Happy holidays everyone!

While I’m spending Christmas with family in Colorado, I decided to share this post about avoiding mistakes when completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Parents can start filing the FAFSA beginning January 1.

If you missed it, here is another post I shared about the FAFSA earlier this month:

Getting Ready to Tackle the FAFSA

I wish that I could reassure you that completing the FAFSA is easy, but it won’t be for many parents. Even more disconcerting is that parents make mistakes all the time and don’t even realize it.

Some of the mistakes in this post may seem obvious, but others will probably surprise you.  Here are 12 FAFSA mistakes to avoid:

1. Reporting an incorrect household size.

This one might seem puzzling. After all, parents should know who lives under their roof, but it’s not that easy. Here are some reasons why:

If a stepparent has children from a previous marriage those children could potentially be included in the household size even if they don’t live in the residence. They would qualify as household members if the parent provides more than half of his or her support and will continue to do so during the financial aid award year.

A parent should also include an unborn child on the FAFSA, if the baby would be born before the end of the award year and will receive more than half of the support from the student or parent. There must be medical documentation of a current pregnancy.

Parents can also include other relatives, such as grandparents, grandchildren or aunts or uncles, if they currently live in the household and will be doing so between July 1, 2015 and June 30, 2016. These dates correspond with the federal financial aid season for the 2015-2016 school year.

Parents also wonder if they can include older children who are now in graduate school when reporting household size. You can include these grown children in the household size if you are providing more than half of their support.  Keep in mind that student aid, including scholarships and loans, will count as student support so this is a higher hurdle than you might assume.

2. Not filing the FAFSA.

Many parents assume that they won’t qualify for need-based aid so they don’t even bother wrestling with the form. This is a huge mistake because families often have no idea whether they will qualify for financial assistance.

Parents will sometimes wonder if they should not seek financial aid for their child’s freshman year but make the request before the child’s sophomore year. The thinking it this might help them get into the school and then seek aid once the child has a year under his/her belt. I once had a parent, who had saved $70,000 for a private college education, ask me about that approach.

I told him that delaying the request for aid until the second year would be a poor idea. What if the child received a mediocre package that was simply stuffed with loans for her second year of college. Can you imagine parents having to tell a child that he/she will have to leave for a cheaper school because they can’t afford it?

When parents need financial aid, they should apply up front.

3. Filing the wrong FAFSA.

It’s easy to make this mistake because for much of the year, two different FAFSA forms are available online. Parents who are submitting the FAFSA for the school year that started this past fall should submit the 2014-2015 FAFSA. (This would include students who are starting college in January.) The 2015-2016 FAFSA will be available on January 1 for students who start school on July 1, 2015 or later.

My son started graduate school in mid June 2014 so he had to complete the 2013-2014 FAFSA. If the summer school had started on July 1, he would have completed the 2014-2015 FAFSA because that is the date when the new federal financial aid season starts every day.   If you are confused about which form to complete, ask a school what application to use.

4. Reporting the wrong assets.

The FAFSA asks about the student and parents’ investments, but you should NOT include any qualified retirement assets such as Individual Retirement Accounts, 401(k)’s, 403(b)’s, KEOGH, SIMPLE, pension plans and annuities. The FAFSA is interested in your non-retirement accounts, which would include checking and saving accounts, brokerage accounts that could include mutual funds, individual stocks and bonds and certificates of deposits.

It’s also critically important to report 529 plan savings as a parent asset. If you report this money as the child’s assets, the financial aid formulas will treat this more harshly.

5. Reporting home equity.

Parents should also not include equity in their primary home on the FAFSA. Families, however, must report the equity of other real estate.

Rental property is usually considered an investment and not a business. It’s an important distinction since the aid formula treats business assets less harshly. To be considered a business, the real estate must be part of a formally recognized business. A hotel is a business while renting out a home, timeshare or room is generally considered an investment.

6. Sharing the wrong name.

The federal government is very picky about the names that filers share on the FAFSA. Students and parents must provide the legal names that are on their Social Security cards. A filer, for instance, shouldn’t use Jim on the form if his legal name is James. If the Social Security Administration has a woman’s maiden name on file, she must use that name until she’s updated the Social Security Administration with her married name. If the names don’t match up, the government won’t process the application.

7. Not expressing an interest in a work-study job.

A student who says he is interested in a work-study job on the FAFSA isn’t obligated to obtain one later, but students need to answer in the affirmative to be eligible. At some schools, most or all of the campus jobs are reserved for students eligible for work-study.

8. Lying on the FAFSA.

For parents who are considering lying on the FAFSA in hopes of getting financial aid, it’s not only a bad idea, it’s a crime. The federal government selects one-third of FAFSA filings for verification each year and colleges may select additional aid applications for review. In fact, some colleges verify 100% of their applications. Lying on the FAFSA can generate fines of up to $20,000 and up to five years in prison. Also the family could face repaying all their financial aid.

9. Failing to list all colleges on the FAFSA.

Families are permitted to list up to 10 schools on the FAFSA. If a parent or child fails to include any schools, these institutions will not receive the financial information that the FAFSA generates. And that means the student wouldn’t be eligible for need-based aid from an overlooked school. If you are applying to more than 10 schools, the parents can add additional names after they have received their electronic Student Aid Report (SAR) from the federal government.

10. Listing schools in order of preference.

Keep in mind that each institution on a student’s FAFSA will be able to see all the other schools that a student is applying to. Some institutions, no one knows how many, use the order that a student lists his or her schools to help make admission and financial aid decisions. Your best bet is to avoid tipping your hand and simply list the colleges alphabetically.

11. Sharing the wrong marital status.

It’s easy to make this mistake if a parent’s marital status has changed. The FAFSA requires that parents note what their marital status is as of the day the FAFSA is filed. So if the parents were married in 2014, but they separated by the time the 2015 FAFSA was filed, the financial aid form should state that the parents are separated.

This rule is different from what the IRS expects. In this same example, the estranged parents would file their federal income taxes for the 2014 calendar year as a married couple.

12. Not knowing who should file the FAFSA

Who should file the FAFSA may seem like it should be straightforward, but it often won’t be. Here is the breakdown of the rules about who should file:

Traditional Married Couples

If you are part of a traditional family — married husband, wife and kids – it’s easy to answer who completes the financial aid forms. Both parents will share their financial information on the FAFSA.

Unmarried Parents Living Together

Unmarried parents who live together have traditionally enjoyed a FAFSA perk. Only one of the parents has had to complete the FAFSA and share his/her financial figures, but this has changed. Both parents, who live together, are now required to complete the financial aid application jointly.

A Parent Has Died

If a parent dies during the year, do not include his or her financial information on the FAFSA. If the parent has died after filing the FAFSA, contact the school immediately with this information.

Divorced and Separated Parents

If you are divorced, the ex-spouse who has taken care of the child the majority of the year will continue to complete the FAFSA. You are considered the custodial parent, with the responsibility of completing the FAFSA, based on where the child has physically lived during a 12-month period ending on the day the FAFSA is completed.

Separated parents don’t have to be “legally” separated to be treated the same as divorced couples, but they can’t be living in the same residence.

Here is a post that I wrote about a California teenager of divorced parents that will give you some examples of divorce strategy:

Financial Aid and Divorce

Here is a video I did awhile ago on this subject:

YouTube video: Divorce and Financial Aid

Single-Sex Couples

A new federal rule requires that married, single-sex partners must both include their financial information on the FAFSA. To reflect this change, the FAFSA will now ask for information for “Parent 1″ and “Parent 2.” In the past, only the biological parent had to share his or her assets and income.

What if the single-sex couple is not married? Both partners will have to submit financial data if one of them has adopted the other partner’s child. If a partner has not adopted the child, only the biological parent will complete the FAFSA.

Here is a story that I wrote for my CBS MoneyWatch blog last year on this rule change:

Feds Push Diversity in Financial Aid

Guardians

If the student is living with a legal guardian, such as a grandparent or an older sibling, the student is considered an independent student. The federal government does not consider a guardian (or foster parent) a parent. As such, the student will only include his or her information on the FAFSA.

Any support a legal guardian or foster parent gave to the student should be reported on Worksheet B as the student’s income.

Parents and teenagers are already dreading the new, radically different SAT test that will debut in March 2016. If your child plans to take this test, you absolutely need to read the post below.

Jed Applerouth, PhD, the founder of Applerouth Tutoring Services, shared his detailed thoughts about the revamped test with his own families and he gave me permission to also share them with you.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy

For those of you searching for a more challenging college admissions test, look no further than the new SAT.

In late December, the College Board writers released the most comprehensive problem set to date drawn from the new SAT and PSAT, providing some “flesh and bones” to the test specifications released last April. The level of difficulty and sophistication of numerous test items was surprising.

If this practice set is an accurate reflection of the new test in development, it will be hardest SAT we’ve ever seen, and significantly harder than the ACT.

This test will mark the arrival of Common Core assessment on a national scale. Adhering to the Common Core State standards, test writers are delivering more advanced content and shifting to more sophisticated question types.

