Christine: Thanks for switching the day for me.
Tom: Yeah. You were out of the country, traveling?
Christine: I was.
Tom: Oh my goodness.
Christine: Yeah. We went to Bratislava, Budapest, and Vienna.
Tom: Just.
Christine: I know. It’s so random. I love saying that because I’ll never get to say that again in my life.
Tom: All right, let’s talk about number six.
Christine: Number six, I’ll never find my student’s college.
Tom: Christine, I think that most people worry about that. I think that’s probably one of the biggest driving pains, strains, and stressors that parents find. And I think for me, after all these years of being in higher ed, working with my own kids, working with other families, it boils down to one thing, and we’ve talked about it before: finding the right school for the right student.
If you have a student who has a 2.0 GPA and they are highly motivated to go to college, not only for the academic development, the personal development, the social development, to meet their spouse or partner for life, then going to college is important. But a 2.0 student is not going to survive in a 4.0 environment no matter how hard and how successful we might be in getting them there, because it’s just not the right environment.
Same be said for a 3.5 or a 4.0. So parents need to invest the time, either working with individuals like us, or their guidance counselor, or doing it on the DIY with resources, to focus in on that. And, it takes a great deal of discipline to separate all of the detractors that are out there, living next door, in the school parking lot, in the gym, at the ice rink, at the dance studio in the grocery store line, that we listen to as families and parents as we’re trying to go through this process.
There is a school for every student. I have two students right now in my practice. They’re seniors. They’re very good students. They waited a while. They waited a little longer. And their fear is they’re not going to get into college in September. They’re already applying, and they’ll be accepted before they even know it, because, yes, there are schools that are hungry for students, but those schools, even though they’re hungry, are very good schools for students to go to.
So we have to get away from chasing what we think is “the one” to chase and find a school that really meets the student’s needs.
Take your student’s GPA and tick it up two and tick it down two. When I say “tick it,” I mean add two decimal points to it. So 3.8 and they’re down a little bit to a 3.3. Those are the schools we look for in that student’s sweet spot, and we investigate them. We evaluate them.
For my seniors right now, I’m asking them to answer five criteria to select the school to say yes to the college, not the dress, but yes to the college.
Five criteria:
Is this school going to academically challenge you?
Is the school going to provide you with the personal safety and environment for you to be successful? So it meets all of your personal needs, whether they’re dietary or they’re mental.
Is the school going to be a social environment for you to thrive in? If you’re an introvert, if you’re in between, or you’re an extrovert, what's your social environment that you want to feel comfortable in?
Affordability?
Is the school going to set you on the track to have an outcome that’s going to have you pointed towards a job, a career, or something that’s going to provide you with financial security? Not right away. You’re not going to make 600 lines right out the door. It’s going to take you 10 years to get that 600 line, depending upon what you’re doing, maybe a little shorter.
So you take all of the schools that you’ve applied to as a senior, and you’re evaluating them based on those criteria, and you’re taking your top four horses in the race, and you’re picking the one that meets all five. A parent can do that with a freshman, or a sophomore, or a junior, as they start exploring those five criteria.
The thing is, if I’m a sophomore, a parent of a sophomore, for some of us right now, you can be going on college fairs, going to college visits with your sophomore, so that they’re seeing how far it is from home, distance wise, and size. And we have to be very careful as parents to stand behind the room, listen, and not get too aggressive and not too into the particular school, but you can start introducing the students to that subject line.
Bottom line is there is a school for every student if they’re motivated to go.
But if they’re not, if they’re not ready to go, don’t be one of the 20th percenters.
Twenty-percenters are the students that go off to college because they feel that they have to. And they come home. They come home after the first semester because it wasn’t one of those five criteria. At least the top four is important. Career takes maybe three or four years of college to get that going. But it wasn’t the right one for a variety of reasons. Their cousins are going to school. Their neighbors, their classmates, their parents are being guided to send their kids to school.
The worst case is they come home at Christmas. How are you doing? Oh, it’s wonderful. I’m having a good time.
How’s classes? Oh, I’m doing very well. They come home in June and they can’t go back because they’ve been told by the school that you can’t come back. And the sad part of that is we’ve already spent $15,000 to $20,000 (potentially) investing in that second semester, there’s nothing more enjoyable than being on a college campus in the spring.
