A. Refining the List

While each family will join the College Conversation at a different point in their child’s development, we’re now approaching a critical moment in the process that is, in fact, governed by a fixed calendar, beginning the summer immediately preceding senior year. It is the process of assembling and submitting college applications.

In the coming pages, we will walk you through every component of the application, including transcripts, essays, counselor and teacher recommendations, records of your child’s extracurricular activities, test results, interviews, and financial aid. When we refer to “the admissions calendar,” we’re talking about a period of time that begins on August 1, when the Common Application, among other application platforms, goes live (please don’t worry—we’re not suggesting your child file their application on or around this date) and that could run as late as February of senior year, which is the deadline to apply to some institutions.

First, though, you and your child may have some important work to do in refining their college list. We suggested earlier that the draft college list might have twelve to fifteen institutions on it. We then encouraged you to hit the road, whether virtually or up close, until the final list contained eight to ten schools—perhaps five or six in the sweet spot category, with one or two that are aspirational and a school or two to which they are more likely to be admitted.

Which may raise a question: How can you best guide your child to winnow their list, if it is still too long? With the search process largely in the rearview mirror—and we say largely because we know you may have some visits scheduled in the fall of senior year—this is probably a good time for you and your child to pull out the collective effort from the first five activities, including your notes from your college visits. Your child might then begin to put their college choices in some kind of order.

That order doesn’t need to be especially strict, but perhaps you and your child can begin to put their choices into our three basic categories. Independently or together, you both can make an assessment of whether their list is light or heavy in a particular category. If, for example, your child has no schools that they would consider to be in the likely category, you both might have some work to do. On the other hand, if they have identified a dozen schools that they consider to be in the sweet spot, some pruning may be in order.

This could be a broader teaching moment, in which you could impart to your child that eliminating an option is, in fact, making a decision. And in arraying options alongside one another, they can clarify those qualities in an institution that they value relative to others. These may be difficult choices for them. For example, they may have to decide whether the availability and popularity of a club sport at one institution outweighs the strong sense of community at another institution. Or the seminars and more intimate learning environment at a small institution may be measured against the broader array of academic offerings at a larger institution. Please explain to your child that there are no perfect choices here, although some may have more appeal than others.

Some readers and their children will have the benefit of a strong college counseling team in their high school. We hope that the advice above will help inform you, as parents, for those conversations. Since they know your child well, we suggest you be open to your counselor’s judgment. But we want to assure other readers who don’t have the benefit of such one-on-one guidance, whether from a school counselor or an independent counselor, that this process is certainly doable on one’s own.

ACTIVITY #6: Creating a College Application Requirement and Deadline Tracker

As your child embarks on the application process, it is important for them to know that they will be held to many deadlines during the fall of their senior year. While they can, of course, draw upon their previous experiences with deadlines in school and other settings, this is likely to be different. Unlike the soft deadline for a project that may have been established by a lenient high school teacher, your child should consider the deadlines that govern the college admissions process to be hard and fast. But they are also transparent and accessible, which means that a child who is organized (or coached by you to be organized) can stay ahead of the curve.

For this activity we suggest you consider using an Excel spreadsheet, Google Doc, or a piece of graph paper, depending on how you have completed prior exercises. Your child might even be able to expand or adapt the list they began in Activity #4 in the previous section of this book. Whatever format they use, down the left-hand side, your child could list each college that is a finalist on their list and then add a series of column titles arrayed across the top. Those could include application deadlines, including in the rolling, early, and regular rounds (more on these options later); fees; and requirements, such as for standardized tests and supplemental essays. They may also wish to include contact information for the admissions office. If at any stage your child created a login—such as when they registered for their college tour—they may wish to note the user name and password here, as they may be used in the application process as well.

As a model for this document—and also as a time-saver to track down in a central location some of the information to help populate it—we recommend downloading a PDF produced each year by the Common Application under the title “First Year Deadlines, Fees and Requirements.” The grid contains information on the nearly nine hundred colleges and universities using the Common Application. We have included a screen grab of a portion of the document below.

For those schools that do not accept the Common Application, the relevant information should be easy to locate on the individual colleges’ admissions websites. Your child may also have access to similar tools through their college counselor at their high school, or through online tools like Naviance and Scoir, should your school or district subscribe to them.

Courtesy of the Common Application.

If your child uses a Google or other online calendar, they might consider putting some of these dates on it—with reminder alerts. Similarly, if your child is open to your keeping track of these deadlines with them, you might add the dates to your calendar as well, so that you can monitor that your child is remaining on task.

B. The College Application as a Reporting Mechanism, and a Moment for Your Child to Take Stock

On the one hand, the college application is quite literally a ticket to admission—a form with a very pragmatic and transactional purpose. Although application requirements will differ from school to school, it is not possible to get in without one.

But we want to encourage you and your child to also consider the college application in a loftier light. Every one of its elements—family background; what their teachers say about them; what they have to say about themselves; the choices they have made, academic and extracurricular—is a storytelling opportunity for the applicant, a chance for them to convey who they are and who they hope to become. When approached thoughtfully, the application also offers an opportunity for interplay among these elements, so that the whole transcends its component parts. Think of the application as a mosaic, a work of art in which small pieces of various materials are arrayed to form a grander pattern or picture. The emerging figure is your child.

The application does, in fact, need to be your child’s—which means that we again encourage the establishment of ground rules and boundaries. Until now, subject to your child’s buy-in, we’ve encouraged you to partner with them at key moments in the search. But as your child begins to create and assemble their application, you as a parent might consider ceding a bit more responsibility in key areas.

We are not advising that you abandon your role as a check and balance, particularly around ensuring that they are on track to meet deadlines. We also believe you should confirm that your child is checking their email for communications from colleges. Email, however passé it may be to your child, will be the preferred channel for alerts from colleges for notification of receipt of important materials. On this latter point, we heard a heartbreaking story from Matthew Boyd, a recent graduate of High Tech High, who missed an email during the application process from a college that was willing to pay for him and a companion—in this case his mother—to fly across the country to visit the campus. By the time Matthew saw the email, it was too late.

Just as they registered for college visits, your child will be asked to register for the Common Application, if they are applying to schools that accept it. Parents—as well as other adults, such as mentors or advisers at community-based organizations—can also obtain login credentials on the Common Application website to keep track of an applicant’s progress in meetings deadlines. Your child needs to grant this permission, and even then, you can view their application on a read-only basis. This is yet another ground rule to discuss.

You and your child should proactively come to agreement, early on, about those portions of the application for which they will have license and ownership, as well as for which they will be accountable. Make it clear that you are not going to write their college essays for them, nor is anyone else. In the same conversation, jointly come up with some parameters on the editing of those essays, and whether your child would like you to have a look and give feedback at some point (again, it’s up to them), or whether they might prefer a counselor, teacher, or peer to do so. These conversations require planning and will yield dividends throughout your child’s senior fall.

In addition, each college will have an online portal, accessible through a separate login. Ask your child periodically whether they have used these portals to confirm the receipt of required materials, such as test scores and transcripts. Please note that these updates are not all tracked through the Common Application.

C. Your Child Assembles the Parts: Opportunities to Render Their Experiences

The various components of the college application can be grouped, loosely, into two main categories. The first is academic and includes the high school transcript; standardized test scores; counselor and teacher recommendations; as well as, perhaps, supplemental recommendations, if they are provided by someone who knows your child in an academic setting. The second category is more of a personal inventory and has to do with your child’s personal qualities and voice—some of those I’s will likely come into play here—and will include their activities; portfolios, where applicable (such as for works of art or musical performances); interviews (on campus or with alumni); and essays.

We want to say a word about the readers who will be reviewing your child’s application and making decisions based on it. You may have an image of an admissions committee as a collection of stodgy old pipe-smoking critics gathered in a drawing room to pass judgment over glasses of cognac. Or perhaps you imagine a conference room filled with accountants in ties and business suits, treating each application as a ledger and spreadsheet with points to be tallied precisely as if they were profits and losses. Or maybe you’re even more cynical and picture an admissions committee clustered around a televised lottery event, where Ping-Pong balls with numbers (or maybe even a photo of your child’s face) jostle to pass through a clear tube and be declared the winner.

In fact, admissions committees are made up of those whose ages may range across as many as five decades, beginning with recent graduates. Many went on to get masters and even doctoral degrees across a variety of fields, including education. Taken as a whole, admissions committees are also increasingly diverse, reflecting the demographics of the nation, not only ethnically and racially but also socioeconomically, including those who were first in their families to attend and graduate from college. On many campuses, faculty play an important role at the admissions table, particularly for those disciplines that may require specialized knowledge of a particular field.

