?
If it works for your child, they (or you and they) could create a separate worksheet for each college on their rough draft list, using each of the C’s (culture, curriculum, community, conclusions, and cost) as section headers, with plenty of space below for notes (theirs and yours) about each school. These notes could be drawn from your ongoing research, as well as further discussions with your college counselor and school visits. In the case of that fifth C, cost, we remind you that each college has a net price calculator somewhere on its website, where you or your child can anonymously plug in some rudimentary financial information and get a very preliminary sense of the potential expenses.
There are obviously aspects of your child’s identity and how they might mesh with a particular college that don’t necessarily fall neatly into the categories we’ve laid out thus far. One of these is learning style. After watching your child advance from early childhood to high school, you’ll likely have a strong sense of how they learn best, as well as the optimal conditions to ensure their success. Does reading come naturally to them, and at what pace, or do they need to be cajoled? How effective are their time management skills? Do they prefer to study alone or in groups? And in what setting do they learn best: smaller, interactive classrooms, or larger spaces?
Mark Allen Poisel, a former vice chancellor for student affairs at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, thinks about that last question in a slightly different way: “Students can get lost in a large-school environment.”
“On the other hand,’’ he adds, they might not want to be on a campus so small that “everybody knows everything about them, and every one of their classes is with the same students.”
The answers to these questions can fuel some of your research about particular colleges as well as the questions you ask on college visits. You might also encourage your child to imagine how a larger school can be broken down into smaller communities, learning as well as social, and how a smaller school might be able to feel larger because of the opportunity to take courses at neighboring institutions or to study abroad.
Also consider a related, more nuanced question: Is the curriculum for first-year students—which may include required courses—organized in a way that helps introduce your child to a new learning environment and lays the groundwork for ongoing success? These may include small reading and writing seminars, smaller sections for foreign language study, and courses that refresh and reinforce the principles of high school. For your child, such building blocks may be essential. Because not all colleges approach the first-year curriculum in this way, your child should conduct some due diligence at the front end.
Similarly, you and your child need to have a shared understanding of the academic and other support services that are offered on campus to ensure not only that they succeed, but at least initially, that they succeed in moving on from the first year to the second year. Many colleges have writing centers and free tutoring collectives in a range of subjects and also offer exam analysis, a diagnostic tool to review and analyze how a student did on a particular test and then provide strategies for improvement. Not all colleges and universities approach student support in the same way, and the depth and wide availability of such services can be a critical differentiator between institutions. Beyond student-faculty ratios, which the colleges dutifully publish, you or your child might also want to ask on your campus visit how accessible, in general, professors are to students, whether during office hours or in settings like residence halls.
Colleges likewise vary widely in their approaches to students with learning differences, and their particular philosophies may well thread through an institution’s culture, curriculum, and community, as well as the prospects for successful conclusions. Marybeth Kravets, a college counselor and former president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, and Imy F. Wax, a psychotherapist, have co-authored The K&W Guide to Colleges for Students with Learning Differences. The book, published by the Princeton Review, includes profiles of nearly 350 colleges and universities with descriptions of their various offerings in this area, as well as solid advice for navigating this process on behalf of a child with different learning needs. It strikes throughout a note of reassurance, as epitomized by this observation: “We know that students with different cognitive traits can do well in college and succeed at work and life, often at very high levels of accomplishment.”
Just as you have long known under what conditions your child learns best, you have also observed them taking batteries of standardized tests from a young age. The SAT and the ACT, the two primary college admissions exams, are in some ways a culmination of a lifetime of being assessed, often in a systematic way. You might assume that no test they have taken previously is freighted with the high stakes of a college entrance exam, but how much do these standardized tests actually matter in the college admissions process? We hope you won’t consider it a cop-out that our answer begins, “It depends,” but that happens to be true.
There is, in fact, a wide range in the degree of weight given to standardized test scores, relative to other factors, across the university landscape. But in general, even at institutions that practice the holistic admissions process, test scores are considered at the same level of import as the rigor of one’s high school courses and the grades received in them. Which isn’t to say that there are strict cutoff scores, at least not at most universities. But, as discussed earlier, there are certainly ranges.