While success on the current SAT is predicated upon a student’s ability to solve math, reading and writing items, the new SAT seeks to measure fluency and gauge a student’s deeper understanding of tested content. The latter approach will yield a more complete picture of a student’s comprehension, but it makes for a test that may scare off many potential customers.

Reading and Writing

While the Writing section of the new SAT looks remarkably like ACT English, the reading level of the passages is more advanced. The new Reading section includes passages more typically found on the harder, more complex SAT Literature test. The political science and literature passages, in particular, would challenge students who were not highly fluent readers.

In order to gauge deeper comprehension, 3 of the 24 reading items don’t just test a student’s ability to spot a right answer, but require a student to explain Why that answer is correct. For these new “show me the evidence” questions, students are first asked an inference question and then asked to identify where they found support in the passage for their answer.

These question pairs will be especially tricky for students: miss the first question, and you’ll likely get the second question incorrect in a “domino effect.” These items are also more time intensive than traditional line-reference questions because they require a student to scan multiple areas of the passage.

To our surprise, and counter to College Board president David Coleman’s assurance that the SAT was moving away from the advanced vocabulary that has been a hallmark of the SAT for nearly a century, a significant number of SAT words remained on the new SAT, appearing throughout both the passages and the questions. Words like “acuteness,” “partisan,” and “empirically” appeared in correct answer choices, revealing that after nearly 90 years of privileging advanced vocabulary, the College Board may have a hard time saying goodbye to old friends.

The passage evoking the “Founding Documents and the Great Global Conversation” demanded a great deal of external knowledge. The Constitutionally-inspired passage requires a more nuanced understanding of the U.S. political system than many American or certainly international students would possess. Lacking knowledge of the Federalist Papers, the political party system in the U.S., or the branches of government, an international student would be at a serious disadvantage.

Given the elevated textual complexity, ongoing presence of advanced vocabulary, and time-intensive “command of evidence” question types, there is no doubt that this new Reading test is harder than its equivalent on the current SAT or ACT.

Optional Essay: harder, but better

The “optional” essay with its focus on analyzing the manner in which an author uses logic, structure and rhetorical skills to build an argument is markedly more challenging and analytical than the current required essay.

I’m willing to go out on a limb and declare this new essay superior in every regard to the current SAT essay. On this new essay, students will shoot for a maximum score of 12, with a possible 4 points each for Reading, Analysis, and Writing. A profound departure from today’s SAT essay, this essay is better suited to assess a student’s readiness for college-level writing and analysis.

Math: Awaken the slumbering giant

Of all the sections, the one that was the most surprising, and even a bit shocking, was the math section. Emphasizing math fluency and conceptual understanding, the math questions required students to model real-world situations with complex formulas. Typically tests like the SAT, ACT, GRE and GMAT assess math skills in a particular way, requiring a student to solve given equations. A student can usually solve most math problems on these tests using an accurate set-up, methodical problem solving, basic heuristics, and occasionally some logic or creative techniques.

These new Common Core inspired question types move us into a new realm, beyond the ability to solve, into the ability to understand the underlying math fundamentals of particular real-world scenarios.

In particular, the calculator-free section was the most radical departure from anything we’ve ever seen on the SAT or the ACT: it was something brand new. Questions in this section require a different method of perceiving a math problem. Students who are well-versed in the logic and language of the current SAT may, in fact, struggle on the new SAT because of their training.

If you are looking for the standard set up–find the relevant info in the problem, structure the work left to right, top to bottom, and solve– you may be scratching your head, wondering how to proceed when facing these new kinds of problems. Students trained on the current SAT will have to unlearn strategies to succeed on the new SAT, eliminating the prospect of transitioning seamlessly between the current and new SAT. Take note, sophomores!

This new math content reveals a new paradigm for assessing math skills. Reflecting the Common Core standards and their emphasis on fluency, this test is far more conceptual than the current SAT. Word problems are everywhere, and students will need to step back to understand what the variables and the constants signify.

For many of the questions, the ability to solve a math problem is subordinate to one’s ability to “read” the problem and understand the function of the various components of the problem. This is math fluency. Examples of these questions include: What does X stand for? How do you interpret the constant 25 in the equation? What does the negative term represent?

Other items that require a solution take many more discrete steps and significantly more time than do typical SAT problems. Additionally, students must now, for the first time, wade through extraneous information—and distractors—to find information relevant to the question.

Finally, the new SAT math content is much broader in scope than its predecessor. Students will be accountable to know more definitions, equations, and math structures on this new test. The variety of new concepts covered by the two new math sections was unprecedented: deep trigonometry knowledge, deep planar geometry knowledge and much more.

I felt like I was taking a high school Algebra II/Trig final rather than taking the SAT. The redesigned math section also featured language that may be unfamiliar to current SAT test takers: margin of error, line of best fit, coefficients, constants, smooth curves, and “solutions” to quadratic equations. Extrapolating from the depth and variety of content covered in this small sample of problems, students might be accountable for knowing over a hundred new math concepts, well beyond the 40 or so discrete topics assessed on the current SAT.

If the College Board writes a complete test at this level of difficulty, it will need a very forgiving curve to round out the normal scoring distribution. A student might be able to miss numerous problems and still attain a high score.  This would be in stark contrast to the current SAT, in which a student could miss a single problem and drop from an 800 to a 750 as was the case on the November, 2014 SAT.

More time per item: more of a necessity than a gift

While I was initially excited by the prospect of having more time per question on the new SAT, assuming the College Board was backing off processing speed, I now realize that much of the benefit from the additional time will be negated by the new, harder problem types. The new kinds of questions will demand a greater time investment.

Replacing speedy sentence completions with cumbersome command-of-evidence questions will put the focus back on processing speed. Turning quick math problems into lengthy, complex word problems will have a similar effect. Though this test still seems like it will be gentler on processing speed than the race that is the ACT, the benefit will not be as substantial as I had once hoped, given the changes in question type. Students have more time per item, and they will need it.

A taste of online testing

For those interested in the rise of online testing, the College Board developers made some significant strides towards an era in which these tests can be taken on any manner of digital device: tablet, small laptop, large screen desktop. Instead of releasing a PDF or static webpage to disseminate the new items, the College Board created what is essentially an app to take the test.

Our head of Software Engineering was impressed by its functionality, particularly the reading passage line-references that are adaptive to a student’s screen size. Shrink the screen, and line 10 becomes line 12 in the passage and the questions. The College Board has clearly been investing time and resources in this new product. We can anticipate digital testing coming soon from the College Board, and digital practice coming through the Kahn Academy partnership.

A Common Core

The College Board had no choice but to change, facing shrinking market share to an ACT that was objectively better aligned with the Common Core and better meeting the demands of the marketplace. The College Board embraced the challenge of deeply integrating the Common Core into its flagship test.

All of the stated learning objectives for each new SAT item in this problem set align almost perfectly with the published Common Core standards. The SAT has now been reconfigured as a Common Core test. And I’m honestly conflicted about it.

On one hand, I’m at heart a Common Core apologist. I’ve been defending the Common Core for several years, citing our low national scores on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), and witnessing the proportion of high school students entering college needing to be funneled immediately into remedial classes.

Our educational system is in need of repair, and I believe accurate assessment and accountability are key components of the solution. The Common Core State Standards take steps to give us an accurate measure of student academic preparedness. We need good assessments, just as we need a good curriculum, proper training and effective implementation. All of this will take time, and there will be bumps in the road.

As the College Board is vying to make the SAT into a Common Core assessment, it will inevitably reveal skill deficits in many of our students and school districts. The fact that a Common Core assessment may reveal shortcomings in the academic preparedness of students is not a reason to discard the assessment. Shooting the messenger to conceal a deficit is far from optimal.

So Which Test is Best?

Do I believe the better-aligned SAT will give us a better prediction of college preparedness? Yes, I do.

Based on my knowledge of the skills required to succeed in college, and viewing the Common Core standards as a decent measure of those skills, this test seems like a better yardstick of preparedness. We’ll certainly have lots of new data by 2018 to verify this hypothesis.

Despite this, given my obligation to help students find the most expedient route to college, and viewing the alternatives- the current SAT (through January, 2016) and the ACT- as easier pathways, how can I in good faith guide students to a harder assessment? My inner idealist and pragmatist are in conflict.

Though I can foresee top students thriving on this harder test, many of our students will struggle with this harder content. And as long as college admissions offices are willing to accept the SAT and the ACT on equal footing, I will be inclined to guide many of our students towards the current SAT (while it’s available) and the ACT. If the data bears out that the new SAT is, in fact, a better predictor of collegiate success, and college admissions offices come to perceive it as such, we will certainly adjust our position.

Broader Implications

As we at Applerouth are grappling with how to counsel our students regarding the changes coming to testing, every SAT/ACT tutor and every college admissions counselor in the country must come up with guidance for their students who will soon be facing the new SAT. Some of my colleagues are advising all of their students to avoid the new SAT and migrate en masse to the ACT. Many others have adopted a wait-and-see approach.

