Launching Your Freshman off to College

Yesterday we took our oldest daughter to the airport to catch a plane to Boston.  She will soon start her first semester at Tufts University—and she won’t return home until just before Christmas.    Somehow, despite months of preparation, I wasn’t quite ready to let her go. . . 

This summer I did what I often do when faced with a new challenge—I read.  Here I will share an article and a few books I found helpful for this “off to college” transition:

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently featured a helpful, practical article, 

“Bye-Bye Birdies: Sending the Kids Away to College “ by Claire Potter.

It offers several suggestions for gradually letting go of daily involvement in your now young adult’s life including—

--Be available to listen but initiate few phone calls.

--Let your child contact professors and administrators without your interference.

--Talk to your child about the difference between high school “homework” and college “coursework.” Explain the importance of the syllabus for each course and how professors are not as lenient or understanding about missed classes.

--Discuss the use and abuse of alcohol and drugs with your child before he/she leaves home.

--Make sure he/she knows how to do laundry.

--Create an online family calendar to help with scheduling.

Here are some books that contain good tips and information about college life and the transition to young adulthood:

The Naked Roommate For Parents Only: A Parent’s Guide to the New College Experience by Harlan Cohen (a companion version to the one for students, which  is also excellent)

The Launching Years: Strategies for Parenting from Senior Year to College Life by Laura Kastner and Jennifer Wyatt

I’m Going to College—Not You!  Surviving the College Search with your Child, Edited by Jennifer Delahunty (some amusing and some more philosophical essays on the college launch)

Good luck with the launching process—it’s an important transition both for the college freshman and for the family left behind.

Summer Suggestions for Rising Seniors

In the end of school year frenzy, it’s sometimes difficult to think ahead.  But for this year’s rising seniors, planning summer activities is important.  It’s a last chance to pursue an activity or work experience before filling out college applications, and it’s also an opportunity to get organized before the hectic process of applying begins.

Before your student turns in textbooks and cleans out his or her locker, check out these reminders for the end of junior year:

Here are five recommendations for your student’s summer to-do list:

1) Get a job!  College admissions officers comment that they see fewer and fewer (middle class) students applying with job experience. Demonstrating  paid work experience is an asset to any application, plus it can be a head start on saving spending money for college.

2) Get organized for senior fall.   Sort through your pile of homework papers, tests and essays—toss most of it but keep: a file of graded essays as some colleges require you to upload a graded research paper as a supplement, any notes or tests you might need to review for AP or other exams.   Make a file or label a box in which to keep all the college literature you’re receiving in the mail and during campus visits.  Design two spreadsheets: one to compare notes on different schools and another to track your college application timeline/calendar from this summer through senior spring.  Here are sample templates:  college comparison  and application timeline.

3) Take a practice ACT exam to see if this format might be preferable to the SAT exam.  (Many students take the “practice” SAT, the PSAT during junior year.  Some take the PLAN, the ACT “practice” test.)  Check out test prep books from the library or purchase some to review for any fall exams you’ve scheduled.  There are many test prep courses and coaches available—I recommend these mostly for students who need to bolster their comprehension of an academic subject or need external motivation to study.

4) Tour local college or university campuses.  Try to visit different kinds of schools from large, urban research universities to smaller liberal arts colleges.  Take virtual tours of campuses further away or visit while on family vacations.

5) Complete a first draft of your personal statements.  You will need at least two if you plan on applying to the University of California system.  Sign up for a personal statement boot camp or consultation through Peninsula Young Writers.

COA - EFC = ??? The Financial Aid Award Letter

This is the season for college acceptances--which means it’s also time when financial aid awards are made.  If you’re like me, the whole financial aid process remains pretty obtuse. 

First of all, there are so many terms and forms to consider from COA (Cost of Attendance) to EFC (Expected Family Contribution) from FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) to the CSS Profile (a not-free application for aid requested by many private schools). 

Then there is the application process itself, followed months later by sending in (before April 15) tax forms. Finally, a financial aid letter appears alongside the acceptance letter.   Now it’s time to sort out what is actually aid or grant money and what parts of the award are loans, both subsidized and unsubsidized.

I’m not a numbers whiz or a financial expert, so I’m not giving advice here.  I’m just empathizing with students and families who not only have to determine the best-fit college in these coming weeks, but

they also need to analyze their financial aid offers carefully.

Just a few observations about interpreting financial aid awards gleaned from my financial aid expert friends and workshops I’ve attended:

--Merit Aid is not Financial Aid.  Some schools, often in an attempt to raise their academic profile, offer aid or “discounts” to students with strong academic records.  This type of aid is not dependent of financial circumstances.  It can be a boon to middle class families whose children would like to attend liberal arts colleges but find them too expensive compared with state universities.