We want to begin this section by offering a sense of which colleges and universities require standardized test scores. In general, many highly selective institutions have long required that an applicant submit the results from at least one administration of the SAT or ACT, as their own institutional research has shown that these standardized tests can be predictive of the student’s success in the first year of college. Some universities also require SAT Subject Tests (these may have been known as the Achievement Tests when you were in high school), in areas that include math, science, English, history, and languages.
However, a growing number of institutions—some of them among the most selective in the nation—do not require the SAT or ACT for many applicants, and you would do well to familiarize yourself with that roster. A list of those schools—and there are more than a thousand of them—has been compiled by an organization called FairTest, or the National Center for Fair and Open Testing. Among the reasons why colleges or universities might go test optional is that standardized tests can be a barrier to otherwise promising students applying to that institution. Moreover, the schools’ own institutional research may indicate other predictors, beyond standardized testing, of which students have the potential to be most successful on their campuses. Also, as was the case during the onset of the global pandemic in early 2020, some colleges and universities may temporarily suspend testing and other admission requirements in times of crisis.
Encourage your child to consider applying to at least one institution that is test optional. If they do well on standardized tests, they could place themselves more competitively within the applicant pool. Bear in mind that “test optional” schools still do report the range of scores submitted for the admitted class. If your child does not test well—again, relative to an institution’s admitted student profile—they might exercise the option not to submit scores, which would place greater weight on their courses and grades. As you’ll see if you look at the FairTest site, it is certainly possible for an applicant to put together a list of outstanding colleges or universities that are exclusively test optional, which for some students could serve to substantially reduce the stress of the college admissions process. (Note that test-optional schools may have additional application requirements, including the submission of a graded paper from a high school class.) Even if your child is strongly considering going the test-optional route, we encourage them to consider taking the ACT or the SAT at least once, if only to preserve their options.
The road to taking the ACT or SAT can begin as early as eighth grade. For the SAT, the preliminary exam is known as the PSAT; for the ACT, the precursor is the PreACT. If you are reading The College Conversation as early as your child’s middle school years, you might ask which exam is part of their school’s testing assessments. Neither of these exams is used by admissions officers when evaluating an application, and thus for most students they are considered practice tests or a source of diagnostic information. By “diagnostic” we mean that these preliminary standardized tests can identify areas of academic strength and weakness, which can then be addressed during the high school years with extra support and attention.
One scenario in which the PSAT in particular becomes a higher-stakes test is for those students who take it in the fall of junior year as part of the application for a National Merit Scholarship, a program administered by a privately funded nonprofit organization that can provide recipients with additional college financial assistance. Some universities will even supplement the award packages of National Merit Scholarship recipients. More information, including on participating universities (known as college sponsors), can be found on the National Merit Scholarship website.
Be aware that by taking the PSAT or PreACT, your child will be asked whether they wish to have their contact information (as well as their scores and interests) shared with prospective colleges. Should they decide to put themselves on the colleges’ radar screens, they may well be bombarded with promotional materials, both print and electronic, as we noted at the very outset of this book. Whether or not to opt in is a personal decision, but you might use it as a moment to have a conversation with your child about their feelings (and yours, too) regarding privacy. One benefit of opting in is that they may learn about colleges that they didn’t know about.
Which standardized college entrance exam should your child take? If either the SAT or ACT is the benchmark exam in your particular state, then the decision has largely been made for you. Virtually any college will likely accept either exam. But what if your child has a choice? How might they decide?
One important factor is your child’s comfort with the approach and format of the two tests. Both exams are now more rooted in actual course content (the classes your child is taking in high school) than may have been the case when you took the tests—the SAT in particular—a generation or more ago. As a way to further gauge comfort levels, your child might even take free, simulated practice tests of both the SAT and ACT under timed conditions, whether administered online or in a school setting, provided they wish to invest the time involved. Of course the actual tests have fees and are offered only on selected days during the year, so both time and money may be factors in choosing whether to take one or both tests, and/or to repeat sitting for each. If money is a concern, it is possible to request a fee waiver through your child’s college counseling office or in a direct request to the test administrator; often, a fee waiver granted by a testing agency will automatically qualify your child to have their college application fees waived as well.