The College Board, anticipating some attrition, is actively soliciting larger contracts to offset some of the individual losses. Just last week College Board reps cut a state-wide deal with the Michigan Department of Education, guaranteeing that every junior in the state will take the new SAT. Budgetary concerns, particularly savings of $15.4 million, were a major driver of that decision, but others cited the superior Common Core alignment of the new SAT as a meaningful decision factor. If the price is right, more states may follow this path.

The ides of March: waiting for confirmation

Our present analysis is based off of the problems that we have been given by the College Board. The redesigned SAT will feature 52 reading, 44 writing, and 58 math problems. For our analysis, we were given only 24 reading, 22 writing, and 48 math problems, 61% of a full-length test. From our limited sample, we cannot accurately predict the full breadth of content that the College Board will include on its new test.

This test is still a work in progress. The poorly calibrated difficulty levels of many test items were one indication of that. The College Board is still figuring this test out, and it could certainly change by the time we see full practice tests in March 2015 and official administrations in March of 2016. We’re going off of the data that we have, but know that this test is clearly evolving.

Potential Implications and timelines

Assuming the new SAT aligns with the content we’ve seen in this current sample, and the writers are not merely showing off their hardest possible material, we anticipate significant changes in student behavior.  Many students will flock in droves to alternatives: the current SAT and the ACT.

There are few incentives for an average student to choose the redesigned SAT when the content is less familiar and more challenging, and the initial March and May SAT results will be delayed until 6-8 weeks after the test. Perhaps the only incentive is for the strong testers who might have a chance to “clean house” on the new SAT if there is a talent flight towards the ACT and the current SAT. Those intrepid souls willing to brave the waters of the new SAT may benefit from their efforts, but I forecast many, many students migrating away from this test.

For those current sophomores who will look to use the current SAT for college admissions, they must finish testing by January of their junior year. This would accelerate their testing timeline, which typically ends in June of junior year and occasionally spills over into the fall of senior year. These students will need to complete their preparation and take 2 or 3 official SAT administrations by January of next year.

Some of my college counseling colleagues are even encouraging sophomores to take their first SAT in May or June of this year! Traditionally I’m opposed to commencing test prep sophomore year, but in this year of transition, I’m softening my position. If a student wants to finish testing by January 2016, and has a tough fall schedule, it’s okay if he or she wants to sit for the June or possibly the May SAT. After this year, we go back to the normal guidelines: keep testing in the junior year, and save senior year as insurance.

Summary

I’m impressed with the big gamble the College Board is taking, embracing the mantra “Go Big or Go Home” and betting all its chips on the Common Core. Will this pay off? Can the SAT reclaim its number one position? Will the SAT be as challenging as this problem set makes it seem?

We’ll know much more as the College Board continues to release official material. All the while, we’ll look to the colleges to see how they embrace this new assessment. We promise to keep you fully informed as we navigate the new landscape of admissions testing together.

I’ve always dreaded tax season, but when I had children in college there was one aspect of this unwelcome ritual that I actually looked forward to every year.

I loved claiming the American Opportunity Tax Credit, which allows qualified parents to knock up to $2,500 off their tax bill for each of their children in college.

I felt even better the one year that my husband Bruce and I got to cut what we owed to the IRS by $5,000 when we had both of our children in college at once. During all those other college-going years, our annual tax credit reduced our IRS bill by $2,500.

This is the first year that Bruce and I won’t be able to claim the credit after seven years in a row and we’re really going to miss it.

Tax credits, by the way, are vastly more valuable than tax deductions because they reduce what you owe on your taxes dollar for dollar. So if you owed the IRS $3,000 on your 2014 tax return and you claimed the maximum American Opportunity Tax Credit, your bill would drop to $500.

The American Opportunity Tax Credit, which Congress has threatened to kill off many times, will be the most generous federal education tax credit for most families. Plenty of parents have no idea that this education tax credit exists nor do they know about other higher-ed tax benefits.

An easy-to-understand resource exists, however, to get you up to speed on all these benefits. Edvisor Network explains these education tax benefits in plain English and how they can best be used, which I think is a first. Here is the main link to visit the site’s higher-ed tax benefit resource guide, which you can see in the screen shot below:

Learning About College Tax Credits

You have always been able to read about these higher-ed benefits on the IRS website or through IRS Publication 970, but when you finish you are likely to be scratching your head about which one to pick and the best way to use them. That’s why I particularly like the Edvisor Network’s tax benefit section entitled, Picking the Best Mix of Education Tax Credits and Deductions.

Mark Kantrowitz, one of the nation’s leading experts on financial aid, and David Levy, the former financial aid director of three colleges including California Institute of Technology, who both work at Edvisors Network, are the authors of this educational material. (Some of you might remember that Kantrowitz was the founder of FinAid.org, but he is now the publisher at Edvisor Network.)

The Best Tax Credit

As I’ve already mentioned, the best tax benefit for most parents will be the American Opportunity Tax Credit. If parents qualify, they can claim a maximum $2,500 tax credit for each child in college.

To capture the American Opportunity Tax Credit, taxpayers can claim 100% of the first $2,000 that they spend on qualified college expenses for a student and 25% on the next $2,000 spent. Tuition and fees and course materials such as textbooks, supplies and equipment are eligible expenses. Room and board do not count. Parents can use this credit for no more than four years of college.

To qualify, a family’s modified adjusted gross income must be under $90,000 for a parent filing as a single taxpayer or under $180,000 for married parents filing jointly. There is also a phase-out period.

No Double Dipping

What’s tricky about using the American Opportunity Tax Credit, as well as other tax credits and deductions, is that no double dipping is allowed. Parents can’t use the same educational expenses to qualify for more than one education tax benefit and that includes tax-free withdrawals from a 529 college account. (Those tax-free withdrawals are considered an educational benefit.) So when my husband and I claimed the American Opportunity Tax Credit, we had to make sure that we weren’t using the same expenses twice.

For instance, if you withdrew $4,000 from a 529 plan to help pay for college tuition, you couldn’t use that same expenditure to qualify for the American Opportunity Tax Credit.

Bottom Line:

When filing your taxes this year, make sure to see if you can capture the American Opportunity Tax Credit or one of the other higher-ed freebies from Uncle Sam. They represent a great way to defray the cost of college.

If paying for college is going to be a challenge, and it usually is, it’s important that you obtain your Expected Family Contribution before your begin looking at colleges with your teenagers.

In fact, obtaining your EFC should be the FIRST STEP you take in the college process.

Here is a quick rundown of what an EFC is, why it’s important, how you can obtain this critical figure and what you should do after you’ve generated  it.

No. 1:

An Expected Family Contribution is a dollar figure that represents what financial aid formulas believe you should be able to pay for one year of a child’s college education.

Families with adjusted gross incomes of $24,000 have an automatic EFC of $0. The EFC for the average American household with an AGI of $55,000 will usually range from $5,000 to $6,000. There is no cap on EFCs so some wealthy families will have EFCs that exceed the cost of an expensive private university.

No. 2:

Determining if a student will be eligible for need-based aid requires subtracting the EFC from a school’s cost of attendance. The more expensive the school is, the more likely the student would qualify for financial assistance.

In the first example, the student wouldn’t qualify for any need-based help because the family’s ability to pay exceeds the cost of the school. In the second scenario, however, the same student would be eligible for up to $25,000 in need-based aid from the private college because the price of this institution is far more expensive and exceeds the family’s EFC.

No. 3:

Families, who discover that they have a high EFC and aren’t eligible for need-based financial aid, should look for schools that provide merit scholarships that are given regardless of need. Most schools fall into this category.

No. 4:

If your EFC is modest, you should search for schools that provide excellent need-based assistance. Far fewer colleges and universities fit into this category.

No. 5:

Families with household incomes of $60,000 to $80,000 and above typically find that they do not qualify for need-based aid at state universities, but they may qualify for need-based aid at private schools.

No. 6:

Families will usually have to pay more for college than their EFC indicates they can afford because most schools do not meet 100% of a student’s demonstrated financial need. Consequently, it’s important to identify the most generous colleges and universities that would consider your child an attractive candidate.

No. 7:

It’s best to get a ballpark idea of what your Expected Family Contribution will be as early as your child’s freshman year in high school. Obtaining a preliminary EFC will give you a rough idea of the minimum amount that you will be expected to pay for college.

No. 8:

You can obtain your Expected Family Contribution by using the College Board’s EFC Calculator.  With this calculator, you’ll want to obtain your EFC using the federal and institutional formulas. Here is a screenshot of the calculator:

The calculator will produce an EFC using the federal methodology that is linked to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

The calculator will also produce an EFC using the institutional methodology, which is linked to the CSS/Financial Aid PROFILE, which is a product of the College Board. The vast majority of private and public colleges and universities only use the FAFSA while 260 mostly private, selective schools use the PROFILE.

