• Pay attention to each student’s needs
• Alleviate stress for both student and parent
• Give the student a competitive edge
• Eliminate the confusion
• Save money

Personalized Attention

College selection and application is a very time-consuming process. Counseling—of all types—requires time and energy from a professional. But school guidance counselors are overworked and have less time than perhaps they once did to give personalized college counseling.

The National Association for College Admissions Counseling (NACAC) recommends that a college counselor work with no more than about one hundred students per year. However, a study by the National Association for College Admissions Counseling (NACAC) measured the degree to which school counselors are overworked.

• Nationwide, the average college counselor in a public high school serves 315 students. In Colorado. The public school student-to- counselor ratio is 553:1.
• The student-to-college-counselor ratio is higher in large schools: nationally, in schools of more than 2000 students, the ratio is 654:1. Colorado has 18 high schools of this size–all along the Front Range.

Choosing a college is not something that is easily left to computer programs and mathematical algorithms. The admissions process, while seemingly quite simple on its face. Can necessitate different strategies and tactics for each individual student. As public schools continue to reduce the number of guidance counselors. Parents are turning to private counselors to ensure that their children get the direction they need and deserve.

Alleviate Stress

Choosing a college can be stressful for a variety of reasons. First, parents, who have been nurturing their children since the day they were born, have a hard time delegating this important decision to their children. Second, students are not always equipped to make this first great life decision: most students have not made their own educational decisions or chosen their schools. They may not possess the self-knowledge to make this decision, and may need to work through a process to develop a strong set of criteria on which to base this decision.

To make matters worse, the junior and senior years of high school can be very difficult for students. They have many competing priorities to balance: improving their grades, deepening their extracurricular commitments, and preparing for those annoying SAT and ACT tests (and don’t forget the difficulty of maintaining a social life!). For these reasons—and many others—the college selection and application process becomes a vortex of anxiety for everyone.

An experienced college consultant can help reassure nervous parents. Guide students through a process of self-discovery, and ensure that all the administrative pieces are managed with efficiency and accuracy. The transition from high school to college should be an exciting time in a young person’s life, full of anticipation and promise, and a professional college counselor can maintain the focus on the excitement—and not the stress.

Competitive Edge

College admissions today seems much more competitive than ever before. More and more students are applying to college, and each student is applying to more colleges. Acceptance rates at selective colleges continue to decline. So how can college-bound students give themselves a competitive edge?

As noted above, high school guidance counselors are overburdened. So more and more families are turning to private consultants to help select the right colleges and guide the student through the admissions process. According to the Independent Educational Consultants Association (IECA). An estimated 22% of freshmen at private, four-year colleges have used some kind of consulting services in the admission process.

Private day and boarding schools have more robust college counseling programs than do public schools. The student to counselor ratio at a private school may be as low as 50:1, compared to the national average of 315:1. Obviously, some students are getting more help than others.

Good guidance in selecting the right schools and in completing the application can make the difference between acceptance and rejection. We can help your son or daughter develop an appropriate college selection and admissions strategy to give them the best possible chance of reaching their educational goals.

Eliminate The Confusion

One of the great benefits of the Internet age is that students and parents have much more access to enormous amounts of information. With literally thousands of websites devoted to college selection and admission, parents and students can learn more about college admission than ever before.

But knowledge is not bliss: the overwhelming quantity of information that does little to clarify our vision and answer our individual questions. Which information is useful and Which sources can I trust? Which information applies to my child’s particular situation? The huge expansion of available information has created a new burden of having to sift through zillions of bits and bytes for useful tidbits.

An experienced college consultant can help do the sifting for you. By focusing primarily on your student, the counselor can pull the information that is directly relevant to the student’s situation. And because a good counselor also knows colleges well, he can select colleges that closely match the student’s needs, abilities, and ambitions.