If you or your child want to drill deeper into the approaches of both the ACT and SAT, as well as the scoring methodology, start on the SAT or ACT websites or order books from the test creators themselves that share actual exams from previous years. The website of the College Board, the administrator of the SAT, as well as the ACT website feature free test prep videos. In the case of the SAT, those videos are provided through a partnership with Khan Academy, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making available free high-quality online instruction. The counterpart on the ACT website is ACT Academy.
There are, of course, any number of tutors or companies that, for a fee, will help prepare your child for the SAT or ACT. Some do so in classroom settings, which can be less expensive, and others do so individually. The latter can be viewed as the equivalent of a personal trainer who can provide discipline as well as guidance and motivation. Factors to consider here are the potential expense, which can run to thousands of dollars, as well as your child’s learning style.
Alternately, your child might choose to structure their own test prep academy, using the many fine resources available free of charge (including those referenced above). They could also form a peer study group and enlist a teacher or even a parent (if your relationship can support it) to play a role as well.
How many times should your child actually take standardized tests? One factor to consider is that the tests themselves, as well as the lead-up to them, take time from students’ core studies and can lead to fatigue at a moment in their lives when they are already pulled in any number of directions. We don’t recommend that any student take either test more than three times—in fact, research indicates that scores can level off or even decline with repeated sittings—and for some, taking the SAT or ACT just once may suffice.
Why might your child repeat taking the SAT or ACT? For some, the initial results may be substantially lower than their scores on a practice exam. Or perhaps after taking the test once, under actual conditions, they’ll feel better prepared to have a second go at it—or have a clearer sense of the areas in which they need to focus before retaking the test.
Another reason to repeat the tests may be related to admissions alignment, if your child has their sights set on a particular school, or group of schools, but their scores the first time out are below the fiftieth percentile of a previously admitted class.
Whether taking the SAT or ACT, your child will have the option—for a fee—to sit for an additional section of the exam to demonstrate their preparation for college writing. This is known as the essay section (in the case of the SAT) or writing section (ACT). Some colleges and universities, including the United States Military Academy at West Point, require these sections. Your child should research whether the colleges of interest to them require or perhaps recommend these parts of the test. If they wish to preserve their options, and again are willing to put in the time and expense, they might err on the side of taking them.
Over that period of years that your child has been taking standardized tests, they may have been granted some testing accommodations, such as extended time, the use of a keyboard in place of a number 2 pencil, or audio or visual enhancements, as the result of a documented learning difference or physical challenge. Such accommodations may have already been set forth in an Individualized Education Program (IEP) or a 504 plan, named for Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. If so, it may be possible for your child to be approved for similar accommodations on the SAT or ACT. The applications to do so require documentation, including of the credentials of the professional who has certified your child’s “learning disorder” or “physical/medical disabilities,” in the language of the College Board’s disability documentation guidelines.
We would be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge that some children (and parents) have exploited testing accommodations to attempt to game the college admissions process. Journalists have singled out some affluent towns where as many as one in three children taking a college entrance exam have been certified as in need of accommodation. Such abuse surfaced recently as an element of the much wider Varsity Blues scandal of 2019, in which several dozen people (many of them affluent parents) faced federal bribery and conspiracy charges, among others, as part of what The New York Times described as a “brazen scheme” to gain admission to top colleges.
If you are weighing whether to support your child in seeking a testing accommodation, take a moment to ask yourself what larger lessons you might be teaching them. One of those lessons could be constructive—namely that self-advocacy, when one is faced with a genuine hurdle, can be essential to success, not only in an academic setting but in life. On the other hand, if you do attempt to cut corners, you may impart ethical lessons that could have far more resonance throughout your child’s development than the score they receive.
If you’re a parent who has attended an admissions information session or reviewed a class profile on a college’s website, you’re familiar with the typical litany of statistics it offers: Our college has students who hail from all fifty states, as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, and nearly every country in the United Nations General Assembly. In addition to geographical diversity, the contours of that community might include diversity of gender and sexual identity, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and whether students are the first in their family to attend a four-year college.
Although these data points may give the impression of a process that entails little more than the checking of a series of boxes, the selection of an entering class is far more human than it is mechanical. Behind each of those statistics is a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old with a unique, nuanced story to tell. Over the course of the nation’s history, some of those voices have been historically underrepresented at colleges and universities.