No. 9:

When you complete the FAFSA, you will receive your official federal EFC via an electronic document called the Student Aid Report. The SAR will include the family’s Expected Family Contribution near the top of the report and also provide all the information that the family provided on the FAFSA. Parents should check for accuracy.

No. 10:

If you need to file the PROFILE, you will not receive your EFC from the College Board, which owns and operates this financial aid application. Institutions that use the PROFILE customize their aid applications by choosing from hundreds of different questions so you will end up with a different EFC for each school.

No. 11:

You should ask each PROFILE school for your EFC if the institutions do not include this important dollar figure on your financial aid awards.

No. 12:

Many schools fail to include a family’s EFC on their financial aid awards. Some institutions suggest that including the EFC on their aid letters will confuse families. More likely, schools don’t want to share EFC figures with families because parents would then be able to determine if the package is stingy.

No. 13:

Once you have your EFC and the financial aid package, compare your EFC with what a school is offering. Let’s say that the cost of a school after deducting institutional grants is $39,000 and your EFC is $28,000. That means there is an $11,000 gap between what your EFC suggests that you can pay and what the school wants to charge you.

No. 14:

Plug new numbers into the EFC calculator if your financial situation changes due to such things as a divorce, separation, death, disability, job loss or the care of an elderly parent.

No. 15:

Don’t be surprised if your EFC figures seem too high. The financial aid formulas as flawed and aren’t designed to accurately measure what you can actually afford to pay for college!

If you’re like millions of other parents with teenagers, you are stressed about your child’s college choices and how you’re going to pay the tab.

Beginning May 19, I will launch my next online course for parents that will teach you, step-by-step, how to become an incredibly smart college shopper in just eight weeks.

Benefits of Taking the Course

Taking the eight-week course should help you lower your stress level (I’d be shocked if it doesn’t) and potentially save you tens of thousands of dollars or more.

 To learn more about my popular class, CLICK THIS LINK

You will also discover more by watching my YouTube video below.

Lynn’s class FAQs:

Is this course worthwhile if I don’t qualify for financial aid?

 Definitely!

This course provides strategies for parents who are seeking financial aid, as well as high-income parents who are looking for merit awards.

You will learn, for instance, how to evaluate the generosity of schools – well before your child applies – regardless of whether you’re eager to capture financial aid or merit scholarships. And I’ll explain where to look for promising sources of money!

Does this class take place at a particular time? 

No. It’s a self-paced course that’s designed for busy parents.

You can visit my online classroom and take advantage of all the materials whenever you want during the eight-week class.  You can also download ALL the materials when the class ends.

Here’s what you’ll find in the classroom:

• Dozens of written lessons.
• Videos.
• Handouts.
• A new parent forum. Ask me questions and interact with parents from around the country.
• Webinars. The webinars are the only live events, but you will receive all the recordings if you can’t participate.

My child’s a freshman, it is too early to take the class? 

If your child will be in high school in the fall – no matter what grade – this course is ideal for you.  The sooner you take the class, the more time you have to implement the strategies that you’ve learned.

Get your 56-page college guide bonus for enrolling now

If you enroll in the class by May 13, you’ll receive as a bonus, My Guide to Building the Perfect College List (56 pages), which is only available through the course. The guide provides many online resources, along with screenshots and instructions, to help you generate ideas when looking for and evaluating schools.

Testimonials

I’ve gotten tremendous feedback from parents taking my course. Here are just two examples:

“Your class has been utterly transformative in the way we approach the college search. I’m excited because I feel there’s a whole new vista ahead with many more promising schools than I had originally thought.”

Elizabeth Rosenblum, MD
Professor of Clinical Medicine, University of California San Diego

 “This course is a treasure for parents seeking the best academic and financial fit for college-bound kids. Lynn’s expertise facilitated one child earning a full tuition scholarship at Miami University and another an athletic scholarship at Stanford.”

Laurence Stefan

Television Produce, Los Angeles, CA

Course price

The cost of the course is $295, which is a great value since you can ask me questions for the entire EIGHT weeks. I  turn down all requests to provide individual consulting to families so the only guaranteed way to get my advice is to enroll in the course.

Enroll now

Join the hundreds of parents who have taken this course and learn how to become an empowered college shopper. Then you can make the best college decisions and save money!

Enroll Today!

Course guarantee

If you’re wondering if this class is worth your time and money, I am happy to take all the risk. If you aren’t satisfied, you can receive a full refund during the first 30 days of the course. No questions asked.

Questions?

If you have questions about the class, email me. I hope to see you in the classroom soon!

Lynn O’Shaughnessy

Lynn@TheCollegeSolution.com

I am inviting you to attend my webinar on Tuesday or Thursday that will explain four ways that you can cut your college costs. For your convenience, I am offering two webinar dates:

May 12 (Tuesday), 5:30 p.m. PDT   Register here.

May 14 (Thursday), Noon PDT  Register here.

Everyone who registers for one of the webinar dates will receive the webinar recording.

What You’ll Learn at the Webinar

When you attend my complimentary webinar, here are four keys things you will discover:

• What critical step you should take before getting deep into the college search.
• What you should do if you qualify for financial aid.
• What your strategy should be if you are looking for merit scholarships.
• Valuable tools to evaluate the generosity of colleges and universities.

Ask Me Questions

During the webinar, you’ll also have an opportunity to ask me college questions.

Bonus: My Free College Guide

Everyone who attends the webinar will receive a special gift. After the webinar, I will send you my 56-page guide entitled, My Guide to Building a Great College List, which includes many resources to look for schools.

ALSO….Everyone who registers for the webinar will also receive the recording.

Register Now

To attend the complimentary event, please register today at GoToWebinar.com.

Register for the May 12 webinar 5:30 p.m. PDT.

Register for the May 14 webinar, noon PDT.

 Questions?

Just email me a Lynn@TheCollegeSolution.com.

Should juniors in high school take the new SAT test?

This is a question that many 11^th graders are stressing out about as the rollout for the new SAT approaches. The dramatically overhauled test will make its premiere on March 5, 2016.

Juniors will be the first to grapple with this question because the launch date of the new test will be too late for seniors. Meanwhile, ninth and tenth graders can sit back and read the reviews of the new test before they have to decide whether to take the ACT or the SAT.

In the video below, I asked Adam Ingersoll, who is a founder of Compass Education Group, a test-prep firm based in Beverly Hills and San Francisco, to share his advice on which test juniors should take. He also discussed differences among the new and old SAT and the ACT.

I sought out Ingersoll because his firm, which provides test prep to students around the globe, has annually produced an extremely helpful guide that among other things compares the ACT and SAT and provides updates on standardized test changes.

If you have questions about the SAT or ACT, I’d urge you to download a free copy of the 80-page resource entitled, The Compass Guide to College Admission Testing 2015-2016.

Standardized Test Choices for Juniors

Juniors, who are trying to figure out what standardized test to take, have the following three standardized-test options:

Current SAT. Dates: Oct. 3, Nov. 7, Dec. 5, Jan. 23.

New SAT. Dates: March 5, May 7, June 4.

ACT. Dates: Oct. 24, Dec. 12, Feb. 6, April 9, June 11.

Which Test to Take?

Here is what Ingersoll had to say about the three choices that juniors face:

New SAT

It’s best to avoid being a guinea pig for the new SAT.

The available practice tests and scaling for the new SAT are half-baked compared to its competitor (the ACT), and there’s little reason to sit for this test until it establishes a track record. All students should take the new PSAT offered at their school in October 2015 to see if they are one of the rare exceptions who is perfectly suited for the new SAT despite the compromises.

Current SAT

Ingersoll’s issue with the current SAT – discontinued as of January 2016 – is that the compressed timeline forces Juniors to try to peak on the test earlier than is realistic. Data show that very few students are able to peak on college admission tests until the end of 11th grade or fall of 12th grade.

For most Juniors, it’s always been a smart move to wait to take the SAT until second semester of 11th grade. This can especially be helpful for faring better on the math portion of the test.

If this year’s Juniors rush to take the current SAT by January and aren’t satisfied with their scores (likely the case), they wouldn’t be able to take that version of the test again. These Juniors would then either have to tackle the new SAT or the ACT, which are both significantly different from the soon-to-be-defunct SAT model.

Because of the likelihood of having to take the test twice – and remember Ingersoll’s clients are mostly affluent and their students typically do sit for the exam more than once – he believes it’s better for most juniors to ignore the old SAT.

Current SAT Exceptions

Ingersoll did say that there are a few Juniors who are well-advised to take the old SAT.

Juniors who scored at the 90+ percentile level on their Sophomore PSAT (the old version) and who have aced a practice test for the old SAT may want to go ahead and take it. These superstars probably wouldn’t have to take the SAT more than once.

ACT

Ingersoll believes the best option for most juniors will be the ACT. This test is a known quantity and if a student doesn’t do well on the ACT, it will be easier to transition to the new SAT than it would be to move from the old SAT to the new SAT version.