If there is a common denominator in admissions offices, it is that they are populated by people committed to giving each applicant the chance to make their case for admission and to ensuring that each application is considered with care. Indeed, your child’s application will likely be read closely by at least two admissions officers, and in some instances an entire committee. Which means that rather than tailoring their application to an imaginary audience of one, your child should picture a group of individuals with a broad outlook and perspective.

Earlier, we compared a college application to a mosaic. Now let’s have a look at each element in it.

The Transcript

Given that your child is in all likelihood filling out their application in the summer before or fall of their senior year of high school, their transcript currently has three years of courses and grades—as well as their planned roster for the senior year. It may also contain information on other graduation requirements, like service learning or capstone projects. This is an official document that your child’s school will transmit directly to the colleges or universities to which they apply, upon request from your child via the Common Application or platforms like Naviance and Scoir. In some cases your child may also be asked to unofficially self-report their courses and grades over the previous three years. Throughout the admissions process their transcript will be updated, such as when midyear grades from their senior year are posted.

The transcript is the most important part of your child’s application—and it will be the first element considered in the evaluation process.

While you as a parent have probably been in the loop throughout their high school years, dutifully keeping track of their quarterly grades, we strongly recommend that you obtain a copy of their updated transcript and take a fresh look at it—viewing it actively and as if for the first time, as an admissions officer will. When that admissions officer does examine your child’s transcript, they will do so alongside a second document, which is known as the high school profile or school report. This is a document that you can also request from your child’s school (it may well be viewable online) that will place their transcript in a larger context. Among the pieces of information it will contain are an overview of the school’s community (such as the number of students, demographics of the student body, and geographic setting); its curriculum (courses offered and level of rigor, including options for International Baccalaureate or Advanced Placement offerings, in addition to the high school’s own honors classes); its grading system and scale (including, perhaps, the percentage that have a particular grade point average); a summary of standardized test scores (as compared to state and local averages); and the college matriculation choices of previous classes. An admissions officer will use the school profile or school report to evaluate your child’s performance within the broader context of their particular high school. We noted earlier that admissions officers will evaluate the rigor of your child’s curriculum, but they will do so within the boundaries of what’s available to your child at their school, which the school profile or report will show.

While the transcript, at this point, may contain only three years of data, consider that it charts ages fourteen to age seventeen and reflects all the changes and growth that your child experienced during that time. You as a parent may discern patterns or trends within this document that your child or their counselor may wish to reference somewhere in the application. If your child is a straight-A student, then no color commentary may be required. But there could be a larger story to tell with the support of this document. For example, your child may have shown steady or marked improvement in a particular subject as they progressed through high school. Or they may have suffered an academic setback for any number of reasons—not only because they were challenged in a particular course, but because of illness or other life circumstances. These experiences can inform the discussion between your child and their counselor, and between their counselor and you. There may be aspects of your child’s transcript that could be addressed in the letters of recommendation from their teachers or counselor, in one of their essays, or in the section of the application where additional information can be provided—all of which we will discuss shortly.

Standardized Test Scores

More likely than not, your child will be applying to at least one college or university that requires the SAT or ACT. Although this may seem like a straightforward reporting process, there are some decisions that your child will need to make regarding their test scores (including in conversation with you and their counselors) and some strategies that can be employed.

For this section of the application, your child may wish to have handy the college application requirement and deadline tracker that we suggested they prepare earlier in this chapter—with columns dedicated to whether standardized tests are required.

When your child took the ACT or SAT, they may have listed colleges or universities to which they wanted their scores officially sent. Your child can also request that these scores be sent officially at any time thereafter—though they should be conscious of application deadlines and the processing time required by the testing companies. A growing number of colleges and universities will also accept self-reported scores as listed on the college application itself. One reason they do so is that it can defray the cost of applying to college, as the testing companies charge a fee to those applicants who request that their scores be sent.

Whenever your child is self-reporting information, honesty and accuracy are critical. Do know that colleges will verify all self-reported scores prior to a student’s enrolling. By using their logins for the SAT and ACT sites, your child will be able to review and print out their scores to date, as well as the names of any colleges or universities to which they have directed the scores to be sent.

For those colleges or universities that require standardized test scores, your child should familiarize themselves with those institutions’ individualized policies on how those scores are used. For example, some colleges or universities may use the term superscore, which means that they will consider the highest score on each subsection of the test—such as math or evidence-based reading and writing on the SAT; or the four main sections of the ACT—regardless of the date on which those tests were taken. As of this writing, the ACT has also announced plans to allow students to retake individual sections of the test, without needing to sit for the entire exam, as long as they have taken the full test at least once previously. Whether they use superscores or not, most colleges and universities want your child to put their best foot forward. The colleges themselves will also use these higher scores as they calculate the ranges of test scores of admitted students for external reporting, including for guidebooks and rankings.

In the interest of accuracy and completeness, your child should self-report all of the scores they received during any test administration that they would like a college to consider. The colleges themselves will use the best scores. We’re not suggesting that your child has to report every instance in which they have taken one of these tests. But if they received a score on a section on a particular day that they do wish to have the college consider, then they need to report all the results from that day. In rare instances, a college or university will require that all scores be submitted from every test they have taken, which the institutions will make clear under their testing requirements.

We mentioned earlier that applicants need to familiarize themselves with the standardized testing policies at each of the schools to which they are applying and to note that information on their tracker. But what about the many colleges and universities that do not require standardized test scores for at least some applicants? Should your child send these institutions their scores anyway?

The answer may lie in whether their scores fall within the range of scores from the top quartile of the previous year’s class. And as a reminder: even schools that don’t require the SAT or ACT may still report to publications like U.S. News the scores of those admitted students who did submit them. Earlier, we suggested that if your child’s SAT or ACT scores were below the bottom quartile, then they should consider that school to be more in line with their aspirational category. But in this scenario, the college or university may consider your child, based on their relatively high scores, to be in its aspirational category—meaning that your child may be a highly appealing candidate for admission, and perhaps even merit aid (a subject we will address later). In other words, if your child, perhaps in consultation with their counselor, believes that their scores could not only further the case for admission but also be helpful to the college or university’s profile, then they might consider submitting their scores. And here again, that can be done by self-reporting (depending on school policy) as well as an official score report sent directly from the testing agency. Students using the Common Application can choose to self-report test scores to some institutions, while choosing not to do so for others.

As with so much concerning college admissions, there is no definitive answer to the question of whether to submit scores to a test-optional institution. In part IV of The College Conversation, we’ll spend some time discussing the admission decision process and the factors that go into it. One factor that matters to colleges and universities is the background and life experience of the applicant. For example, a student who may be the first in their family to apply to college—and let’s say, for sake of argument, this is also a student whose annual family income is below $75,000 a year, but still above the median family income in the United States—would not be expected to score as high on the SAT or ACT, considering the correlation that researchers have demonstrated between score results and a family’s income and education. In such an instance, a score closer to a college or university’s twenty-fifth percentile might still be helpful to the applicant, and the admissions office.

If your child chooses for whatever reason not to report their scores to test-optional institutions, you might take solace in the thought that by establishing such a policy, those schools are sending a message about the relative value they place on test scores in assessing and predicting your child’s ability to do well at their institutions. But in the absence of scores, the colleges may seek out supplemental sources of information—such as a graded paper, or a more involved essay requirement—to assure themselves and the faculty that, if enrolled, your child can not only do the work but also flourish.

In addition to the SAT and ACT, some colleges or universities may require, or at least recommend, the submission of scores from two to three SAT Subject Tests. For parents of a certain generation, these were known as the Achievement Tests. They are one-hour exams, scored on the same 800-point scale as the SAT, that cover content in particular subject areas, such as literature, math, history, and a range of foreign languages. Unlike the broader science reasoning section of the SAT, the SAT Subject Tests in biology, chemistry, and physics hone in on specific content within these disciplines. We suggested earlier that your child should take SAT Subject Tests in areas where they felt they could do well. If your child is applying to a college that requires the submission of SAT Subject Tests, they might choose to send their highest scores—as well as to consider sending their scores in disciplines they might wish to study in college, particularly if they are interested in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) or a foreign language.

Counselor and Teacher Recommendations or Evaluations

Most colleges and universities will require applicants to include a letter of recommendation or evaluation from their high school’s college counselor, as well as two teachers. If that mosaic of your child’s experiences that we asked you to imagine earlier was made of stained glass, then these letters are the equivalent of bright shafts of light streaming through a range of colors. They also provide texture and perspective. The recommendation section of your child’s application provides them with three opportunities to demonstrate to an admissions committee how the educators who know them best view their academic work, as well as their participation and impact in a learning environment, to say nothing of the school community. These recommendation letters provide firsthand insight into how your child will engage with the university community and contribute to its vitality.