Through a series of court cases dating to the 1970s, including those heard by the United States Supreme Court, college admissions offices have been permitted to consider an applicant’s race, among many other factors, as they assemble a class, whether at the undergraduate or graduate level. As a result, colleges and universities have sought through their own search processes—namely their outreach efforts to prospective applicants—to make a priority of identifying and recruiting young people from minority backgrounds. This is known as affirmative action.
In an upcoming section devoted to how admissions officers take the measure of an applicant, we’ll discuss how race and ethnicity may factor into their decisions. But for now we simply want to encourage all parents—and not just those of children from underrepresented backgrounds—to consider the degree to which a college of potential interest values diverse perspectives within its community.
If you are the parent of a child from an underrepresented minority background—or, for that matter, a child who identifies as LGBTQ, or even a daughter who is interested in a particular field of study that has historically been dominated by men—you might urge your child to seek a deeper understanding of the extent to which students from that background feel isolated or included on campus.
What we’re suggesting here is that your child reflect on how one of the Five I’s—identity—might align with or connect to one of the C’s—community—at a college or university they’re considering. So, too, for students who may be the first in their families to seek to attend a four-year college or university—how welcome or supported are they on campus?—as well as for students whose family income may be in the lowest brackets nationally. On this latter point, one barometer is the number and percentage of students in a recently admitted class who qualify for the Federal Pell Grant, typically those whose annual family income is considered among the lowest in the nation.
In identifying and reaching out to potential applicants from underrepresented backgrounds, many colleges or universities may underwrite the cost of travel to campus, including a round-trip airline ticket, so that students can experience campus life firsthand. In researching these programs, often known as fly-ins, students can be proactive in requesting travel assistance.
If you’re the parent of a child embarking on a college search from outside the United States, you might go back to our initial index card exercise so that you and your child can remind yourselves of the experiences and community that you’re seeking. As with any student from a background that is not in the majority on campus, you’ll want to know the degree to which the culture (another C) is welcoming. There’s also the matter of curriculum (yet another C), and the extent to which it is inclusive and broadly reflective of the world as a whole. For example, is there a concentration of courses in foreign languages, non-Western thought and experience, and global studies, such as Latin America or the Middle East? One website that may be of assistance is EducationUSA, a resource provided by the U.S. Department of State. It has a tab labeled “Your 5 Steps to U.S. Study,” which includes the critically important step of applying for a student visa.
A student from any background that is considered nonmajority, for lack of a better word, could take the same brief exercise we recommend for international students and make it their own. This includes asking questions about dedicated spaces on campus that serve and support students from a range of backgrounds. Some may be organized around an affinity or theme and may include kitchen and social spaces as well as housing.
If you have attended a four-year college or university, how might your child take your experience into account, especially if they are interested in attending your (or their grandparents’) alma mater? These students are known as legacies. Later, we’ll speak to the question of how one’s legacy status can impact an admission decision, and how such policies are under fire in some quarters. But the point we wish to raise here is again related to search. One critical question is whether a family member’s experience or history at a particular institution is reason enough to include it on a college list. Some students may wish to consider embracing that opportunity, while making it their own. Still others may wish to blaze an entirely new path. It’s human nature that parents may have strong feelings—positive, as well as negative—regarding the colleges or universities they attended. While it may be easier said than done, we encourage you to separate your own emotions or those of a spouse or other partner (including nostalgia, and impressions that may or may not be out of date) in favor of allowing your child the space to come to their own conclusions.
If, based on their own priorities for their college search, your child expresses interest in your alma mater, seek out available resources for legacy applicants. These could include admissions information sessions during signature campus events like homecoming and class reunions. If, in the past, you have served as an alumni interviewer of local students applying to your alma mater, don’t be surprised if once your child signals interest that the admissions office asks you to take a break from interviewing for that year.
Whether it’s figure skating, the oboe, journalism, painting, or independent science research, your child may have interests and talents that are the product of a deep-seated passion. If you ask them to identify who they are, they might reply that these are the very experiences that in many ways define them, and as such, may be the lens that brings focus as they seek to refine their college list.