Here is some good news:

There are plenty of smart moves that you can make to reduce your college costs.

This is an especially important year to know what those options are because 2016 is bringing some big changes to the admission scene.

Learn the Strategies You Need to Make College Affordable

You’ll discover what these changes are, along with valuable cost-saving ideas, by attending my free webinar – Six Winning College Strategies for 2016.

Everyone attending the webinar will receive a copy of my new guide on making college more affordable.

Here are just two of the topics that I’ll tackle during the webinar:

1. Learn what the latest trends are for where the money for college is located in 2016.
2. Discover why applying for financial aid at any college will look different later this year when the rules change significantly.

Register for the Webinar!

To participate in my one-hour webinar next week, you must register for one of the times below:

Feb. 10 (Wed.) 5:30 p.m. Pacific, 8:30 pm Eastern. Register here.

Feb. 11 (Thursday) Noon Pacific, 3 pm Eastern. Register here.

Feb. 11 (Thursday) 5:30 pm Pacific, 8:30 pm Eastern. Register here.

Bonus

Everyone who attends a webinar will receive my new resource guide entitled, Six  Ways to Cut the Cost of College, which will reinforce what you’ve learned.

Enroll Now!

Please register today and share the webinar registration links with anyone else who could benefit.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy

Do you feel paralyzed by your college choices?

And, even more importantly, are you stressed about the crazy prices that colleges are charging for their bachelor’s degrees?

I can help.

I held a webinar on Memorial Day where I shared a variety of strategies that showed families how they can cut their college costs and find promising colleges and universities.

To watch a replay of the webinar, just click on the video screen image below. (The red arrow on the screen is pointing to my daughter Caitlin when she was in high school.)

College Topics

Here are topics that I tackled during the live session:

1. Where you should be looking for college money.
2. How to determine a college’s generosity before applying.
3. Why applying for financial aid at any college will look different in 2016 and beyond.
4. How to use an obscure, but exciting resource to evaluate what kind of salary your child will make based on his/her academic major at a specific school.
5. How to avoid a HUGE costly mistake when college shopping.

At the end of the webinar, I answered a lot of questions about a variety of college issues.

The webinar recording will be available for a limited time so please watch it soon!

Learn a Lot More

If you are truly serious about becoming an empowered college shopper, who is equipped to make the smartest college decisions, I’d urge you to enroll in my  popular online course, The College Cost Lab.

The class, which you can take at your own pace, can potentially save you tens of thousands of dollars or more!

The post Discover 5 Winning College Strategies appeared first on The College Solution.

The best way to make college more affordable is to enroll in my upcoming course, The College Cost Lab, that starts soon. You can learn more about the class and enroll here.

Will your children graduate from college?

And will they graduate with their declared academic major?

These are critically important questions that families routinely overlook. Unfortunately, families focus primarily on getting into college and not on whether their children will actually succeed and obtain a bachelor’s degree.

Too often students fail to graduate. Or they fail to earn a degree in their initial major.

A  new ground-breaking program by Educate to Career, which uses massive amounts of ACTUAL government data to access college-degree attainment, provides a sobering look at what is really doing on with college-degree success in this country.

Degree Attainment Statistics

Courtesy of Educate to Career, here are some sobering statistics:

• Undergraduates take an average of 5.3 years to graduate with a bachelor’s degree.
• Over 30% of students won’t graduate in even six years.
• Even top students may only graduate in their intended major approximately 50% of the time.

For the vast majority of families, understanding the probability of graduating and graduating with a specific major is infinitely more valuable than college rankings. That is why I’d urge you to take a look at ETC’s College Graduation Probability Program.

The probability program calculates the chance of success in graduating from a public university within five years for a student who has selected an academic major. It asks for these inputs:

• Gender
• State of residence.
• Academic major.
• High school grade point average.

Below is a screenshot of what you’ll see when using the tool. For some majors, the program also asks for the GPA in a relevant subject area.

What Factors Matter

Not surprisingly, the higher a person’s high school grade point average, the greater the chance of college success. What’s also crucial though is a student’s choice of academic major and the grades that the high school student received in the most relevant subject area.

Gender and the state where a child resides are also factors in academic success.

Example No. 1

Below you’ll see the result of a young woman from California whose overall high school GPA was in the 3.5 – 4.0 range. Her grades in math, which you won’t see in the example below, fell into that same GPA range. Her chances of graduating from college is 74.4%.

Example No. 2:

Interestingly enough, a young woman from Arkansas with the same academic profile and an interest in engineering would only have a 64% chance of graduating from college within five years.

Example No. 3:

While there has been a great focus in this country in getting more students to attend college, there has been alarmingly less attention on whether students will end up earning a degree. For the low-performing students, the choice of major can be critical.

In this example, I looked at a weak male student from New York who wanted to major in business or psychology. The chances of success were significantly better for a psychology major.

Business Major

The odds of graduating from college within five years when starting out as a business major would be just 27.8%.

Psychology Major

When starting out as a psychology major, the odds of graduating from college within five years would be 48.2%.

Graduation Probability Tool

You can use the probability tool for free to obtain the odds of graduating with a bachelor’s degree with any student’s profile. If you’d like to know the odds of the student graduating with his or her declared major, it will cost $25 for this premium data. Based on the information provided, you would also discoverwhat academic majors that students with the same GPA range, initial major and gender actually obtained.

For instance, for the young California woman, who hoped to graduate with an engineering degree, here is a breakdown of what happened to female students with the same profile:

• Obtained an engineering  degree  48.9%
• Obtained a business degree 7.6%
• Obtained a degree in all other majors 17.9%
• Didn’t graduate from college 25.6%

How to Use the Tool

Unfortunately, many students and parents have unrealistic notion’s about a child’s academic abilities. Plenty of students say they want to major in engineering because of the potential for higher salaries despite their weakness in math and sciences. This tool can provide a wake-up call.

You can use the graduation probability tool to:

• Make realistic academic major decisions after identifying academic weaknesses and strengths.
• Motivate students to apply themselves to perform better in high school.
• Determine if a child should start at a two-year college first or explore vocational opportunities.

Where the Data Comes From

The data set for this graduation probability program was developed by pulling data from a variety of government agencies and assimilating it into a common database which includes millions of graduate over the past four years. A private company, Job Search Intelligence, created the methodology and algorithms to tease out the data.

Job Search Intelligence is a leading provider of information relating to educational attainment and career outcomes. Among Job Search Intelligence’s clients are more than 5,000 employers, including over half of the Fortune 500.

Paul Hill, the president of Job Search Intelligence, says he has a small group of computer science PhDs from MIT and Carnegie Mellon working at the firm who relish pulling back the curtain on what’s really happening with college outcomes. Schools love to advertise with glossy brochures and slick websites, but the reality of what happens at these schools can be far less rosy.

The firm teamed up with Educate to Career, a nonprofit, to provide families with information about colleges, majors and salary outcomes that you can’t find elsewhere. Educate to Career relies on significantly more data points than any other source that I’m aware of. Job Search Intelligence uses dozens of data sources from such places as the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Federal Reserve, and National Center for Education Statistics when generating its college statistics.

You can learn more about this site here.

The main reason why you can’t find this information elsewhere is because there has been tremendous push back from the higher-ed industry, and particularly private colleges and universities, to make this sort of revealing information unavailable.

While Congress has forbidden the U.S. Department of Education from releasing relevant post-college salary figures for graduates from specific colleges, the folks at ETC and Job Search Intelligence relish filling this shameful information void.

The post College Majors and Graduation Odds appeared first on The College Solution.

I wrote this post last year, but wanted to share it again because the messages are equally relevant today!  Lynn O’Shaughnessy

Plenty of parents, who enroll in my online course – The College Cost Lab –  are affluent and highly educated.

Quite a few of these moms and dads would like to see their children attend elite schools.

Not surprisingly, these parents express concern about the cost of these highly prestigious schools. For those who don’t qualify for financial aid, some of these institutions are charging $280,000 for a SINGLE bachelor’s degree. And for parents with two or more children, the costs are beyond staggering – even for those with comfortable six-figure incomes.

One of the things these parents are learning is this:  the schools with the very shiniest brand names don’t have to bother giving merit scholarships to highly accomplished students from high-income families.

Why?  Because there are plenty of wealthy parents who will pay ANY amount to get their children into one of U.S. News & World Report’s darlings. A school like Harvard or Stanford could charge $1 million or $2 million for a bachelor’s degree and they’d still reject many teenagers.

Once this reality sinks in, these parents sometimes begin wondering if they should plunder their retirements accounts and/or take on debt to underwrite a degree at one of these elite schools that seem (notice the emphasis on seem) to have a monopoly on dispensing golden tickets.

Yale vs. Northeastern University

I got an email last week from a mom struggling with this very issue. Her son got into Yale with barely any financial aid and also got a full-tuition scholarship to Northeastern University.  The parents, who are in their 60s, would have to borrow six-figures to make Yale  financially possible.