Oh my goodness. If I could go back in time and our time warp conversation, I would go back and be a college student permanently in the spring.
Christine: Yeah.
Tom: Yeah. The spring, so you don't know until June or May when they’re moving out, and you go to pick them up, and you expect them just coming out with a couple of suitcases because they’re going to leave everything else in the campus and they’re bringing everything home.
So if we’re not ready, we don't go or we go to community college and we take the bump. We get our associates and we go to a four-year school. When we go into the work and, we work a little while, we realize we don’t want to work, we want to go back to school, and all of that is helping us develop, it’s giving a 17- or 18- or 19-year-old the opportunity to experience some of the things that we’ve been doing for the last, 20 years for you, 40 years for me, learning how life is outside of, the school system, so to speak. I think that, depending upon where you live (and there’s always exceptions), the nature of the beast is that we have to really be focused on what’s going to be the best thing for our kids and our family and celebrate it.
Christine: Very nice. And my only question was, and you already answered it, was the uptick and the, the, how do you search for a school for a 2.0, but you talked about that.
Tom: Yeah, there's plenty of tools out there, whether it’s Naviance, the school systems that are using the high school system that the schools use, Naviance or SCOIR, those are the two common ones that I know of using the Department of Ed’s college navigator site.
It’s taking advantage of some of the other tools out there, web-based tools to run a search based on the region, the GPA range, and you move forward that way.
Christine: And then all the other five things, which we’re going to get into the videos so that it gets really just super easy for parents to identify.
Tom: Yeah, it’s super easy to identify. It’s super overwhelming if you don’t have a plan.
Christine: Not having a plan is a plan to fail.
Tom: And, I say there’s about 150 things to do between the junior and the senior year before you go off to school in September. Some of them are very important for parents to be doing themselves.
Some of them are very important for everybody to be doing them together. I think the financial side is something that parents need to do with their kids. Too many parents don’t talk about finances with their students as they’re trying to figure out where they’re going and how they’re going to pay for college.
Kids know if there’s not a lot of money in the house, if we’re eating peanut butter and jelly all the time and that’s fine, but we have to do that, so keep them in the loop too, and as they go off the same thing and some at some point we can talk about the the legal and the medical documents that families need to put together.
Yes, that's what I’m going to add that to our list.
Tom: When students turn 18, the legal system and the medical system consider them adults and if you don’t have things like a HIPAA form or a power of attorney or another form that colleges use, you can call until you’re blue in the face and no one’s going to talk to you about your kids.
And there’s the kids. So that would be a segment that we can talk about, as we get closer into June, July.
Christine: Yeah. Sending them off. Yeah. It’s very important. It’s very important to get those forms signed. And the time to make a lot of these decisions is not when you’re in the moment, because if your kid is, God forbid, in a coma, the kid can’t sign the form. So you got to make all these decisions before those kinds of things happen.
Tom: And if it needs, if it means bringing someone else in to have those conversations and help with that, then there’s thousands of resources that we have. You and I know people in our area who that’s their lane, that’s their lane of business.
And I get very preachy on the fact that we have to be careful when we’re sending kids off to school about the whole alcohol situation. Still large number of students in the first 45 days of college end up in the emergency room because of alcohol poisoning. So you know, if we can bring some of these things to the forefront and help people, then we’re doing a good job.
Christine: Absolutely. Yeah. I appreciate your time. I appreciate your wisdom. I’m excited that we’re knocking through these myths for people to watch and learn from and we’re just going to keep turning them out.
Tom: I thank you for the work you’re doing behind the scenes to edit and make them look good. And how do people get ahold of you?
Christine: How do people get ahold of me? They can go to my website, www.essaycure.com. There are lots of ways to contact me from there. Parents and students can reach out on Substack, www.collegeapphelpdesk.com and can leave comments there if you want, if there’s something you wish we were talking about that we haven’t addressed yet, let us know because, we definitely would take that under advisement and see what we can do to bring in some guest speakers if it’s out of our lane.
Tom: If you want to talk to me, go to www.getcollegegoing.com.
Christine: Awesome. All right. Thank you, Tom.
Tom: Good to see you.
Christine: Good to see you too.
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