This might mark a point in the college search in which your child can reach beyond an admissions office and contact a particular professor, coach, or program director. That individual can provide valuable details not only on their program or offering itself, but on the degree of commitment it entails and the level of accomplishment of the students who are currently involved. Your child may well be wondering if they have what it takes to participate in and contribute to these programs. That question is fair, and one that your child can put to someone at the institution who has helpful perspective and insight to offer.
In making such outreach, your child should be thoughtful and focused—choosing one person within a department or program, as opposed to a scattershot approach. They should also bear in mind that the people to whom they are reaching out have busy schedules and may not respond. Some admissions offices may have guidelines on how best to reach out to particular departments or programs, including through the contact information on their websites, as well as schedules of class visits and open houses.
Depending on the program, your child may be asked, even at this stage, to provide an art portfolio, writing sample, or a recording of a musical selection to help better inform such a conversation. There may also be formal opportunities to submit similar materials through the application process, which we will discuss later.
If you are the parent of an athlete, the process may be far more proscribed and governed by the rules of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) or the athletic conference in which the school participates. This includes guidelines for what is considered permissible contact between coaches and potential recruits. A student who is contemplating competing in sports at the collegiate level should register on the NCAA website under the tab labeled “Student-Athletes.” In addition, the web pages for a sport or team at a particular college or university may have a link to a questionnaire for potential recruits. Prompts may include self-reported academic information, including grades and test scores, as well as sports-specific statistics.
Some children who competed in a sport at the varsity level in high school may wish to continue their participation in college, though not with the same degree of commitment. Suggest to them that, as they work through their college list, they explore whether that sport is offered at the club or intramural level. One gauge of their commitment might be the degree to which that sport is mentioned on their initial index card, or later among the interests they identified. We also note that such interests may wane over time and become less of a priority not only during the search, but while attending college as well.
As your child moves toward the point of preparing—and eventually submitting—their college applications, there is a critically important bridge that lies between the search process and the application process, which they (and you) must cross. It is a test, both intellectual and experiential, to be applied to the colleges and universities that may remain on their list.
What we’re referring to here are college tours—which may be virtual and offered through the college’s website, or in person on campus. These offer opportunities for your child to imagine what it would be like to be a student there, and whether they can truly see themselves attending that institution.
“This is going to be your home for four years,’’ said Matthew Boyd, a High Tech High graduate, who decided to apply to the University of Richmond in Virginia after traveling across the country to visit it and discovering the appeal of its open spaces. He found it to be “a big campus for such a small number of students,” which met his objective of being able to “get to know my teachers, so if I ever needed them, they would know me personally.” He was later admitted to Richmond and enrolled in the fall of 2019.
On a parallel path, you will be engaging in a similar exercise around whether you as a parent can envision them there. If our process thus far has been the equivalent of a series of snapshots, this is the point to pull back for a panoramic view. It’s also a moment in the process when your child should draw upon all their senses to absorb that campus environment in every one of its nuances and textures.
While we believe there is no substitute for the experience of actually visiting a particular campus to experience all those intangibles, time, distance, money, and life events outside your control can be limiting factors. If that’s the case, for each school on your child’s list, check to see whether that institution has a virtual tour on its website or on the website of a company that offers these tours, such as YouVisit. These immersive multimedia experiences simulate what it is like to embark on an actual journey around a college campus and allow you to choose with the stroke of a key where you wish to “walk” and which buildings you wish to enter.
To seek out voices beyond that of a single tour guide, whether virtual or live, your child might explore a broader range of perspectives—including those offered online through resources like student and faculty blogs and student publications, whether offering traditional journalism or opinion. Via social media they can follow the admissions office on a range of platforms for official updates, as well as to learn more about programs and departments of interest. One caution: we don’t, in general, advise you or your child sending friend or LinkedIn requests to individual admissions officers or professors.
While such efforts could yield a trove of valuable information, there is only so much one can experience through a screen. As perhaps the final stage in the college search, we recommend, if it is at all possible, that you and your child create a game plan or itinerary for college visits. Your child should also consider that by registering for a campus visit, they are demonstrating interest to that institution. Indeed, some colleges keep track of demonstrated interest, including your child’s attending a college admissions officer’s visit to their high school, which can be a factor in the admissions process (though hardly the deciding factor), as we will discuss further in the portion of this book devoted to admissions officers’ decision-making.