To me this is an absolute no-brainer decision. Here was my advice, “Go to Northeastern!!!!”

This case also illustrates something else that’s common – a high-income teenager who gets nothing from an Ivy League school can routinely snag big, fat merit scholarships from countless other schools.

I’ve heard from so many moms and dads focused on underwriting an elite-school education through my course, in my talks and through my blog, that I felt compelled to write a post pointing out some key things these parents need to know.

You don’t have to go to an elite school to succeed!

This seems incredibly obvious to me, but it isn’t to many parents in wealthy communities that seem to view getting into prestigious colleges as some kind of trophy sport. For some parents, it becomes an obsession while their kids are still in diapers.

A Princeton admission rep once told someone I know that parents with preschoolers ask her what private schools their children should attend to boost their ultimate chances of a Princeton admission. Wow!

Even if I was to concede (and I’m definitely not!) that all the best jobs in the entire country go exclusively to the graduates of the most highly ranked colleges and universities, that would leave about 99.5% of jobs left to the rest of us.

LinkedIn Reality Check

If you don’t believe me, take a few minutes some day and look at your LinkedIn contacts. I bet most, if not all, of the most successful contacts you have did not attend a trophy school!

I made the LinkedIn suggestion recently when I was giving a talk at a financial conference in Las Vegas that attracted some extremely successful, fee-only financial advisors from across the country. When someone asked about the elite school advantage (he assumed there was one), I reacted by instructing anyone who had attended an Ivy League school to raise his/her hand. No one in the room did.

There have been some excellent and highly touted studies on whether an Ivy League bachelor’s degree conveys a professional advantage for students. The main conclusion of these papers was this:  students who attend Ivy League institutions and equally bright students who apply but get rejected from Ivy League schools end up making the same amount of money in their careers. These are bright and motivated students, after all, who can succeed wherever they go to school.

There was an exception to the research finding.  Minority and first-generation students who don’t enjoy the same advantages as the students whom the Ivy League schools specialize in educating – wealthy students  – did gain an advantage from attending these schools.

This Should Make You Feel Better

What should make parents feel better is this conclusion from Alan Krueger, the famous Princeton economist and coauthor of the studies:

He pointed out that the average SAT score at the most selective college that students apply to is a better predictor of their future earnings than the average SAT score at the college they attended. Read that again and let that sink in!

Here are excellent summaries from The New York Times and the Brookings Institute on what the famous Ivy League studies uncovered:

Revisiting the Value of Elite Colleges

 Who Needs Harvard?

It’s What You Do in College That Counts!

A Gallup survey conducted with Purdue University last year provided further evidence that people should really stop fixating on the elite schools.

The survey results indicated that the type of institution that college graduates attend matters less to their future happiness at home and work than the experiences they have at whatever college that they end up at. In fact, the survey concluded that whether respondents attended an elite school, a public flagship, a  private college or a regional state school didn’t matter at all.

I wrote the following blog post about this survey and used my daughter Caitlin (see photo), a Juniata College graduate, to illustrate how you can be incredibly successful at a college that most people have never heard of:

How My Daughter Made the Most Out of College

Striving for elite schools can cripple teenagers mentally

Finally, I’ve left the most important factor in the college-admission rat race for last. What mental-health price are teenagers paying who are aiming for these elite schools?

I had a mom in my class wonder last week if the burnout her daughter, a junior, is experiencing is normal. The girl is taking four AP classes and a honors class on top of all her extracurricular activities. The mom is worried how her daughter is going to do when she’ll face this crushing load while visiting colleges, applying to schools and taking her standardized tests.

I encounter this issue a lot when I talk at schools in high-income areas with ambitious parents. What I tell them is that their children do not have to be super human. There are many schools that would love high-achieving students whether they take four AP classes a semester or two or one and will reward them with merit scholarships.

I see a lot of panic at these schools where parents worry that other students are pulling ahead academically so they pile on more AP classes. At the high school where my husband attended, the premiere public school in Denver, some students are starting Calculus as freshmen to try to gain an edge. It’s nuts!

This academic escalation can have tragic consequences.

I’ll be giving a talk at Gunn High School in Palo Alto this spring (I’ve given several talks at Silicon Valley high schools) that has experienced eight student suicides in roughly the past five years. Here is a YouTube video from a girl who talked about a student suicide in November and there has been another suicide since then.

I would highly urge parents of teenagers attending these pressure-cooker high schools to read a wonderful book written by Madeline Levine entitled, The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids.

Here is a guest post from my blog recently that synthesizes Levine’s message that is definitely worth reading:

Why Affluent Teens Are Miserable

Bottom Line:

There are amazing colleges and universities in this country, many of which are under the radar, that offer excellent opportunities for their students.

It’s important to know that nationally around 75% of students get into their first-choice school. At most colleges and universities, it’s actually a buyer’s market not a seller’s market. Students have many, many choices if they are savvy enough to not just look at the same old two or three dozens schools that smart, high-income students tend to focus on.

The post Don’t Pay $280,00 for a Bachelor’s Degree appeared first on The College Solution.

During the past week, I shared Five Winning College Strategies during a webinar that attracted more than 1,000 viewers.

If you missed the webinar, which I offered on four different dates, you can still listen to the replay for a limited time period.

Here is the link to Five Winning College Strategies to Finding Great Schools and Cutting Their Price.

These are topics that I tackled during the live sessions:

1. Where you should be looking for college money.
2. How to determine a college’s generosity to your family before applying.
3. Huge new changes in the college admission process.
4. How to use an intriguing resource to evaluate the future earnings potential of your child at any college.
5. An easy step to avoid paying many thousands of dollars extra for college.

I also hopped on the Internet to show people some  wonderful resources to evaluate and/or find colleges.

The recording is available through Sunday. So please watch the presentation while there is still time and come prepared to learn!

The post 5 Winning College Strategies appeared first on The College Solution.

Financial aid awards are often confusing. I believe many colleges and universities intentionally make financial aid awards hard to decipher to trick families into thinking that their institutions are being generous even when they aren’t.

Obfuscation is an effective way to keep parents off balance.

Since we are heading into the season when students will be receiving their financial aid letters, I wanted to take a look at this critical part of the college admission process.

What Every Financial Aid Letter Should Contain

Here is what a good financial aid letter should contain:

• Full cost of attendance. This should be broken down into such expenses as tuition, room and board, textbooks and travel.
• Grants and scholarships.
• Types and amounts of loans. The loans should include the interest rates.
• Net amount student will have to pay after financial aid is deducted.
• Parent and student’s Expected Family Contribution.  

Most financial aid letters don’t include all these elements, which truly is an outrage. If you find a financial aid letter incomplete, you should contact the school and get the missing information.

Check the EFC

I want to especially encourage you to obtain your Expected Family Contribution from the college.

Your EFC is what the financial aid formula says your household should be able to pay for one year of college. If the EFC isn’t provided and it usually isn’t, you YOU CANNOT DETERMINE if the award is a fair one or not.

If you need it, here’s a quick background on what an EFC is:

Your First Financial Aid Step

I am going to use a financial letter that a parent gave me last year from Pace University that illustrates why knowing an EFC is critical when evaluating an award letter:

What’s Inside This Letter

When I first saw this letter I thought Pace University had not included this family’s EFC in the letter, but I later saw that it was at the very bottom of the award without including an explanation. (See bottom red arrow.) It would have been very easy for the parents and the student not to know what this number was or why it was so important.

Before I share what the significance of this figure is, let’s take a look at what Pace was offering and not offering.

Gift aid. Pace gave this student $33,075 in grants and scholarships. In the award, $7,575 of this assistance came from the federal government (Pell and SEOG grants).

Loans and work study. After the gift aid was deducted, this student would have been expected to pay $28,900 for one year of college since the total cost of attendance was $61,976.

The Lowest EFC Possible

Was this is a good award?

You might think so since $33,075 sure looks like a lot of free money. But in reality, this is a terrible award. The reason why I know this is because the aid letter includes the family’s EFC.

This student’s EFC is $0. This means, according to the formula, that she has the financial ability to pay $0 for college. Students get an automatic EFC when their adjusted gross income is $24,000 or less.

Pace was asking this impoverished student to pay $28,900 for one year of school. Clearly that would have been financial suicide for this low-income family to take out loans to cover this cost.

In contrast, someone with a higher EFC could have been thrilled with this type of assistance.

Let’s say a wealthy student with an EFC of $60,000 applied to Pace and got a merit award of $25,000 a year. Thanks to the merit award, the student would be paying far less than what his or her household EFC suggests the family could pay.

Bottom Line:

When a financial aid letter is incomplete, make sure you get all the information you need before making any decision about where your child will attend college and what you can afford.

Learn More!

The No. 1 way to cut the cost of college is to become an educated consumer. You can learn how by attending my popular online course, The College Cost Lab. I’ll be relaunching the course in late spring or early summer.

If you’d like to be notified when I have more details, please click here!

The post How to Decipher a Financial Aid Letter appeared first on The College Solution.

