College Selection, Admissions, Financial Aid Tips

If you’re looking for information on selecting, applying, and paying for college, you’ve come to the right place. My name is Joe Connolly and I’m a full time high school guidance counselor. I created this presentation as a service to most motivated students and their families so they have a baseline of knowledge as they approach the daunting task of post-secondary planning and transition. The soon you will learn this information the better off you will be as you will be an inform consumer. I did not own all the content of the presentation. I’ve tried to include references whenever possible.

I also work with limited families as a college consultant or private college counselor. If after viewing this presentation I could be of service to you, please visit my website where you’ll find 61 tips on selecting, applying, and paying for college and a hundred ninety six of the best links to other websites for further research on these topics. Do you feel like this? Do you feel like you’re running through some kind of maze trying to get to the end result which is college? If so, let’s break the process down.

The better job you do with college selection during 9th, 10th, and 11th grade, it will make your life easier come application time in 11th and 12th grade. And likewise when it comes time during 12th grade, you figure out, how in the world are we going to pay for this? I believe in Mark Kantrowitz said it best in his book “College Gold”, “Attend the right college, at the right price, for the right reasons.” And that is why college selection is so important. But it’s also important to consider that additional loan debt can be rack up by doing things like choosing a school and then switching majors, choosing a school and then transferring or worse case scenario, choosing a school and then dropping out.

Take a moment to read this last bullet point. I suspected part of the reason why this statistic is so pitiful is due to a lack of understanding of educational attainment levels. So let’s look at those. Starting up tab and working down, short term on-the-job training, apprenticeships, and trade and technical schools, many of which offers associates degrees, many times those are terminal associates, meaning they can’t transfer elsewhere, and then community colleges which offer diplomas, certificates and associates degrees.

Followed by 4-year colleges which offer bachelors degrees and then graduate schools where students sometimes attain a master’s degree and go on for post-graduate studies. Certainly, you already know that the longer you stay in school, the more you will be paid. But here’s what it looks like in a chart format. Perhaps this chart has too much data but clearly shows why going to college has become more competitive over time. Look to the right of the chart, the percentages of Americans who earn at least a bachelor’s degree has risen dramatically.

Additionally, you probably heard of the news over the past few years that there’s a bubble in the number of high school graduates compared to years past. And that is precisely what this chart shows. Because there are more high school graduates, more students are submitting more applications. Personally I think your nuts if you submit more than 6 applications. The end result is that things have gotten more competitive at most schools because they are getting more and more qualified applicants. What is a competitive college? We’ll for argument’s sake I’ll use 50% as a benchmark. A school that accepts less than 50% of the people who apply, is usually refer to as either a competitive college or selective college.

By the way, the average acceptance rate for all colleges when you average them together is 70%. So don’t go off the deep end on this one. Why do you need to know about competitive colleges? Because if you are applying to one, you need to be able to answer this four key questions. Think of it as if you’re running down the track clearing a hurdle, and the next one’s even higher, and the next one’s even higher. The first key question is: do you have the numbers? Is your GPA, class rank, SAT/ACT score fitting with most applicants? Second of all, how do you as a student fit that school? Meaning, when you get to campus, what are you going to contribute? Third, how did they fit you? How did they as a school fit you as a student?

And fourth is what I’d like to call “so stinking special”. You know when you consider there is 70,000 high schools around our country, that means there is 70,000 valedictorians, 70,000 student council presidents, 70,000 editors of school newspapers, and while at your school let me put in an elite position, on a national scale it gets to be watered down. So when you compare colleges, what should you look for?

Please don’t feed in to the rankings hysteria and become the guy in the right who’ve use the acceptance letter to the so called “right school” as a trophy to be won. It’s all about finding schools that are good fit, where best match. I believe that we as Americans love lists, we love polls, we love rankings and it often lead to misconceptions such as, “You turn the Ivy’s” but I bet most people will be hard press to name all eight schools that make up the Ivy League. This is the end of Part one of Four. Please take the time to click through to part two, three, and four. Thank you.