In advance of a college visit, it may also be possible to sign up to visit classes from an approved list on the admissions office visit page, as well as information sessions that are specific to an area of academic interest or a particular school or program within the college or university. Walking around a campus fifteen minutes before classes begin, and fifteen minutes afterward, will provide an opportunity to observe its unique dynamics and vibrancy.
Where possible, your child might also reach out in advance to a graduate of their high school who is attending a college they plan on visiting and arrange a time to meet. In doing so they can learn about the experience of someone who came from a similar environment and the degree to which they felt prepared when they matriculated. While some children will have no shortage of high school alumni from whom to choose, others may have to seek out the few trailblazers who preceded them.
We have one other travel tip to pass along from Chloe Rodriguez, a High Tech High graduate studying at New York University who hadn’t traveled much before embarking on her college tours. She suggests that you and your child draw up an itinerary covering not only all your college visits, but the activities within each day, “because kids, especially me, like to know what is going to happen next. ‘What are we doing next?’ You can just look at the schedule.”
Depending on the extent to which money is a factor, you may have to be flexible about if or how often you accompany your child on college visits—especially in situations where your child may be able to book air travel to and from campus at the college’s expense via one of the fly-in programs mentioned earlier. There is also the question of whether it is financially feasible to include other family members. Spouses or other partners might also consider a divide-and-conquer approach, splitting the travel itinerary.
In addition to taking expense into account, revisit the rules of the road you and your child established. You might ask them directly whether they wish you to tag along on these visits—and, if the answer is no, ask yourself whether you believe they have the maturity to set out on their own, or with a friend, and what expectations you have regarding their behavior. Of course, for some families there won’t be a choice, given work schedules and other family responsibilities.
Some schools may have the capacity to offer overnight accommodations to your child, such as in the dorm room of a current student. This is a question certainly worth asking the admissions office. The admissions website will typically feature a list of discounted local hotels and motels nearby. It might also be worth checking the websites Airbnb and Vrbo, on which private homes and apartments can be rented. Likewise, consider whether there are relatives or family friends in the area who might be willing to put you up for a night.
Mindful that some prospective applicants may be traveling by air for the first time, Chloe said that in preparation for her college visits, she and her mother watched a series of YouTube videos on packing and travel tips. She added, “We just researched what you can take on your specific flight; that way you can learn what you can pack and what you can’t.” She also asked that we advise you to advise your children to “leave room in your suitcase,” including for college swag they might want to bring back.
Quite often, students and families overlook visits to colleges and universities in their own vicinity, based on the belief that they have seen them frequently, perhaps because they routinely drive by the outskirts of campus. Even if that school is not on your child’s list, it might still be worth a visit as something of a dry run, provided it has at least some similarities to schools that may actually be on their list. The purpose here is to gain insight and practice into how you can best experience a campus you are visiting.
College visits are very much a long-range planning exercise. You and your child (and perhaps a spouse or other partner) should set aside time to gather at the kitchen table or in a home office where you have access to a computer and sufficient surface space to spread out some paperwork, including from prior activities, to draw up an itinerary. While you may be tempted to do this work on behalf of your child—or they may prefer to do it themselves—our general advice is that, at an appropriate point in the process, you find a way to do this activity together.
Depending on the point when you are entering the College Conversation, your child may be planning college visits as early as the sophomore year of high school or during a family vacation. While there are no firm rules here, we do encourage you to consider whether you are planning a college visit too early in your child’s development, with the risk of perhaps scaring or overwhelming them. These are obviously personal decisions. In terms of timing, we believe you’ll both get the most out of these visits if you’ve engaged in the activities we presented earlier in this book, while acknowledging that family schedules may make it possible to visit colleges at an earlier point.
In general, start thinking about planning to schedule college visits beginning the summer prior to junior year of high school and continuing, if feasible, during school vacations and national holidays, and on into the new calendar year and the summer before senior year. One word of advice: while national holidays can be among the times that colleges are most crowded with visiting parents and students, they might also be days when the colleges offer additional programming.