You may have already had a series of your own conversations with your child’s counselor. The reflections about your child that you provided in those meetings—as well as, perhaps, in response to questionnaires—can help shape the contours of the letter that the counselor writes on your child’s behalf. That being said, we feel obliged to erect a guardrail here. Just as your child’s essays need to be their own, so too should you respect the counselor’s responsibility to prepare an independent assessment of your child. In other words, please don’t try to write it for them. You can rest assured that if you did seek to do so, the admissions officer reading that letter would likely see through the effort. Similarly, your child’s school may have a policy prohibiting your even seeing that letter—a policy we urge you to respect.

While recognizing that counselor caseloads vary dramatically—from a few dozen to as many as a thousand—we nonetheless hope your child has proactively sought to give their counselor opportunities to get to know them. Your child might consider writing a letter that would help a counselor with a long roster of advisees understand who they are and what is important to them. They could even draw upon their Five I’s exercise. Most counselors will appreciate having that material in hand as they write your child’s letter. Ultimately, the counselor’s charge from an admissions committee is to provide as broad a perspective as possible on your child’s life and experiences.

The letters requested by an admissions committee from two teachers provide an opportunity for your child to have a say in choosing those teachers. Considering that your child will be taking a range of courses in college, it is important that they choose teachers who can speak to their style of learning across different subjects. The way your child processes a great work of literature could be vastly different from the way they would approach hands-on learning in a science lab.

As your child considers which teachers to approach, they should not necessarily avoid those instructors in whose classes they struggled. For example, a student who is passionate about the study of history—to the point of seeking out their teacher after class to discuss material beyond the syllabus—might do well to ask that teacher for a recommendation. But let’s say that same student struggled in a science course. That teacher could describe the student’s perseverance when confronted with challenging material—earning a B that may have been hard-won—which gives an admissions committee insight into how a student manages to learn under pressure, such as they might encounter in college.

Your child should not choose two teachers within the same discipline and risk appearing one-dimensional. Speaking from the perspective of someone who has read tens of thousands of teacher endorsements, Eric tends to prefer references from teachers who taught a student in the junior year, as they can better assess your child’s growth and maturity. But there may be times or circumstances when a teacher who had your child in the sophomore or even freshman year knows them best and can convey the most vivid rendering of them. In such circumstances, that teacher could be asked to write one of the two teacher recommendations—or perhaps to contribute a third, supplemental letter, if the college will accept it.

Your child may want to ask their teacher if it would be helpful to provide them any additional information that could put their performance in that teacher’s class in a broader perspective. For example, the teacher may not be aware that that your child is holding down a part-time job or has a long commute to school—elements that could provide a deeper understanding of your child’s life. Imagine a teacher who assigns a tremendous amount of reading. Your child could inform that teacher about how and where they do that reading, which could further make your child come alive to an admissions committee.

Colleges and universities have very specific guidelines regarding their willingness to review submissions of recommendations beyond those of the counselor and two teachers. Bear in mind that admissions officers only have so much bandwidth to review each application. The question your child needs to ask is whether an additional letter would be truly beneficial or merely a pile-on. Examples of where such a letter could be helpful include those from a coach or orchestra leader, your child’s employer or a leader of a faith community. Each might provide observations of what your child is like outside of a classroom or even a school setting.

A word of caution, however, to those readers who might be tempted to encourage their child to seek out a letter of recommendation from someone writing under an impressive letterhead—such as a government official or celebrity—with the hope of impressing an admissions officer. Not only do such letters rarely provide much in the way of insight, but they also carry a risk of distraction. This advice also holds for recommendations from alumni of an institution to which your child is applying, and whom your child may know well. Each of these cases, though, is unique, and we want to refrain from giving blanket advice. In those instances in which alumni, particularly those who remain in active contact with their alma mater, are open to writing such a letter, both your child and that individual should temper their expectations of the impact it could have on a college’s decision.

Activities

Whether it’s the Common Application or a form specific to a particular institution, your child’s college application will include a section where they will be asked to describe their extracurricular activities. The Common Application has drop-down menus in the activity section with headings like athletics, debate/speech, community service, cultural, music, academic, and religious, among others. There is also a drop-down labeled “work.”

Before wading into this section, your child should give thought to how they want to knit together these various activities to convey to an admissions officer how they spend their time outside the classroom or, in some cases, how they extend their classroom time. This is also an opportunity for your child to explain how much time they have spent on their activities, and over a span of how many years.

Far more important than the volume of your child’s experiences is their ability in this section to convey the quality of those experiences, as well as their level of engagement and the degree to which they have grown as a result. They should not feel pressure to pad this list, or to fill every available space in this section.

Speaking not only in her role leading the Common Application but also as a former dean of admissions at several colleges, Jenny Rickard explained:

Those little lines are not as powerful as parents might make them out to be. What is powerful is the authenticity, care, and thoughtfulness that students have put into the application process. Those are the things that really stand out. I would love for a student to look at their application and just be proud. And for parents: just reinforce that what your child has done is great.

To that end, your child should once again imagine the audience that will be reviewing this information—and think about how they want to present their experiences in ways that have meaning for the reader. So how do they do that?

ACTIVITY #7: Your Child Catalogs Their Activity List

The objective of this exercise is to have your child take an inventory of all their experiences and then shape that list so that it tells a story. As with any story, some details will be more compelling than others, and still others will end up on the cutting room floor. By this point, they probably have a preference for whether they wish to set up this document on paper or electronically.

Your child’s inventory should mirror the format of the activity section of the application, so they should familiarize themselves with it in advance. On the Common Application, for example, the information requested includes years of commitment, hours per week, weeks per year, and whether the applicant wants to continue the activity in college. Then follow the categories listed above in the Common App activity drop-down menus, with space for the name of the activity, titles and leadership positions, and room for a description, which is capped at 150 characters.

For the purposes of this exercise, your child should err on the side of being comprehensive, in terms of the activities they include, as well as their descriptions of them. There will be time later to winnow the list that is actually entered into the form and to edit those descriptions. The goal here is not to create a formal résumé, but to instead begin to experiment with how to describe their experiences.

Once they’ve assembled a rough draft, they can then give thought to those experiences that are most significant and note them with an old-fashioned highlighter or the highlighter function in a spreadsheet. The criteria for what your child considers important will be particular and unique to them. For some, it may be the sheer time commitment that determines the rank order. For others, it is the meaning and impact that the activity has had on their lives, which may not necessarily correlate with time devoted to it. For still others, it could be the positions held (managing editor of the newspaper; president of the class) that they want an admissions officer to see first. By giving thought to those activities they wish to amplify, and in which order, your child has an opportunity to direct an admission’s officer’s eyes in ways that will make a strong first impression, as well as provide a cumulative experience. They should also pay close attention to how they characterize those activities, given that space is limited, and do their best to make these experiences come alive for the reader. For example, use active words—a softball captain might say they “led the squad to a conference championship”—and even tap into some of the emotional aspects of that involvement (“and while we lost in the state round, we felt proud of how hard we fought”). Again, this is less of a résumé than a narrative or story.

When they feel ready, they can use this draft as source material to enter information into the activity section of the application itself.

We want to add a word here about the relative merits of uploading a résumé into the application, which the Common Application, among other platforms, permits. Your child should bear in mind that a lot of thought has gone into designing a college application form that enables the reader—the admissions officer—to quickly find the information they are seeking. For this reason, there are two words that have been known to trigger a wave of dread in longtime admissions officers: “See attached.” By drawing an admissions officer away from the application itself, the applicant risks distracting them or taking up too much of their precious time. All of which is to say that applicants should feel confident that whatever information they might be tempted to include in a résumé can probably be more efficiently and effectively transmitted within the confines of the activity section of the application itself.

Portfolios and Other Additional Information

While there is generally sufficient room within the college application to provide admissions officers with key information, your child may nonetheless feel it is limiting. They may feel the need for more space to upload a sample of their work (such as a science abstract, a musical composition, or a video of an actual performance). A section of the Common Application includes the header “Portfolio,” which is where an applicant might transmit photographs they’ve taken; short stories or poetry they’ve written; art they’ve created; video or audio recordings of a musical performance; video clips; or digital media they’ve designed. No one should feel compelled to create a portfolio, as it is neither necessary nor appropriate for most applicants. Indeed, it is a portion of the application that is probably most relevant for students interested in specific majors and programs, whose faculty may be enlisted as part of the review process. But even in those cases, there is no guarantee that portfolio work will be considered in the final decision.

