Articles
Waiting on the Waitlist
With college admission decisions made and released, the attention of students and admission officers turns to the tricky challenge of the waitlist. And rarely has the process seemed more chaotic than this year, in which many selective colleges faced higher application numbers, lower admit rates, and greater uncertainty about their yield.
Empathy: Considering another’s perspective in a college application
In preparing their applications to college, high school students are encouraged to be authentic, engaged, passionate, and committed. These are indeed great aspirations, and, hopefully, kids get the message that being true and honest with themselves and putting together a good college application should not be at odds with each other.
One quality usually missing from this list of exhortations, though, might be the most important one: be empathetic.
The Advantages of Boarding School
Students who attend boarding school get to live, learn, and thrive with motivated peers from around the world, supported by compassionate and dedicated faculty who serve as teachers, coaches, and dorm parents. At boarding school, students wake up each morning in a community buzzing with energy and know they are part of something special and unique.
How Heavy Is Your Backpack?
She uses the backpack analogy as a way to help her clients prioritize the things occupying their headspace. A backpack is a useful tool, but it has a limited capacity and a tendency to collect stuff that weighs you down. I couldn’t help but think that her framework and analogy could benefit my students as they transition into a post-pandemic world.
Major Myths, Revisited
Students should be encouraged to look at its exciting range of possibilities rather than casting around for a narrow academic box to climb into. But college is also not summer camp, and a conversation about majors might be another way to encourage high school students to view their learning with an equally important and exciting search for rigor and intellectual depth.
The Role of Majors in Applying to a Liberal Arts Program
In the admission process to a selective liberal arts college, a lack of any academic focus can also help to weaken a student’s application. Some colleges will require applicants to express an academic interest even if their admitted students have a lot of leeway in changing majors.
The Role of Parents in the College Application Process
College admissions present parents with difficult ethical, social and educational choices. We want our children to enjoy the adventure, act with integrity, feel good about the outcome, and be launched into successful and empowered adulthood under their own steam. Yet, we also witness the avalanche of requirements bearing down on them and we listen to other parents stressing about declining admit rates and soaring college expectations. In the end, many parents feel like they need to choose between allowing their teenagers the space to forge their own way to college or, given the stress and complexities of the process, usurping their child’s ability and right to retain ownership of it. The road to helicopter parenting is, like the one to hell, paved with the best of intentions!
Protecting Your Family Against Digital and Identity Theft
My 24-year-old graduate-student son recently had a terrible experience that offers many lessons to college-aged students and their parents. As a nice, smart kid who typically thinks the best of people, he naively put himself into a situation (yes, he does admit he made a stupid choice) where his cell phone, credit cards and keys were stolen.
Interviewing
A successful interview is the outcome of your conscious and thoughtful choices about how you to present yourself to others. Thinking about this process will also help you to better explore and evaluate all of your personal and professional relationships. After all, if you can understand more about how others view you and how you can influence that view, then you can also begin to grasp a little more about why you see other people (or even judge them!) – friends, relatives, teachers, strangers – in the way you do.
Why Choose College Goals?
Why choose College Goals to guide your child and you through the critically important challenge of preparing for and gaining admission to college? You will benefit from the collective knowledge, experience and wisdom gained from professionals who are familiar with every aspect of the admissions process and its significance for academic success. While you work with one of us, we conference regularly about information that can benefit our students.
Planning Your Summer with College in Mind
Are you a high school student (or the parent of one) who is wondering how best to spend your summer? What do colleges expect high school students to do during their school holidays? While summer is a great time to relax and recharge, it’s also an excellent opportunity for teenagers to show commitment, responsibility, passion, leadership and reflection – all characteristics that can really boost your chance of getting into a good college!
The Cost of Education: the language and tools of financial aid for students and parents
As parents and students explore college admission, they cannot help but be struck by the astonishing cost of attending an American university. Sarah Lawrence College, for example, has a sticker price of almost $60,000! Parents are questioning their ability and their interest in paying such exorbitant fees. Even families who do not expect to qualify for financial aid are exploring scholarship opportunities for their children. The best counsel on how to pay for college will come from private financial advisers or from financial aid counselors at colleges. Here, however, is a very basic overview of the process just to familiarize you with the concepts and give you some of the “language” with which to have those conversations.