For this activity, you and your child will need:
Their high school calendar
Google or other calendars that include their schedules, and yours
Access via computer to a navigation tool like MapQuest, Google Maps, or Waze, as well as airline websites (or aggregators like Kayak) and public transportation schedules
A rough budget
While we acknowledge that ours is increasingly a digital society, we both see value in your printing and marking up calendars with highlighters and Sharpies, and perhaps even availing yourselves of an erasable whiteboard as part of this exercise.
In general, your aim should be to register for a college’s group information session—typically led by an admissions officer, and perhaps current students—as well as a guided campus tour, which will be led by students. Some schools will offer information sessions and tours only on particular days, including weekends, and slots can fill up quickly. In addition, some schools recommend on-campus interviews, which also require prior registration. There may be restrictions on the point in a student’s high school career when colleges permit them to interview (perhaps beginning in spring of the junior year). If it is possible to do an on-campus interview, even if it is not required, your child should consider it as an opportunity to ask questions of their own (regardless of whether the interviewer is an admissions officer or a current student) as well as to share firsthand their impressions and experiences of that school.
When scheduling campus visits, be conscious of blackout days—such as new student move-in days or graduation—when visitors cannot be accommodated. Also be aware of the point in the institution’s academic calendar when you may be contemplating a visit. If it’s midterms or final exam period, current student stress levels may be higher than normal. In an ideal world, your child should visit a campus when students are actually present, and not during a break.
As you and your child plan your trips, consider whether it is possible to cluster visits to a set of geographically close schools. We certainly don’t advise visiting more than two schools in a day, given how time-consuming and intense those experiences can be. There is also something to be said, schedules and other factors permitting, for visiting just a single school on a particular day. Encourage your child to use part of that day to visit the surrounding area, to contemplate and take some reflective time to process the experience, or to spend an early evening walking through the campus more casually.
As you plot your schedule, be sure to build in breaks—whether for downtime, exercise, naps, or homework. For those readers who have never experienced a college tour from the vantage point of being a parent, be aware that they can be as intense for you as they are for your child. A lot of information is going to be conveyed in a very short period of time. There’s also going to be a lot of walking, with some tours lasting upward of ninety minutes, so wear comfortable shoes.
Pace yourselves by not trying to plan all your college visits in a single sitting. You and your child may need breaks, as well as supplemental information, such as from an admissions office during working hours. At the end of this activity, you should have a draft master plan that might extend for a full year or more. But build in some flexibility, as college admissions offices may post their calendar of visit dates only a few months in advance. Also, your calendar and your child’s may change.
Setting off on a college trip may be the most time you’ve spent alone with your child in a number of years. The potential of sharing a room together in a hotel may feel awkward. Be sensitive to all the emotions your child may be feeling, including fear or anxiety, and don’t underestimate the value of a little strategically placed silence or time apart.
As you’re packing for your trip, remember to take along the individual index cards, worksheets, or spreadsheets for each school, in which the five C’s are listed—culture, curriculum, community, conclusions, and cost—with space below each for you and your child to record your observations, reflections, and impressions. In their applications, most colleges will include a question that essentially boils down to “Why our school?” The data you fill out after your visit will provide useful raw material for your child’s reply to this question.
If you or your child have any concerns about mobility, and require special assistance, share that information with the admissions office before the visit. Pack an empty water bottle, too, as there should be filling stations at the admissions office or along the way. Bring along an umbrella and a rain jacket, though some admissions offices may provide both. During extreme weather, the campus tour may relocate indoors for a student panel.
If your child has an appointment for an interview, they might consider, as a general rule, dressing business casual. Ultimately, your child’s comfort—not only in what they are wearing for an interview, but how they are feeling at that moment—is what is most important. For students who are not interviewing, the visit could be relatively anonymous, particularly at large- and medium-sized institutions, apart from signing in at the admissions office to indicate you’ve paid a visit. In this case, tip the balance toward comfort and allow your child to choose what to wear, though not to the point of sloppiness. In our own experiences on campus, each of us has seen prospective applicants who choose for whatever reason to wear the sweatshirt of another institution. If your child is inclined to do so, you might suggest otherwise.