While on the subject of portfolio work: in recent years, as mentioned earlier, more than 150 colleges and universities—ranging from some flagship state institutions to small liberal arts colleges to the University of Pennsylvania—have begun accepting an application called the Coalition application. It is designed to enable applicants to build extensive digital portfolios, housed in cloud-based lockers, starting as early as the ninth grade.

The Common Application also includes a section titled “Additional Information.” Applicants might use this section to elaborate on experiences or mitigating circumstances not necessarily referenced in other parts of the application, including in the college counselor’s letter or by the student in their essays. For example, an applicant might use this section to explain how a concussion had resulted in an extended absence, or that their family had moved several times. Whatever the case might be, if there is a need to provide additional information or commentary, this is the space to do so.

Disciplinary Information

On their college application, your child and their high school may be asked for information about any past disciplinary action they received within the school or larger community. This is information that is part of their formal record, including “academic misconduct or behavioral misconduct that resulted in a disciplinary action,” as the Common Application puts it. The first step for you as a parent in response to these questions is to verify what information is on your child’s official record. If the school is obligated, based on their policies, to report such an incident to a prospective college, then your child should also report it in the disciplinary information section of their application. Taking proactive ownership in this way, your child will also be able to provide background information and explain how they may have grown from that experience as well as what they might have learned from it. Depending on the college or university, they may also be asked if they have ever been found guilty or convicted of a misdemeanor or felony. There is a growing movement called Ban the Box, in which municipalities and states have sought to bar colleges and universities from asking these questions; more information can be found on the Ban the Box campaign website. Recently, the Common Application decided to no longer ask applicants about disciplinary history as part of its standard questions, although individual institutions may opt to do so.

D. Conversations About the Essays: Your Child Frames Their Story

We turn now to the essay section of the college application, which represents a critical opportunity for your child to combine the pieces of their mosaic into a coherent picture. It may well be the final portion of the application that they complete before its submission. Colleges and universities include essay questions on their applications for two main reasons. The first is to assess your child’s basic writing ability, namely: Are they able to express themselves clearly and effectively, and how well do they organize their thinking? The other reason that colleges pose essay questions—including those that are supplemental to the Common Application, and specific to their schools—is that they are genuinely interested in the answer.

To provide you with a sense of the framing and tone of such questions, here are six essay prompts from the Common Application for the Class of 2025.

1. Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.

2. The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?

3. Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?

4. Describe a problem you’ve solved or a problem you’d like to solve. It can be an intellectual challenge, a research query, an ethical dilemma—anything that is of personal importance, no matter the scale. Explain its significance to you and what steps you took or could be taken to identify a solution.

5. Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.

6. Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?

The seventh and final prompt was more open-ended:

7. Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you’ve already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.

Regardless of which option your child chooses, the thread that runs through all these prompts is a desire by the admissions committee to encourage them to reflect on their lives and experiences and how those moments have shaped who they have become and who they aspire to be. This is perhaps the one section of the application where your child can speak most directly to the reader. It is also an opportunity for them to do so without a filter or intermediary—which is our not-so-subtle reminder to you to honor the guardrails and boundaries upon which you and your child agreed early on.

ACTIVITY #8: Your Child Looks into Their Rearview Mirror

In this exercise we want to help you as parents support your child as they reflect on their lives and past experiences—with the goal of their identifying the signal moments and details that will serve as the raw material for their college essays. These stories need not be epic. To the contrary, sometimes a moment that is on its surface inconsequential can be quite telling and revealing, especially for a reader who has little to no personal knowledge of the writer. This is a research activity—but the research is personal. What we’re asking applicants to do, effectively, is to become investigative journalists by turning the metaphorical camera or recorder on themselves.

Let’s pause to give some thought to the audience who will be on the receiving end of these stories. While it is possible that your child has interacted with a representative from the college or university who will be reading their essays—they might have met on a high school visit, or at a college interview—your child should not feel limited by imagining that they are addressing only that one person. In all likelihood at least two admissions officers will initially read their application, and it is entirely possible that portions of the essay will be read aloud to a larger committee or projected on a screen during deliberations.

Most admissions officers will save—and often savor—the essays as among the last pieces of an application that they review, as they will by then have some context for that reading. Others will just dive in cold. Your child should consider that either scenario is possible and err on the side of assuming their readers have no other knowledge about them.

Now, on to the activity.

Spread this exercise out over the course of several days. If your child is in tenth or eleventh grade, it is obviously not time sensitive, and whatever reflections it generates can be filed away to be retrieved when the application process is at hand. Doing this exercise early could also provide some insights into changes in mindset over time. But we’ve structured this activity for those students who are working toward the deadline of filing their college applications within a matter of months or weeks.

At the heart of this is a series of prompts designed to inspire reflections, almost as if your child were looking in a mirror. These reflections will offer glimpses and insights that can bring your child’s story into focus not only for themselves, but also for those who will be reading about them.

Among the prompts that you might offer are:

• What is important to you, whether in school or out, and why?

• What are the experiences over the years that have shaped you, and how?

• Who are the people who have influenced you, and in what ways?

• Upon reflection, how have you changed as a person over time?

Each of these prompts requires a look backward, as well as inward. Your child may also find it helpful to project forward a bit:

• Armed with these reflections and insights, how might you shape or influence the college community you wish to join? And how might that community further shape or influence you?

One advantage to your child contemplating these questions now is that this exercise will prepare them for insights that the colleges will be seeking to glean. As you put these prompts to your child, feel free to recast or reframe them in ways that will be most likely to encourage their thought processes. It is also possible that some version of this exercise may take place at their high school, as guided by a counselor or an English teacher. For those applicants who don’t have the benefit of that sort of professional guidance, you as their parent are eminently qualified to help your child lay the foundation for their college essays.

By encouraging your child to engage in this exercise over several days, you will help them be open to spontaneous moments when inspiration presents itself. All writers can tell you that ideas will bubble to the surface during everyday moments when you least expect them: on a run, in the shower, when waking up in the middle of night, or while lost in a favorite song. Suggest that your child keep a notebook close by for this purpose, or create a file on their phone, tablet, or laptop dedicated to it.

Once you’ve presented the prompts to them, come back together after several days with an invitation for them to share their thinking thus far. You might also tell them some stories that you remember about them that could jog their memories. Or you could even tell them some stories about yourself at a similar age, which could model for them what introspection is like. Remember, though: this is ultimately, of course, their story.

If the process works for them, they might engage in similar conversations using similar prompts with a peer or another adult in their life, such as a teacher or spiritual leader who knows them well. In the case of a peer, your child could reframe the conversation as a journalistic interview about themselves: What does that friend consider your child’s defining attributes, and what are some examples that illustrate that point of view?

As your child embarks on this introspective journey, they should be on the lookout for anecdotes and resonant details that will make them vivid to readers. During his career as a journalist, Jacques was periodically tasked with writing obituaries—which, when done well, are less about mourning a person than celebrating their life, often the life of someone who readers have never met. If your child is game, suggest they read a few obituaries in your local newspaper. We don’t mean celebrities but rather people who in the most unassuming way may have had an impact on the lives of others. What were the details and stories that the writer of the obituary marshaled to convey to the reader what was special or enduring about that person? This approach might be instructive.

Your child should consider this activity of self-discovery to be complete when they have collected roughly four to six examples drawn from their recollections, insights, or life experiences that might serve as the building blocks for their college essays.

After they’ve completed the exercise, we want to share some advice—from our perspectives as a professional writer and professional reader, respectively—that will enable you to help your child synthesize the material they’ve gathered so that it serves as the grist for a compelling narrative.

Jacques suggests the following:

1. A college essay is not a comprehensive memoir intended to capture every moment of your child’s life in chronological order. Instead, it provides an opportunity for your child to curate their life story—and to use a few vivid examples to support a handful of important themes or assertions. Each story told—each memory recalled—should serve a larger purpose and be drawn upon to make a particular point, as opposed to merely filling the page. Ultimately, those anecdotes and reflections should reveal to the reader something vital about your child.

2. The opening sentence or sentences are crucial, as they serve as an invitation drawing the reader into the essay. In the course of a given day, an admissions officer might evaluate upward of fifty or more essays. Like the opening notes of a Broadway musical, your child’s lead sentence will set the tone. But rather than being entertaining, your child should seek to be compelling—whether it’s by opening with a thoughtful question or a relatable anecdote or an evocative image. The idea is to provide something of a hook.