Save You Money

In today’s economy, almost all parents are looking for a bargain in higher education. The biggest sources of financial aid and scholarship money in the United States are the colleges and universities themselves. Colleges award better financial aid and scholarship packages to the students that best match their institutional values and priorities. Thus for the price-sensitive family, it is crucial that the student select colleges that are a perfect fit. Not only for the student, but for the college.

While we can never guarantee a particular outcome, we have a strong record of helping families reduce the overall cost of a college education by carefully selecting the right colleges to which to apply. Even families that do not expect any financial aid often find that working with us can save them tens of thousands of dollars in tuition bills.

So while hiring an educational consultant may seem like a hefty cost. Many families are surprised at how much money they can save by hiring an experienced college consultant.

Read five more reasons to hire a college consultant.

Mark Montgomery
Educational Consultant

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Are you ready to make your commitment? How are you spending these last few days leading up to May 1 deciding?

– Flipping a coin?
– Trying that t-shirt with the college name on the front on one more time?
– Getting feedback from the people you trust?
– Reading the fine print on the financial aid forms once again?
– Chatting online with current students to get your final questions answered?
– Writing pro and con lists?
Everyone makes their final decision in a different way. My advice? It echoes that of our NACAC 2011 keynote speaker, Jonah Lehrer. Go with your gut.
Go with what your instinct tells you. You’ve visited the campuses, spent the time researching, read all of the brochures, gone on the website hundreds of times and now the time has come to take the next step. Listen to what your gut is telling you and ask yourself, “Will I be happy here?” Is the answer yes? Then sign your name on the dotted line and start getting excited for this new adventure you are about to embark on!

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An article in the Washington Post, drawing on a report from the National Council for College Admissions Counseling (NACAC, or “nack-ack”) points to the much-discussed but poorly documented phenomenon of “application inflation.”
What do we mean?  Get this:

• The number of applications rose 47 percent at public colleges and 70 percent at private colleges between fall 2001 and fall 2008.
• The share of students applying to seven or more colleges rose from 12 percent in 1999 to 23 percent in 2009.

A friend and college admissions director and I were talking about this just yesterday over lunch. Colleges have every incentive to make it look like they are desirable. Thus they use every means possible to widen the sales funnel and to increase the number of applicants…just so that they can reject more of them.

Thus kids, feeling the pressure of rejection, apply to more colleges. For game theorists, this is a game of “chicken” in which escalation is inevitable until someone swerves, someone breaks the cycle. An Applications Arms Race.
Who’s going to break the cycle? The kids? Not on your life: they feel that their futures are at stake? The colleges? Not when they live and die by their budgets and by their rankings with US News (which depend, in part, on application rates).

NACAC? Nope, they represent the colleges. The government? Hah…now, that’s funny!

I don’t see an end in sight, unless parents and kids get smart and really start looking at raw statistics, including yield rates, and figure out that it doesn’t make sense to apply to so many.
Choose more wisely, be realistic about your chances (neither too optimistic nor too pessimistic). Spend the time developing a very solid application to the colleges you really, really want to attend. And have the confidence that you will get a great education no matter where you land.

Mark Montgomery
Educational Consultant

The post Who to Blame for Apps Arms Race? first appeared on Great College Advice.

College Planner and Adviser

The post Hate SAT/ACT? Colleges Still Love Them first appeared on Great College Advice.

But as long as public rankings of colleges and universities, such as those issue by US News & World Report, it’s unlikely that colleges will dump their dependence on scores any time soon.

Baylor University is now paying its accepted students to retake the SAT.  The stated aim is to encourage students to improve their scores and thereby be eligible for more scholarship aid.  But the ploy also helps move Baylor’s average SAT score up a notch or two.  And in the world of rankings, a notch or two is significant.

Here’s how it works at Baylor.  Admissions and financial aid folks at Baylor contact accepted students telling them that if they retake the SAT, they will receive a $300 credit the campus bookstore. If students raised their scores by 50 points, they would receive a $1000 scholarship.  Moreover, students who raised their scores above predetermined cut-off points for certain merit scholarships, they would then be eligible or thousands more dollars in scholarships.

