CollegeConsult

It used to be that students could do good or excellent work in high school, spend a little time in the fall of their senior year applying to various colleges that fit their academic and personal profile, and reliably be accepted at several of their chosen ones.

Not any longer.  Sadly, today, being good isn’t good enough.

While this logjam exists mainly at the top-tier schools – the Ivies, the Stanfords, the Carnegie-Mellons, and the Amhersts, as well as Michigan, Virginia, UNC, UCLA, and UC Berkeley for non-residents of their states – there’s a huge advantage all rising high school seniors can avail themselves of by starting the process early.

Regardless of a student’s academic standing, the most important consideration is determining where he or she feels most at home; in order to enjoy the four years of college, and to do the best possible work, it’s vital to be in an environment that feels “right.”  Only by visiting campuses can prospective students get a “feel” for a school; applying to colleges solely on the basis of name and/or curriculum alone is short-sighted.

Contrary to what some people believe, in the earliest stages of a college search process, prospective applicants should be looking to widen, not narrow, their list of possibilities.  There are some campuses, of course, that won’t suit each student’s individual taste.  Yet it’s as important for a student to be able to define what he doesn’t want as it is what he does.  This allows us to eliminate recommendations of other colleges with similar characteristics, and thus the student’s search can more and more focus on the schools that have the qualities he/she finds appealing.

The ideal situation comes about if the student falls in love with a particular school during this “scouting out” period.  The reason is if that college offers an “early decision” option, the student increases his chances of acceptance by following that route, especially at the more competitive schools.  This is truer now than ever in the past, as colleges look to maximize their “yield,” which is the percentage of students who accept their offers of admission, and the binding nature of early decision helps to do that.  One top-tier school, Northwestern, reportedly admitted a whopping 36% of its early decision applicants this past year, compared to a single-digit regular admission percentage.

But early decision isn’t for everybody.  If financial aid is an essential factor in the choice of college, parents as well as students may not want to sacrifice the freedom of choice and ability to negotiate.  At the very least, knowledge and understanding of the particular college’s past record in the percentage of family “need” it meets should be ascertained before submitting an early decision application.

High school guidance departments rarely venture into the area of financial considerations when recommending colleges to students.  There are a variety of legitimate reasons for this, but parents and students can’t really proceed effectively with the college search process without being aware of the financial dynamics involved at various colleges, which often has to do with how strong their financial aid programs are, as demonstrated in the past. 

This is why we take all of this into account when working with clients.  And why students and parents alike have found it so much more rewarding a process when begun as early as possible.  How about now