3. Like a journalist, your child needs to be conscious of word limits as they outline and rough out their essays. For the main Common Application personal statement—in response to the seven essay options—your child will be limited to 650 words. That is roughly equivalent to fewer than two full pages of the book you’re holding. For a writer, that is not a lot of space, which means your child needs to use it well—being careful to be focused, precise, and economical to convey the points they most want to make. There is simply no room in an essay of this length for tangents.

4. Your child should also be careful not to be too brief or spare. The Common Application essay also has a minimum length of 250 words. While we are not encouraging your child to pad their essay, they should nonetheless use the space allotted to fully develop their ideas.

5. Your child should bear in mind that this is a personal narrative, not a term or research paper. It will in all likelihood require multiple uses of the pronoun “I,” which may feel awkward, especially to those who may be a bit shy. Then again, there is a difference between being self-reflective and self-aware and being self-centered. Your child’s college essay should not be a brag sheet, but it should serve as a vehicle for them to convey pride in their accomplishments and growth. None of these lines is absolute, and they will know best how and where to establish the necessary boundaries.

6. Ultimately, the essay your child writes needs to be a united whole, with a narrative or thematic line extending from the beginning through the body to the end. While repetition should be avoided, your child might consider ending on a note that evokes or recalls the main thematic point or impression they sought to make at the outset.

We’ll now shift from the vantage point of a writer to that of a reader. As an admissions officer for more than a quarter century, Eric has his own advice about what makes a good and effective college essay. Overall he wants parents to think about—and remind their children—that admissions officers are human beings who are spending upward of six months of each year evaluating, discussing, and deliberating. While they take great care in seeking to understand each individual, they have to deal with the reality of a heavy volume of applications and of their own limited amount of time to assess each submission. That said, Eric emphasizes that admissions officers place enormous value on these essays. Among his tips for your child:

1. Direct the focus and attention of the admissions officer reading the application to what is most important to you. Superfluous words or ideas are a distraction.

2. Let us hear your voice. An authentic seventeen- or eighteen-year-old voice (as opposed to that of a forty-five- or fifty-year-old trying to overly influence that voice) can be refreshing. It need not be polished or perfect. That the writer is a work in progress is what makes it most compelling.

3. Remember that the main purpose of the essay is to get to know you, because in all likelihood we don’t. Give your reader an understanding, directly from you, about what motivates you, how you think, what you care about, and, as emphasized earlier, what matters most to you and why. By reflecting on these questions, you may well gain a better understanding of yourself in the process of sharing it with others, in the spirit of the Discovery section of this book.

4. Avoid the temptation to be too formulaic or linear. Or, to put it another way, avoid drafting an essay that, in effect, reads as if A + B + C + D equals the logical conclusion that you are the perfect candidate for the college in question. Eric has read more than his share of these, and they are often as predictable as they are contrived.

5. Be willing to embrace complexity and nuance and accept that the various parts of your life or the range of your priorities or the experiences that you have had may not necessarily lend themselves to an easy summary. Some of the most compelling essays that Eric has read were crafted by students genuinely wrestling with seeming dichotomies: the precision of an engineer and the spontaneity of an artist; the poet and the scientist; the fiscal conservative who prizes social justice. The point here is that human beings are multidimensional, and your college essay should try to capture that.

6. Sometimes one story or experience can stand alone in supporting your college essay, if explored with depth and sufficient reflection. For example, Eric recalls an essay by a young woman who described driving a beat-up Volkswagen to visit her grandmother as a metaphor for her own youth and childhood, told through such details as the stickers affixed to the bumper, the music on the radio, and the feel of the air with the windows down. That Eric first read this essay more than two decades ago should say something about the endurance and staying power of the imagery—and the effectiveness of the author’s using it to convey who she was.

7. Take with a grain of salt those so-called hard and fast rules proclaiming that a particular college admissions essay topic works, or does not. For example, more than a few advice books will tell you to avoid an essay about a grandparent or the road less traveled. The example just cited by Eric included both of these themes—while still being insightful and therefore compelling. The lesson here is that the theme may be less important than what you actually have to say about it, from your unique experience or perspective.

Much of Eric’s advice is especially relevant to those seven essay prompts offered as options in the Common Application. But as mentioned earlier, many colleges will also include supplemental essay questions. At their essence these questions are often intended to gauge students’ knowledge about the schools to which they are applying, and why they believe those colleges would be a suitable fit. But admissions offices may also use their supplemental essay questions to convey important information to applicants about what they as institutions value in their student bodies, classrooms, and broader communities.

As an example, the undergraduate application to the University of Pennsylvania for those enrolling in fall 2020 included the following two supplemental essay questions. By considering the thinking behind them, parents and students may be able to analyze other institutions’ supplemental essay questions with a more critical eye.

• How did you discover your intellectual and academic interests, and how will you explore them at the University of Pennsylvania? Please respond considering the specific undergraduate school you have selected. (300–450 words)

• At Penn, learning and growth happen outside of the classroom, too. How will you explore the community at Penn? Consider how this community will help shape your perspective and identity, and how your identity and perspective will help shape this community. (150–200 words)

In the case of the first question, Eric and his admissions colleagues (along with faculty and administrators who were asked to weigh in) sought applicants’ firsthand testimony about themselves as thinkers (“intellectual”) and students (“academic”). The second part of the question is intended to yield responses that will be of value not only to the admissions office, but also to the faculty and advisers who work directly with students in the university’s undergraduate schools and specialized programs. Quite simply, the latter audience wants to know the interests and motivations of the students whom they might be teaching and supporting over the next four years.

The main objective of the second question is to ascertain how a student, if admitted and enrolled, would have an impact on the university community, as well as how that community might have an impact on the student. In posing the question in this way, the university is conveying to the applicant that it believes each and every voice matters, and that the opportunity exists for all students to learn from one another.

This is the moment when the exercises we put your child through regarding the I’s and C’s converge. For example, your child’s sense of how their identity and interests would find a home in a specific campus community and its culture can fuel their responses to supplemental questions like these, regardless of precisely how the university frames them.

---

•   •   •

At this point in the process, your child should, at the very least, have in hand some roughly drafted responses to the Common Application prompts, or similar questions in other applications, as well as to the supplemental essay questions from the institutions to which they will be applying. This might be an appropriate time for them to get some feedback, whether from their counselor, a teacher, a peer, or perhaps you, if that is something that feels comfortable to you both under the ground rules you established early on.

“You have to show somebody,” Carol Sutton Lewis told her own child. Speaking to us, she stressed the need for involving “a friend, somebody who likes to write, somebody who can ensure there are no errors. There has to be some other person’s eyes on this other than your child’s.”

Matthew Boyd, a student from High Tech High whom we introduced earlier, emphasized the value of enlisting teachers as proofreaders. “Always ask teachers for help, ask people you believe are writing geniuses for help,” he said. “I asked all the English teachers.”

As your child solicits feedback on their essay drafts, they might ask you questions like these, feeling free to reframe them in their own voice:

• Does this essay convey the essential elements of who I am as a student and a person, as well as an individual and a community member?

• Are the examples offered in support of these elements vivid and compelling?

• Even in its roughest form, is the writing clear and well organized, and does it flow?

• Are there ideas I might add or explore with more depth? Are there passages I might cut?

They should also be mindful of the deadlines at the schools to which they are applying and, particularly in the case of the supplemental essays, allow sufficient time and space to research, write, revise, and complete them. They might wish to include in their application tracker some self-imposed deadlines for when they want to complete the various supplements—which, if they are not careful, can stack up like flights trying to land in the fog at a busy airport.

As a final gut check before your child puts the final touches to their essays, you might suggest that they consider reading them aloud, including privately to themselves. Good writers often find that by doing so, they can catch a grammatical error, an omitted word, or an awkward phrase.

E. Application Plans

Now that we have provided a primer on the various components of an application, we want to walk you as parents though the various college application plans—including early and regular applications, and the various rules that govern them. In this section, we will provide you with some definitions. We will then discuss the strategies that your child and you might use to determine which application plan is best, given their interests, objectives, and other factors.

Rolling Admission

Institutions that use rolling admission plans will consider students’ applications on a first-come, first-serve basis, typically beginning around September 1 and continuing until the first-year class is full, which could be as late as the following spring. The colleges and universities that use such plans are often state universities, including Arizona State, Michigan State, Penn State, and the University of Alabama. Schools with rolling admission plans will often make an admission decision on a given applicant in two months or less. Some, such as Penn State, may divide their rolling admission calendar into tiers, with a priority submission deadline in late November, for example, that assures a decision by the end of January.