--Different schools offer widely different packages and combinations of grants and loans, as they base their decision on a variety of criteria.  And some schools have larger endowments to give from!

--The award contains aid from various “sources,” that is part of it may be federal and state grants, which aren’t repaid, part of it may be subsidized loans, which are repaid with interest after graduation, and part of it may be unsubsidized or private loans, which accumulate interest while the student is attending school.  Work-study, or the student’s on campus job, will also be included.

One example of an financial aid letter: I volunteer with a low income student through College Track, a college preparatory program that helps students from under-resourced schools perform well and apply for college.  My advisee has applied to California State University Schools as well as some local private universities.  Last week she was overjoyed to receive an acceptance from Notre Dame de Namur University until I pointed out that over $17K of her financial aid award consisted of unsubsidized loans.  For a student with an EFC (Estimated Family Contribution) of 0, that amount is untenable.

--If your student is awarded a scholarship, the amount of aid will be adjusted.  Some schools reduce the self-help (work-study) level before replacing institutional aid or grants; others don’t.

--If the financial aid letter truly doesn’t meet your student’s financial need, you can appeal.  It

helps to have offers of aid from other schools for a comparison basis.

If you need help figuring out how to finance your child’s college education, there are experts out there who can guide you.  I highly recommend my colleague Beatrice Schultz at Westface College Planning, who will not only explain award letters much better than I, but she can lead you through a step-by-step process of preparing a budget for college costs, applying for aid, and maximizing your tax savings.

When it’s time to fill out the FAFSA and CSS Profile in January, (which you/your student will need to do every year while attending college), there are also online resources to help including:

--Studentaid.ed.gov (U.S. Department of Education)

--Finaid.org (a private, non-profit website offering information on loans and scholarships)

--Bigfuture.collegeboard.org (the College Board website, the organization that administers the CSS Profile)

Thoughts on the “new” SAT 2016

The New York Times has featured several articles recently about the College Board’s decision to change the format and contents of the SAT in response to relentless criticism from students, educators, and college admissions staff among others.  In my view, the changes, mostly to the reading and writing sections of the exam, are for the better, but the reasons for the reform and the results of them might be somewhat different from what is discussed.

First, a summary of the changes:

--The essay section will become optional and will be an analysis of a passage rather than an amorphous reflection on the relevance of a quotation.

--No more abstruse vocabulary sections—instead the exam will ask students to define words used in daily and school.

--Reading passages will include texts from “founding” historical documents such as the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Gettysburg Address. Students will select answers based on evidence from the passages themselves.

--Calculators will be permitted only on part of the math sections. 

--Math sections will focus on problem solving, data analysis, algebra and complex equations.

--Tests will be structured more like “achievement” or AP tests.

--No more deductions for incorrect scores.

These are significant but not radical changes.  They will shape the test to be more like the SAT’s competitor the ACT, which has content drawn more from actual high school coursework.   In the past few years the number of students taking the ACT vs. the SAT has risen considerably, so one might argue that the College Board, the non-profit organization that administers the SAT, is responding to its competition.

Whatever its reasons for reform, the new College Board president, David Coleman, appears to be genuinely concerned with reaching more high achieving low income students, who have not had the advantage of taking prep courses for exams.  He is working with Khan Academy to develop online tailored tutorials for any student who wants to take the test, hopefully leveling the playing field at least to some degree.

A few cents of advice gleaned from reading and experience:

--Be wary of test preparation courses.  They may be helpful in instilling discipline for studying, but they cannot guarantee score enhancement.

--Consider opportunity cost.  After our daughter Lily performed much better on the ACT than the SAT, despite taking a Revolution Prep course for the SAT, she decided not to re-take the SAT, but to submit her ACT scores instead.  If your high school junior or even sophomore is currently considering either taking a prep course or re-taking the exam several times, it’s worth evaluating what is often called the “opportunity cost.”  What else might your son or daughter be doing to prepare for college instead of studying for or taking standardized tests?  Seeking new experiences whether academic or extra-curricular might be a better option. 

--Take or re-take either the SAT or ACT, not both. Lily’s high school college counselor also advises students to take the SAT and ACT each once—I think a practice test in each would suffice—and see which format works better.  Some students perform significantly better in one format vs. the other.  Re-take the test in which you performed best. 

--Consider applying to test optional schools.  Last month a new report was issued supporting the view of several test optional colleges that standardized tests like the SAT and ACT are not an accurate predictor of student performance at all.  A student’s GPA is much better.  In 2008, a number of colleges and universities began eliminating the SAT and ACT from admissions requirements.  Schools like Wake-Forest have admitted much stronger students academically since that time.  It’s worth considering applying to at least some of these schools.  

I doubt standardized college admissions testing will ever be eliminated from college admissions. But we can at least begin to diminish their outsized influence on the whole evaluation process.