Over the past few days I had 1,300 people listen live to my webinar that revealed eight insider secrets that colleges aren’t eager to share, but that you need to know to find good college matches and shrink your college costs.

When you start looking for colleges, you need to be on guard just as you would walking onto a car lot!

The only way to get the best deals is to become a smart college shopper.

Find out why so many people made it a priority to watch the webinar! Click below to access the presentation. (In the slide, the red arrow points to my daughter Caitlin in high school).

A sampling of what you’ll learn…

Here are some of the topics that I covered during the mini workshop:

No. 1. Letting your teenager apply to whatever colleges they want – and hope for the best – will often be a financial disaster. And that’s what colleges want you to do!

No. 2. Many of the most popular universities can make the majority of their students pay full price because they can get away with it. Most colleges would like to do the same, but can’t.

No. 3. Discover the invaluable tool that many colleges would prefer you don’t use when comparing what YOU will pay.

No. 4. Many schools love to quote six-year graduation rates, which is disgraceful. Learn how to pinpoint four-year grad rates and compare schools within seconds.

No. 5. College job placement figures are often bogus. Discover a reliable source!

No. 6. Does it really matter if you attend an elite university?

 Learn MUCH more…

The post 1300 people listened to this webinar. You should too! appeared first on The College Solution.

Should you visit a college before you apply?

According to a new study, for some students there is a powerful benefit to visiting highly selective schools.

According to the researchers, teenagers, who apply to highly selective colleges and visit the campuses, are up to 40% more likely to be admitted than comparable students.

The study suggests that the applicants who would benefit from a campus visit to a highly selective school are teenagers who are otherwise qualified for admittance.

Why colleges care that you care!

Highly selective colleges can be gun shy about accepting solid applicants if they haven’t demonstrated interest in their institutions. Schools fear that these students are just using them as safety-school back ups if the institutions they really covet reject them.

Thanks to the Common Application, it’s become more challenging to know which students genuinely consider a school an attractive option because it is so easy to apply to a large number of schools. With the Common App, which nearly 700 schools use, students can apply to many schools without much extra effort.

Increasingly students, who are aiming for the most selective schools, are treating their applications like lottery tickets. While this often doesn’t work, they believe that applying to many elite institutions will boost their chances of winning.

While there are many ways for students to show interest in a college, the study suggested that it’s the visit that matters the most for highly selective schools. This reality will favor affluent students.

When a visit doesn’t matter

Visiting a campus, however, isn’t going to boost admission chances at all elite schools.  The most elite universities such as Stanford and Harvard couldn’t care less if you show up on campus because they enjoy very high admission yields. In other words, these alpha dogs aren’t worrying that a lot of accepted students are going to snub them.

How to measure demonstrated interest

Demonstrated interest isn’t just an issue for students wanting to attend highly selective schools!!

According to the National Association for College Admission Counseling, 50% of four-year colleges say they view demonstrated interest as having “considerable importance” or “moderate importance”  on admission decisions.

Luckily, there is no need to guess whether schools want applicants to show them some love.

An easy way to determine if a school uses demonstrated interest in its admission decisions is to head over to COLLEGEdata. Once there, you can check out how individual colleges rate 19 admission factors.

Each school is asked to rate the 19 admission factors in these four categories:

• Very important
• Important
• Considered
• Not considered

Schools rate all these admission factors in a document they complete called the Common Data Set. COLLEGEdata conveniently compiles much of this information on its website.

To access this data, here’s what to do:

• Click on College Search on COLLEGEdata’s home page.
• Type in the name of the school.
• Click on its Admissions hyperlink.
• Scroll down to the Selection of Students heading.

Stanford University example

Using Stanford as an example, let’s take a look at the 19 admission factors.

As you can see in this screenshot, Stanford doesn’t consider the level of an applicant’s interest at all. So clearly you won’t gain an admission advantage by taking a tour.

U.S. Naval Academy example

In contrast, the Naval Academy says it’s very important for a teenager to show interest in the school.

Visiting Colleges

The most obvious reason to visit a school is to determine if you even like the place enough to spend time and money applying.

Visiting colleges, however, can be expensive.

Living in California, it wasn’t cheap visiting colleges with my son and daughter in places like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Oregon, Washington, Illinois and Maryland.

Other ways to show you’re interested

There are many ways to demonstrate interest. Here are some of them:

• Reach out to the appropriate college admission representative. (Find the list of reps and their contact info on a school’s admission page).
• Apply early decision.
• Join a school’s Facebook page.
• Participate in a school’s online chats for prospective students.
• Request literature from a school’s website.
• Fill out a school’s interest card at a college fair.
• Interview in person or online if offered.
• Reach out to professors in a relevant major(s).
• Ask to be connected to current students.
• Follow the school on Twitter.

Focusing on applicants who have made the extra effort to contact a school allows an institution to gain better control of its admission process.

For many colleges, an unsolicited inquiry is the best type. From day one, a student who called, emailed or wrote a letter requesting information may receive more care and attention during the recruitment process.

The post How to Increase Your Admission Chances by 40% appeared first on The College Solution.

While U.S. News and World Report’s college rankings are wildly popular, few families know much about how they are created.

Before you place too much faith in U.S. News’ college rankings, here are 15 things that you should know about them.

1. U.S. News relies on rankings to stay alive.

U.S. News’ college rankings wields tremendous power even though the rankings giant is a shell of its former self. Long ago U.S. News couldn’t attract enough subscribers to keep the magazine going.

To survive, U.S. News issues junk rankings for all sorts of stuff including such things as hospitals, cars, diets, high schools, law firms, vacations, cruises and health insurers!

2. U.S. News’ college rankings have encouraged institutional bad behavior.

U.S. News’ college ranking system is one of the chief culprits for escalating college prices and encouraging harmful admission practices.

Millions of students have been adversely impacted by the rankings competition because of the actions of the audience that cares most deeply about the numbers – college presidents and their boards of trustees, and by extension, their admission offices.

For these folks, US News has provided them with an easy (though deeply flawed) scorecard to measure how their institutions are faring and they are distraught if their school’s ranking stalls out, or worse, drops.

3. The college rankings formula can be gamed.

Plenty of universities have figured out how to crack the code to climb up the rankings ladder.

Northeastern University is one of the schools that focused single-mindedly on improving their rankings. Two decades ago, Northeastern was considered an third-tier, blue-collar commuter school stuck with an unattractive campus.

But then a new college president took over and focused single mindedly on  saving the institution by doing whatever was possible to boost its U.S. News ranking.

Four years ago, Boston Magazine explored this Cinderella tale and quoted the Northeastern president as saying, “There’s no question that the system invites gaming.”

U.S. News ranks Northeastern, which is now an extremely popular destination, as No. 40 in the coveted national university category. Twenty years ago it was ranked No. 162 and it was rare for anyone outside of Boston to have heard of it.

George Washington University was another struggling commuter school that successfully cracked the U.S. News college rankings code and began attracting affluent students who could pay higher prices for a bachelor’s degree and, in turn, attract even more high-income teenagers.

Here is an article from Washington Monthly about how ranking manipulation catapulted GWU in the rankings. It’s now ranked No. 56 in the national university category.

4. Popularity is a big ratings factor.

A school’s reputation among the right people will significantly impact it’s U.S. News ranking.

In annual surveys, three administrators from the offices of president, provost and admission at each school in the national university category, for instance, must assess what they think about all their peers on a one-to-five grading scale. (One is marginal and five is distinguished.)

Here, however, is the dilemma:

What do administrators at UCLA, Johns Hopkins, University of Tulsa and Clemson know about what’s going on at Brandeis, Case Western Reserve, Virginia Tech and Florida State, much less 300 other schools in the national university category?

Or how about schools in the liberal arts college category that have far less name recognition. What do administrators at my son and daughter’s alma mater – Beloit and Juniata colleges – know about the academic quality at Lake Forest, Coe, Rhodes and Allegheny colleges?

Rating peers on one-to-five scale is an absurd exercise that administrators should refuse to do.

5. U.S. News measures six-year graduation rates.

I don’t know any parents who thinks that graduating from college in six years is acceptable. U.S. News, however, uses six-year rates when evaluating schools. Another head scratcher.

6. Rankings encourage colleges to favor affluent students.

US News awards schools which generate higher test scores and grade point averages for their incoming freshmen class, which favors rich students.

This focus on selectivity has been a boon for affluent high school students, who tend to enjoy better academic profiles. These teens can afford expensive test-prep courses and are more likely to have attended schools with stronger academic offerings. There is a strong positive correlation between standardized test scores and family income.

Attracting richer students allows the school to boost their sticker prices without alienating too many potential customers.

7. Rankings encourage the use of merit scholarships.

Before the rankings became so prominent, high-income students typically had to pay full price for college. The majority of grants were reserved for middle-class and low-income students, who required financial help.

But with the rankings premium linked to top students, private and public institutions began offering merit scholarships to entice smart, wealthy students to their campuses rather than to their competitors.