One advantage to institutions that use such plans is that it helps manage the flow of submissions and the processing of application materials. An advantage for applicants is the opportunity to know, early in the calendar, that they have already secured an appealing option for where they might go to college, with no obligation by the student to attend. And that knowledge can help shape the remainder of your child’s list, and perhaps even prompt them to eliminate other potential schools.

Early Action (Including Single Choice and Restrictive)

In general, colleges that offer students the option of submitting an early action application are providing them an opportunity to get a nonbinding decision around mid-December. Nonbinding means that the student is under no obligation to attend if admitted. While this may sound like a priority rolling admission process, one critical difference is that colleges with early action plans typically review all those applicants as a pool, in the context of all those students who met the early action deadline, usually on or around November 1. Unless otherwise indicated a student can apply to as many early action plans as they like. The notable exception are those colleges or universities that label their early action plans restrictive or single choice. Students who apply under such programs attest to that institution that the only other early applications that they may submit will be to a public college or university with a nonbinding application plan and, in some cases, to international institutions with such plans.

Early Decision

Early decision programs typically have a November 1 deadline with a decision communicated by the university by mid-December. The critical difference in this plan is that a student must commit in advance to attend that institution if accepted, and to withdraw all other applications. Colleges take that advance commitment seriously. Before your child can submit their application, they—as well as you and their school counselor—will all be asked to sign an early decision agreement. On the Common Application Early Decision Agreement form, for example, the following two statements appear in bold: “Early Decision (ED) is the application process in which students make a commitment to a first-choice institution where, if admitted, they definitely will enroll.” All three signatories on the form also acknowledge: “If you are accepted under an Early Decision plan, you must promptly withdraw the applications submitted to other colleges and universities and make no additional applications to any other university in any country.”

Early Decision II

Institutions that offer students the opportunity to apply under an early decision II (or EDII) plan generally follow the binding rules for early decision set forth above, but with a slightly modified calendar. Deadlines for applying are typically in early to mid-January, with a decision rendered in late February. Colleges that employ such plans do so, in part, to give your child more time to consider their college list—at a point in time when they might have already received other decisions under other plans.

Regular Decision

The majority of applicants to the nation’s colleges and universities will apply under regular decision plans. Application deadlines at these schools may range from January 1 to as far out as February 15. Students who submit a regular application and are accepted are under no obligation to attend and will be able to weigh their options when they’ve heard from all their schools. Most institutions will try to communicate a regular admission decision to an applicant by late March or early April in order to give the student time to make a final decision by May 1, which has long been known as the National Candidates Reply Date. In the fall of 2019 the National Association for College Admission Counseling, a membership group of more than fifteen thousand college admissions professionals, made a decision in response to an antitrust investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice that has relevance here. It struck from its code of ethics several mandatory provisions that restricted the ability of colleges and universities to recruit prospective students, including after May 1, a prohibition that the association believed to be in the interest of students but that the Justice Department considered anti-competitive. By spring 2020, the association’s leadership was preparing to recommend to its membership that it approve a revised code that would strike all other mandatory provisions—including a reference to May 1 as a universal deadline for student decisions, which would instead leave it to individual institutions to set that date. Your child should therefore be aware of the deadlines for submitting a deposit, for the purpose of holding a place, at every institution to which they are admitted, as those dates may now vary. By missing such a date, your child may jeopardize their spot in the incoming class.

Transfer

Our focus in this part of the book has been on application plans for students applying directly from high school. In part V, where we discuss the transition throughout the first year of college, we’ll spend some time discussing the Transfer Conversation, for those students who may be contemplating a change. Suffice it to say here that while many of the components of the transfer application process are similar—transcripts, recommendations, and essays are all required—the rules and deadlines are far less standardized.

F. Assessing Whether an Early Application Plan May Be Best for Your Child

Now that we have provided you as parents with a basic glossary of admissions plans, we want to turn to the question of whether your child might consider submitting an early application—which we’ll define as any plan that has a deadline prior to January 1. We’ll also equip you with some questions to ask your child to help inform which of those plans might be most suitable.

As we move into the strategic portion of the application process, you and your child will want to have close at hand any of the exercises you have completed up to this point, as those reflections will help you both come to some decisions. For example, if your child is contemplating making a binding commitment to an institution up front, there should be strong alignment between their initial index card (characteristics of the college environment they are seeking), along with their I’s (including their reflections on their identity) and C’s (that institution’s culture and community).

For those readers whose children have the benefit of access to college counseling—whether through their high school or a community-based organization, or possibly a certified independent counselor—this juncture in the process is so critical that you should be sure to draw upon all the guidance available.

Just as your child needs to engage in some self-reflection prior to submitting an early application, they must also ensure that they keep a close eye on the logistics. This is a good point for them to consult their application requirement and deadline tracker. They can’t apply early, for example, if they haven’t taken the necessary standardized tests for those schools that require them. (One caveat: some schools with early application plans that have November 1 deadlines may consider the results of tests taken later that month; your child should consult the guidelines provided by that school and also decide, from an emotional perspective, whether they are able to manage the additional pressure.)

Assuming that your child has met the requirements to submit an early application, let’s turn to the question of how you might help guide them through the process of determining whether applying early makes sense.

ACTIVITY #9: A Preflight Checklist for Those Considering Flying Early

Imagine for the purpose of this exercise that your child is an airline pilot, deciding whether they are ready to depart from the gate a bit early and, if so, which route to take. You are the copilot, walking them through a series of final safety checks and supporting them as they determine the best flight path.

If your child is considering applying under an early plan—whether binding or nonbinding—some of the relevant questions you might ask them are:

• As you reflect on some of the concerns about the process that you may have flagged during earlier activities in this book—such as an institution’s distance from home or its size—are the institution’s basic qualities consistent with some of your earlier assumptions and preferences? And if so, are those assumptions and preferences still relevant?

• Where does the institution under consideration fit within the categories on your college list—likely, sweet spot, and aspirational—and to what extent are you comfortable with the relative risk of the outcome? If the school is in the likely category and particularly if the decision is binding, are they going to be satisfied? Similarly, if the school is in the aspirational category, are you prepared for potential disappointment?

• Do the results of your grades and standardized test scores thus far suggest you would be a competitive applicant early—or would you benefit from the time to show more grades through the senior year, as well as any additional retesting?

• Did you give your teachers sufficient lead time to meet the deadlines of submitting recommendations under an early application plan? And are you satisfied that your essays are ready to be submitted?

• Is financial aid a factor? Particularly if you are admitted under a binding early decision plan, are we as a family comfortable with not being able to compare financial aid packages from other institutions?

• And finally, if you are admitted under a binding applicant plan, are you prepared emotionally to pass up the potential opportunity for admission to all the other colleges and universities on your list and embrace this one choice?

Now, like a good copilot, you’ll need to support your child’s analysis of their responses to these questions and help them come to a conclusion. This is particularly the case for those considering whether binding early decision constitutes their best flight plan—or whether they might better point themselves toward another course.

If you and your child haven’t already had this conversation, this may be one of the final opportunities to do so.

One consideration to which we want to return is financial aid. Many colleges with binding early decision plans will work with your family to try to make that education affordable. But your interpretation of what you can afford may differ from the college’s calculation of your expected family contribution—as well as the components of that package, including loans that will need to be repaid. And as noted in the question on the previous page, by accepting an early decision you’ll be losing the ability to compare other offers.

Under extenuating circumstances, a college may allow an applicant accepted under an early decision plan to be released from that commitment for financial reasons. The early decision agreement on the Common Application includes this passage: “Should a student who applies for financial aid not be offered an award that makes attendance possible, the student may decline the offer of admission and be released from the Early Decision commitment.”

But we caution that you, like the colleges, should enter into such an agreement in good faith—informed, perhaps, by the data generated by the institution’s net price calculator, the web tool that each institution provides so that you can estimate your family’s potential financial commitment.

In addition to finances, some readers may have two other overarching questions about early decision: Is it to my child’s strategic advantage to apply to a particular institution early decision? And what are the risks?

If your child believes that this institution aligns well with what they are seeking to get out of a college experience, then there is an important fact we wish to impart: admission rates under early decision plans are generally higher than in the regular round.

Among the reasons why:

As dean of admissions at a university with an early decision plan, Eric considers candidates in this pool to be somewhat self-selecting. Their academic credentials tend to be highly competitive nationally and internationally, and through their application—as well as by their willingness to make a binding commitment—they are signaling their belief that the institution represents a strong match.

More broadly, the University of Pennsylvania and other colleges and universities with early decision plans use them to meet some of their stated institutional goals and priorities, which can also impact admission rates. Recruited student athletes tend to be in this pool, as are legacy candidates.