The plan worked.  Over 800 students retook the SAT, about 150 received the $1000 scholarship for raising scores by 50 points or more, and 177 boosted their scores over the merit hump and pulled down another $450,000 in scholarships.  And (surprise!) Baylor’s average SAT score went up by 10 points.

You see, when it comes to the use of SAT and ACT scores in the admissions process, we have something of a vicious circle.  Even though virtually everyone agrees that there is no adequate proof that these scores predict college success or measure intelligence or aptitude, we can’t seem to get rid of them.  Why not?

Colleges, especially selective ones, find the short-hand numbers provided by the score a convenient sorting tool.

Reading applications more carefully and devising more personal or holistic admissions procedures takes time–and probably will cost more–if more staff people are required  to actually read every single application more carefully.

While everyone moans about the rankings, every rankings organization uses the scores as one important measure of a college’s selectivity and quality.

Colleges in the middle or bottom of rankings heap tend to be the ones most willing to abandon the scores as an admissions tool.  What is the incentive for Harvard, Yale, or Princeton to stop using the test scores in admissions?  (Besides, with their huge volumes of applications, these are the schools that depend on scores more heavily in assigning each application a number (the “academic index,” based on test scores and class rank).  Still, even schools like Baylor with very average SAT scores, aspire to be considered premier academic institutions.  And this aspiration depends, in part, on becoming more selective–a measure that depends, in large part, on average test scores of admitted students.

So this the problem:  no matter how much we all detest the SAT and ACT scores, it’s devilishly hard to get rid of them.

Rankings organizations will not drop their use of the test scores, because what other “objective” measure of quality could replace them?  At least scores are something easily compared across institutions.  It’s much harder to actually compare more important variables, such as quality of teaching, student learning outcomes, or “return on investment.”

It’s hard to know whether Baylor’s cynical ploy to raise its average SAT scores will become a wave of the future.  Most everyone in the business seems shocked and appalled by their practice of buying better SAT scores.

But it’s not difficult to understand the incentives, and to understand why the admissions and financial aid offices acted the way they did.  To become a highly-ranked, world class university, those average test scores had better be as high as they can be.  In the rankings game, nothing else matters as much as the numbers.

My guess is that while other admissions directors are busy condemning Baylor’s decision, they’re also secretly trying to figure out how to achieve the goal without incurring the wrath of their peers.  I think they probably admire Baylor’s chutzpah more than they would like to admit.

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For the first time, NACAC takes the stance that standardized testing may not, actually, be essential in evaluating candidates for admission, and encourages colleges and universities to more carefully consider how standardized testing is used.

One of my personal pet peeves is the fact that these tests may serve to keep quality minority students from applying to college–and may prevent them from entering more selective ones.  White and Asians score higher, generally, than Blacks and Latinos.

The College Board and ACT insist that any discrepancies in scores among these groups is due to differences in the quality of education that these different groups receive.  This is the “achievement gap” that we continue to hear so much about in relation to No Child Left Behind.  The College Board and ACT seem to say say that the “achievement gap” is not their problem, and that the tests are still relevant.

Whether or not you buy their argument, the NACAC report calls on colleges and universities to control the conversation more, and not to let it be dominated by the organizations that administer (and profit from) the tests.  Colleges may, for example, desire to enroll more Black and Latino students.  But how will selective colleges do this–especially when using race as an admissions criterion is frowned upon?

I’m happy to hear that colleges are starting to take this issue more seriously.  Clearly the fact that over 700 colleges are now test optional, plus the fact that even some selective schools no longer require the tests (e.g., WPI, Wake Forest) is a sign that perhaps there are other ways to glean enough information about the quality of an applicant–from high school grades, teacher recommendations, essays, graded work, and whatnot) that are at least as good and perhaps more wholistic than the use of standardized tests.

What do you think?

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