You and your child might also devote some thought and research, prior to arriving on campus, to where you might eat—a campus dining hall, a local diner, or maybe a renowned local food truck—not just for the meal itself, but to be able to experience the overall environment. Don’t forget to check on the proximity and ease of parking, which should be posted on the admissions website. Plan ahead, and build time into your itinerary for potential delays.
Have a conversation in advance about your child’s comfort with your asking questions at a group information session. Regardless of who is doing the asking—you or your child—we suggest that you prepare a series of questions in advance, whether you’ll present them at the session itself or in a one-on-one immediately after. Harvey Fields of Washington University in St. Louis advises that you arrive prepared with specific questions about student support services, including academics, social life, physical and mental health, and opportunities after graduation, and drill deep on each. For example, you or your child should ask not just about the existence of a tutoring center, but whether it is situated as a priority within the campus culture and organizational chart, with a high-level advocate, such as a senior administrator. And to the extent those academic services are delivered by other students, how are they trained and supervised? Another possible line of questioning Dr. Fields suggests concerns campus mental health services: Where are they located? To how many visits is a student entitled? Who oversees those services? And how long does it take to get an initial appointment?
You might also discuss with your child whether they wish to take the campus tour together or to split up. Some colleges will require parent and child to go on different tours, which can have the advantage of giving each separate perspectives to compare and contrast later. That said, hearing and responding to the same information together, and in real time, can be valuable.
As you and your child walk around campus, be mindful to observe your surroundings. Look at the flyers and other materials that have been tacked up on bulletin boards or that students may be handing out along the way. Pay attention to the information on LED TV displays, including messages regarding upcoming lectures and other campus events. You may also wish to check the events calendar on the college website prior to your visit and attend gatherings that are open to the general public.
Carol Sutton Lewis recalled that on each of her daughter’s college visits, her daughter made a point of stopping three students at random to ask them a series of questions. You might think of this as the “current student” conversation. As Carol explains:
She’d ask them what year they were, how they liked it, where else they thought about going, and why they decided to go to this place. For a relatively shy person at the time, she found students were very friendly while the responses ranged from the sort of brusque to, “Here, do you want to see my room?” It was a variety of responses that served two major purposes. It gave her a lot of information that she couldn’t get from the information session and the tour, where you get one student giving your tour, one student’s impression. It also made her hear how other people viewed it. And not everybody said, “I love it.” They were honest about it. And where was I? I was sitting removed, somewhere on a bench. Because whatever they would say to her, it’s going to be different than what they would say to me. I really looked at it as a valuable opportunity for her to see herself as a college student.
As you are leaving the campus, and before you get into your car, you and your child might take a moment to pause and look back. Do so with the intention of taking a few final mental snapshots—or just to draw a few deep breaths and to reflect on your experience. You might also remind yourself that simply by virtue of traveling to this campus and taking an extended look around it, you have reached a critical milestone in the search process.
Once in the car, or en route to the train station or airport, consider the virtue, yet again, of a bit of silence. Your child may be eager to hear your answer to the question, “What did you think?” and you may be equally curious about their own response. Be aware that your child may be looking closely for cues and clues from you that you may not wish to share at this time, with the impressions from your visit still so fresh.
Here again, Carol has some pointed advice for parents: keep your poker face, as best you can, and avoid trying to tip the scales with observations like, “Who wouldn’t want to go here? I want to go here.” At least at this early stage, refrain from comments like, “The cafeteria looked kind of grungy.” To the extent you are pressed by your child to show your hand, Carol suggests you consider gently turning those questions back to your child to allow them to share their impressions. Back at the hotel or on the plane, separately or together, fill out your worksheets and then, at whatever point you both feel ready, compare notes.
There may be opportunities for your child to return to a given campus. Some high-school-sponsored events, such as Model United Nations or a debate competition, may take place at a college or university. Some schools also offer on-campus summer programs for high school students that may last from two to six weeks and feature classes taught by college faculty or graduate students in an area of academic interest. This can be a good opportunity for your child to experience independence, as well as dorm living, and to be around similarly engaged peers. Two caveats: such programs can be expensive, sometimes costing thousands of dollars. And while your child might learn much about an institution by spending part of a summer on its campus, they should know that participation in such a program should not be viewed as a strategy to gain a leg up in the college admissions process.
Before long, your child’s college list will be set—and conversations about the application itself will be at hand.