The early decision pool is typically much smaller than in the regular round. At the University of Pennsylvania, for example, roughly one in seven applicants for the Class of 2024 applied early. Early decision is certainly not without its passionate critics, including those who point out that candidates often come from families of greater privilege—as indicated by the level of education and wealth—which can translate into the ability to afford test prep and other coaching throughout the process. For many of these students and families, the question is often not whether to apply early decision, but where. In some private schools and wealthy suburban public school districts, families may regard an early decision application as a card that must be played lest their child face a disadvantage in the main round.

To readers who may be having similar thoughts, we have one overriding caution: your child just might get in—and that might not be the best outcome, if the question of whether it is the best option for your child was not factored in. In other words, don’t let strategy supersede a thoughtful and reflective discovery and search process.

Regardless of your family’s background—legacy or first generation, full financial aid or full pay—our hope is that the information and advice we’ve provided thus far will serve to inform an applicant’s decision of whether to avail themselves of an early decision plan.

If that answer is yes, then your child may be ready to push “submit.”

If the answer is no, or not sure, then let’s consider whether your child might be better off submitting an application under one of the other early application plans.

For those students who want to get an early indication of at least some of their college options without boxing themselves in, early action or rolling admission may provide viable choices.

The questions we posed above regarding early decision can also provide a rigorous framework for evaluating these other options. For example, having an offer in hand before January 1 (or a denial or deferral) can help shape the remainder of your child’s application list—and prompt adjustments. An early denial from a college or university that your child felt was firmly in their sweet spot—or maybe even a likely—will mean that some colleges need to be added to the list and perhaps others removed.

Our strong advice here is not to panic, but for your child (perhaps in partnership with you) to take a fresh look at their list, bearing in mind any decisions already received. This may result in a follow-up conversation about risk tolerance and perhaps the shifting of some schools within categories, such as from sweet spot to aspirational.

What about students whose early application has been deferred, or rolled over, for consideration in the main admissions round? In all likelihood that deferral will be accompanied by specific instructions from the admissions office about next steps. These might include a request for a letter from your child, to be submitted through their portal, providing updates on any academic achievements or other accomplishments since they filed their early application. We recommend that this letter be submitted no later than mid-January. Your child should also confirm with their high school that it is sending an updated midyear report that includes their latest grades.

Let’s return, for a moment, to the prospect of securing an acceptance under an early action or rolling plan, which can serve to give your child confidence and peace of mind. For those who are interested in receiving an early signal—without the pressure of an immediate commitment—single choice or restrictive early action, if offered at a school of interest, could be an appropriate path. This option may be especially appealing to students who want to have another financial aid offer for comparison—which, in addition to the early action school, could include offers from public universities. Applicants should be aware that the few colleges or universities with single choice or restrictive early action plans are among the most selective in the nation.

Is there a strategic advantage to applying early action, whether restricted or unrestricted, compared to in a school’s regular round? Although admission rates may be higher under an early action plan than regular decision—for some of the reasons cited earlier regarding the characteristics of the pool—families should be careful not to conclude from those figures that it is easier to get in early. The main advantage for families is having a decision earlier in the calendar.

We want to close this section with a word about early decision II, the second round of binding early decision, but with later deadlines. Each year, it seems, a growing number of colleges and universities are offering this option. But which students should seriously consider applying EDII?

One group includes those who received a denial in the first round of early decision or early action from another institution. Others may have been told that their application has been deferred to the next round of admission decision-making for further consideration in the larger applicant pool. With that knowledge, a student may look to another top choice on their list that fully aligns with their interests and objectives and, if it has an EDII option, choose to exercise it.

An applicant who may have been deferred, early, at their first-choice college, may come to the conclusion that their prospects of admission are better at another school on their list that offers EDII. But remember that this is a binding commitment, and your child should feel confident that they would be happy to attend if admitted.

G. The Fifth C Revisited: Managing Cost and Affordability

While your child is working on their applications, they will require your assistance to answer some basic questions around the financing of their higher education.

The first question relates to the application itself: Does the school require an application fee, and if so, will your child be requesting a waiver?

While some colleges or universities do not have a fee for submitting and processing an application, others may charge in the range of twenty-five to one hundred dollars. Those that do charge will include a place, such as in the personal profile of the Common Application, where a student can request a fee waiver. Among the factors that colleges consider in granting those waivers are whether your child has received a fee waiver on the SAT or ACT; whether they qualify for a free or reduced-price school lunch; or whether you or your child believe the fee would be burdensome. Your college counselor may also be asked to document that need.

If your child is going to be requesting financial aid from the college or university to which they are applying, you and they are likely going to have to fill out several forms. They will include the FAFSA, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid; the CSS Profile (from the College Scholarship Service), which is used by private colleges and universities for consideration of nongovernment aid; and sometimes the institution’s own financial aid form.

Each of these documents may be required for the granting of need-based aid, which will be determined by your family’s resources, including annual family income and assets. Some institutions may also use the forms as part of the process for determining merit aid, which will be directly related to your child’s academic or other achievements and talents.

Following is a brief word about each of those forms, along with some suggestions on instructional resources that you and your child might find helpful.

FAFSA

The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) can be submitted as early as October 1 of your child’s senior year of high school, and no later than June 30. As always, your child should check the institutional deadlines, as they may vary by school, and include them in their tracker. While there have been efforts over the years to simplify this form, the experience can feel a bit like filing annual federal taxes, so set aside time not only to complete the form but to gather the information you’ll need to have on hand. Specifically, have ready the federal tax forms that you submitted—including the 1040 and any schedules attached to it—in the spring of the year when your child was a junior in high school.

The FAFSA is used to determine eligibility for federal grants (such as Pell), work-study (on-campus jobs), and subsidized or unsubsidized loans under the government’s Stafford Loan program. Even families that feel certain they will not qualify for need-based aid should still seriously consider filling out the FAFSA. The unsubsidized Stafford Loan, for example, may make available capital for higher-education-related expenses throughout your child’s time in college and is not based on need.

The dense ten-page online form includes sections to be completed by your child as well as by you as their parent. Among the questions asked are whether the applicant’s parents are married, divorced, or separated; family wages, income, and investments; whether a parent is deceased; and whether the family receives benefits under Medicaid.

The form is intrusive, and as such may present the first time you are discussing these matters in depth with your child. You are in the best position to decide whether you wish to fill out this document together. Regardless, it can provide an opportunity for you and your child to discuss the financial commitment that their education may require and the shared responsibility for that investment. Once they’ve enrolled, they may even recall these conversations as they weigh whether to get out of bed for that early morning class—not with a sense of guilt about your financial sacrifice (and theirs, too), but with a sense of ownership.

For those readers seeking advice on filling out the FAFSA, we asked Charlie Javice of Frank for a few tips. She suggests the following:

• As you fill out the form initially, answer each question to the best of your ability, including with estimates where necessary, as you can always go back and edit before filing.

• When asked on the FAFSA for the size of your household, make sure you count everyone, including yourself as a parent, as “it has a huge impact on the amount of aid.”

• In the section on assets: if you or others in your household have debts or any liabilities, subtract them.

• If you are a homeowner, the primary home in which you reside is not an asset you report on FAFSA.

• For those parents who may not have filed taxes—and there are any number of reasons why that may be the case—you could still file your FAFSA, though it may be subject to enhanced verification, including a review of W-2 and 1099 forms generated by an employer or client.

The time it will take you to fill out the FAFSA can vary widely, depending in part on whether you have all the required information at your fingertips and whether it is organized in a way that lets you reference the documents easily. Filing could take as little as a half hour, though realistically you might set aside several hours for the entire task.

Frank also offers a service, for free, in which it will help you populate your FAFSA form using photos of your tax returns sent from your mobile phone. While the site assures users that it employs “bank-level security to protect your information,” readers will have to decide for themselves their level of comfort with sharing their most personal data.

CSS Profile

The College Scholarship Service (CSS) Profile is a product of the College Board, the purveyor of the SAT, and does carry a fee: twenty-five dollars to complete and submit to one school, and sixteen dollars for each additional school, though fee waivers are available. It is used by nearly four hundred “colleges, universities, professional schools, and scholarship programs,” according to its website, as an additional source of information on awarding financial aid. For international applicants who are not U.S. citizens, the CSS Profile is the primary financial aid application at those institutions that accept it.

Like the FAFSA, the CSS Profile can be filled out as early as October 1 of your child’s senior year, though with an earlier closing date—typically the following January through March, depending on the institution. Unlike the FAFSA, the CSS Profile is for aid that is specific to particular institutions, such as grants and scholarships.

Charlie’s caution here is that the CSS “really gets into the weeds” and is typically “longer and harder to fill out” than the FAFSA. It asks for many pieces of supplemental information like value of primary homes (and secondary homes, too), as well as brokerage accounts and business assets. The form, and the instructions on it, can be found in the CSS Profile section of the College Board website.

Financial Aid Forms Specific to a College or University

While the FAFSA and CSS Profile are the major foundation on which your child’s aid package will be constructed, some colleges and universities—including those that are public—may require the completion of additional forms. Some institutions ask for these forms to cross-check information provided on the others, as well as to gain additional context on your family’s financial picture. Again, you and your child will want to pace yourselves, paying close attention to deadlines, which are likely to be firm.

Outside Scholarships

When colleges or universities use the term “outside scholarships,” they are referencing financial aid provided from entities beyond the institution. For example, if your child took the PSAT, they will likely qualify for consideration under the National Merit Scholarship Program, which defines itself as an academic competition based, at least in the initial rounds, on your child’s scores. In September of their senior year of high school, they will be informed whether they have been designated as a semifinalist, based on a cutoff score that varies by state. The following February, a subset of semifinalists will be designated as finalists.

The path from finalist to National Merit Scholar includes securing a recommendation from the high school principal or designee; a “record of high academic performance in high school”; and submission of a scholarship application. About seventy-six hundred students will ultimately receive scholarships ranging from $500 to $2,500 annually, including from several hundred colleges and businesses.

Your child may also wish to explore whether outside scholarships are available from your employer or a union; from national talent search competitions, such as those administered by organizations like the Gates and Jack Kent Cooke foundations; from the local Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) post or other associations; or from community-based organizations. There may also be programs sponsored by your state, such as the Hope Scholarship in Georgia, or a so-called College Promise program in your state or community that might help defray the cost of the first two years of college, particularly community college.

Military veterans and their dependents may qualify for scholarships under the Post-9/11 GI Bill, which could cover tuition and provide annual stipends for books and supplies.

Essays for Scholarship Applications

Some of the outside scholarship applications listed above may include an essay section. The good news for your child is that the basic prompts very likely mirror those used on the Common Application. While some may be tailored, like those in the college supplements, to the particular mission of a foundation or other sponsoring organization, all are likely to touch on basic ground your child has covered before: Why college? What in your background, or your experiences, has shaped the arc of your life? Who has been an influence?

Where possible, you can encourage your child to revisit earlier essays and drafts from the college process and consider repurposing them for the task at hand. There is nothing wrong with their doing so, as long as they read the specific question carefully and ensure they are speaking to it.

As with your child’s college applications, they—and where appropriate, you—will want to ensure that all required financial aid documents have not only been submitted, but received. We spoke earlier about application portals that may be used by each college, with specific login credentials. It is likely that through these same portals your child and you can keep track of the documents received and follow up on those that may be missing.

H. Some Thoughts on Pacing, Time Management, and the Parallel Universe Where Life in High School Goes On

The journey on which we have led you and your child in this chapter has been especially intense and probably exhausting. As your child enters the stage where application deadlines are beginning to loom, both of you should take a moment to pause and breathe, and to acknowledge that you have accomplished a lot.

There is, of course, much work still to be done, but happily, there are also natural breaks throughout your child’s fall school calendar, and you want to make sure that they take advantage of these opportunities—whether to catch up or get ahead on their college applications or, perhaps, to catch up on some much-needed rest or schoolwork on which they might have fallen behind. You might also take a moment to check in with younger siblings—and, if relevant, your spouse or another partner—to take the measure of how everyone is feeling.

For the last few weeks and months leading up to the final application deadlines, pacing and spacing will be critical. If your child will allow you to play such a role, you might offer yourself up as something of an executive coach—not to plan this frenetic period of their lives, but to help them create some interim deadlines and milestones throughout the concluding stretch.

If they have four, five, six, or more applications due on or around January 1, they should not regard that date as the equivalent of a final exam for which they can cram. Rather, they should create, perhaps with your help, realistic mini-deadlines on which they commit to have certain applications, or at least large portions of them, completed. Encourage them to put those dates on the calendar and in the college application requirement and deadline tracker from Activity #6.

Be on the lookout for the telltale signs of procrastination and avoidance. Often, these behaviors may be rooted not in laziness but in any number of fears—feelings that you or another trusted adult or friend might seek to draw out. Your willingness to listen, without interruption or judgment, is key—as is your willingness to offer encouragement, and perhaps some suggestions, borne from your own experience, on managing a seemingly never-ending to-do list of complex tasks and projects.

As you both populate and revise their fall calendar, your child could assemble a final checklist that is similar to the one we suggested earlier in this section for submitting early applications.

Their final checklist for the submission of applications under the regular decision process might include the following tasks:

• Print out each application for one final, proofreading review. A spelling or grammatical error, or an omitted word, which their eye might glance over on a screen, may reveal itself on the printed page.

• Jacques, drawing on his experience as a writer, suggests that for the essay in particular your child give those sections a series of final reads, each of them serving a different objective. They should use one read to ensure they have varied their choices of words and have not been repetitive. Another read—and this one can be aloud—would be to check that no sentence is too long, and that the reader has a chance quite literally to take a breath. With a final read, they can focus on whether their main ideas are conveyed clearly. This is not a time to second-guess the topic or approach. Instead, what we are recommending here is a polish.

• Make sure standardized test scores have been self-reported in the application or sent directly from the testing agencies, depending on the school’s policies.

• Determine whether a fee waiver is being sought. If not, make sure that your child has access to a credit card or other accepted form of payment.

• Confirm that recommendations, transcripts, and other supporting materials from your school have been requested by your child, bearing in mind that your child may need to check in occasionally to make sure these materials have been submitted.

• If applicable, be sure that art, music, or other portfolios or supplemental materials are ready for upload.

• Prioritize those applications that have to be submitted early, including those your child may be considering submitting for early decision II.

• Don’t wait until the last minute to submit. We suggest at least a forty-eight-hour buffer prior to any deadline. This is especially important from a technological point of view: systems can crash, electricity can go out, and your home internet can go dark.

As your child runs through this checklist for each of the colleges to which they intend to apply, encourage them to take breaks at strategic and regular moments. They should draw some confidence from the fact that at this stage they remain very much in control of the college process.

You surely know from your own life and work that fatigue can lead to errors and frustration, as well as inefficiency. A cup of coffee with friends, a movie, a nap, or time to just do nothing can be rejuvenating. This free time is a necessity, not a luxury—and certainly not time that your child should feel guilty about allowing themselves. This all falls into the category of self-care.

Potential opportunities to take a break are complicated by the fact that life in school goes on—with papers due, exams scheduled, and homework pressing. Those deadlines, too, might be logged on the master calendar so that your child, and you, can have a full view of these multiple and competing demands.

I. Ready to Submit

And now the time is at hand. Your child is ready to press “submit.” And so they do.

They may experience a range of emotions, whether immediately or a day or so later. You, as a parent, should keep an eye and ear out for signals of how they are feeling. They might be elated and relieved that the task at hand is complete. Or they may feel a sudden letdown, having pushed for months, if not years, to get to this point. They may start second-guessing themselves—whether over their choice of schools or over an idea expressed in an essay.

Your job is to be supportive and reassuring and to help them begin to let go and to move on with their lives. This may also be a teaching opportunity, where you can help your child take their eyes off the rearview mirror, as well as their gaze off the road far ahead, and perhaps pull off to the side of that road. The aim is for them to be present in the current moment—maybe for the first time in a long while. Give them some advice, if they are willing to hear it, about how to prepare themselves for what is likely to be a long wait.

A college decision is not a package delivered the next day by Amazon Prime. Waiting is hard, particularly for this digital generation, and you may need to assist them with strategies for shifting gears.

Over these next few days and weeks, encourage your child to slip back into a more regular routine, one that is less frenetic than in the previous weeks and months. While they still have to maintain their grades, their schedules should open up—providing them time for a return to something resembling normalcy. For the first time in a long time, they can take control of their own calendars, with the intention of reconnecting with those things that give them joy.

You’re also surely experiencing your own strong feelings, so give yourself the opportunity to step back, take stock, and recharge. Amid the final frenzy of the application process, you may have unintentionally neglected yourself or others in your life. Now can be the time to reorient and focus on other priorities.

Months from now, a new series of decisions about the college process will be arrayed in front of you and your child. But the last of your child’s college applications going out the door is most certainly a milestone. And it is a milestone that we hope you, as a parent, will acknowledge and celebrate.