How do you cough up the money for these deal sweeteners?

One way is to raise the tuition price to generate extra revenue for these scholarships and another way is to reduce the financial aid to needy students. Low and middle-income students are the big losers in the rankings game.

8. Elite schools are the exception to merit awards.

The only schools that don’t offer merit scholarships to rich students are the institutions that are perched at the top of U.S. News’ college rankings.

Wealthy parents whose children get into the top-rated schools in U.S. News’ national university and liberal arts colleges categories, such as Stanford, Harvard, Princeton and Amherst, will pay roughly $300,000 for a SINGLE bachelor’s degree, but they won’t do it for other schools.

The most elite schools boast that they reserve their aid to the families who need financial help to attend college, but most of these institutions offer admissions to a shamefully low percentage of needy students. The most elite schools primarily educate wealthy students.

9. Rankings encourage admission tricks

For instance, US News’ algorithm favors schools that spurn more students. To increase their rejection rates, schools will court students through marketing materials and social media that they have no intention of accepting.

Here’s another trick: some institutions make it easy for students to apply via streamlined online applications, which are referred to in the industry as “fast apps.” Schools use this strategy to increase the size of their student body, as well as bump up their rejection rates.

10. Rankings don’t measure what’s important.

One of the perverse aspects about the rankings is that turning out thoughtful, articulate young men and women, who can write cogently and think critically won’t budge a school’s ranking up even one spot. Curiously enough, U.S. News doesn’t even attempt to measure the type of learning going on at schools.

In reality, the methodology fueling the rankings are a collection of subjective measurements that students and families are supposed to rely upon to pinpoint the schools doing the best job of educating undergraduates. U.S. News relies on proxies for educational quality, but these proxies are dubious at best.

11. Rankings encourage cheating.

Rankings have become such a high-stakes game that some schools send false data or have acted unethically. And I suspect that most of the schools that are manipulating their figures have never been caught. Those that have been outed include Claremont McKenna, U.S. Naval Academy, Baylor University, Emory University.

12. Rankings encourage debt.

This is incredibly infuriating –  the rankings giant ignores how much college debt students are incurring. It’s a terrible omission that is certainly one reason why college tuition continues to defy inflation.

US News rewards schools that spend freely and the rankings juggernaut doesn’t care if that requires universities to boost their prices and graduate students with staggering debt.

Here is an old post -that I wrote about this phenomenon for my previous college blog at CBS Moneywatch: 

Blaming College Rankings for Runaway College Costs

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a fascinating article for The New Yorker in 2011 on college rankings in which he talked about the incentive of institutions to turn their campuses into lavish palaces and stick the bill with the kids:

13. Don’t believe the numbers.

You should not believe that a college ranked No. 1 or 19th or 73rd is better than peers ranked 6th or 42nd or 95th best. I’ve seen too many parents make terrible financial sacrifices to send their kids to rankings darlings when it was completely unnecessary.

The school that you attend isn’t as important as what a student does wherever he or she lands. I wrote a post about my daughter four years ago that illustrates this fact.

14. Use U.S. News as a tip sheet.

Rather than focus on the numbers, consider using U.S. News rankings to generate ideas. This will be particularly helpful in searching for promising schools beyond the national university category, which includes nearly all of the nation’s best-known universities.

Try looking for ideas in U.S. News’ regional universities and liberal arts college categories and then start researching them.

15. U.S. News  is here to stay.

A few years ago, Brian Kelly, the U.S. News editor made this promise during an press interview:  “You can love us or hate us, but we’re not going away.”

The post 15 Things to Know About U.S. News’ College Rankings appeared first on The College Solution.

In honor of Father’s Day, I am rerunning a post that I wrote back in 2009 about my dad. In the main photo, he is watching one of his granddaughter’s play basketball with family including my daughter Caitlin with the broken arm. Lynn O’Shaughnessy

Today I’d like to share a 65-year-old story that illustrates the power of a college degree, as well as the kindness of two priests,  who recognized the intellectual potential of a poor Irish kid from St. Louis.

It’s a sweet story about my father, Vincent Patrick O’Shaughnessy, who is dying of pancreatic cancer. As I sit at his bedside, this is the story more than any others – and my dad has lots of stories – that I love to remember.

St. Louis University High School

My dad was supposed to attend an archdiocese high school back in the 1940’s, which would have provided him with an adequate education.  Father Redding, the pastor of my dad’s grade school at St. Cronan, however, asked my dad one day why he wasn’t going to attend St. Louis University High School, a Jesuit school for boys. At the time, SLUH was considered the finest high school in St. Louis and it still is today.

My dad explained that his parents couldn’t possibly afford SLUH’s tuition. My dad’s parents, grandparents and two siblings lived in a tiny three-room (not three bedroom) house with one electrical outlet on the wrong side of the tracks. Undeterred, the priest picked up the phone and got the principal of SLUH on the line. The principal agreed to give my dad a scholarship.

My dad was placed in the top honor’s track at SLUH and he managed to do well at the school even though he worked most nights at a grocery store to support his family since his father was disabled. My dad often couldn’t begin his homework until after midnight.

Dad with his kids 15 years ago.

From his hospital bed this week, my dad chuckled that the Jesuits at SLUH “brainwashed” him into believing that a college degree was not negotiable. He had to go to college. (His parents hadn’t even graduated from grade school.)

After graduating from high school, my dad was prepared to work his way through St. Louis University by attending classes at night, but then the GI bill came along after he got out of the Navy. He earned his electrical engineering degree at St. Louis University, where he made life-long friends, and he eventually pursued an engineering master’s degree and an MBA at SLU and Washington University in St. Louis respectively.

I can’t help thinking about how a simple phone call and the kindness of two priests changed the course of my dad’s life and his children as well. My dad’s brother and sister, who didn’t get the chance to attend an extraordinary college prep high school, never made it to college. And none of their children went to college either. All five of my mom and dad’s children graduated from college with at least one degree.

I wish I could thank the priests who gave my dad that chance. I will never forget their kindness.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution.

The post College and My Father appeared first on The College Solution.

Does your child need to attend an Ivy League college or other elite university to end up getting great jobs with great salaries? The answer is…

No.

No!

Noooo!

NOOOO!

Got It?

At the risk of being obnoxious, I repeated my answer because the parents, who are most likely to obsess about Ivy League colleges or other elite universities, are the ones who haven’t gotten the message or are resistant to it.

After crossing paths with thousands of parents over the years through my blog, presentations and my online course, I ultimately concluded that it’s the high-income, educated (often with advanced degrees) parents, who believe that a degree from a place like Stanford, Harvard or Duke is the best (and perhaps the only) way to ensure financial success for life.

What I find especially ironic is that these parents believe the Ivy League hype even though the vast majority of them didn’t attend these elite schools and they did just fine.

What these moms and dads don’t understand is that children from affluent households will typically earn higher lifetime salaries regardless of where they attend college. They don’t need a golden ticket from Harvard because they were born into golden-ticket households.

But hey, don’t believe me. Believe the respected researchers who have closely examined this issue.

A couple of landmark studies demonstrated this reality quite a few years ago and brand new research has produced some of the same conclusions, but with one fascinating twist.

Outcomes: Ivy League Degrees vs. Non-Ivy Degrees

Here are three main conclusions from the original studies, which were published in 2002 and 2011:

No. 1:

Students who graduated from Ivy League schools and those who were accepted into Ivies, but attended other institutions, ultimately made the same salaries over their careers.

No. 2:

Students who graduated from Ivies, as well as students who were rejected from the Ivies, but shared the same high academic profiles, also were making the same salaries in their careers.

Folks, it’s not the Ivies that make the difference.

To drive home this point to a ridiculous degree, I have told people that bright, rich students could have spent their college years in a closet and they likely would still have become successful.

No. 3:

An Ivy League degree did result in higher salaries for students who were minorities, low-income and the children of parents without college degrees. This makes sense since these children don’t enjoy the benefits  that wealthy children have.

Despite the documented benefit of an elite degree for students of modest means, the prestigious schools primarily fill their freshmen ranks with overachievers from rich and ultra-rich households. (This is the kind of stuff that has made me cynical – actually disgusted – about higher-ed behavior, but that’s a subject for another day.)

Dive Deeper in Ivy League Research

Here is a blog post that I wrote back in 2011 about these two highly cited studies, as well as a New York Times article about this research:

• The Myth of the Ivy League
• Revisiting the Value of Elite Colleges

A Follow-Up Study on Ivy League Educations

I ran across a study, which was published last month, that prompted me to revisit this issue. The aim of the authors from Virginia Tech, Tulane and University of Virginia was to determine if the findings of the original Ivy League studies were holding up.

New Ivy League Study Findings

Here are three things that the academics found:

No. 1:

Just like the original studies, white, high-income white men with the same academic profiles did not enjoy any salary boost for attending an elite university.

No. 2:

Low-income and minority students, along with those without college-educated parents, did enjoy a significant salary boost.

No. 3:

Here is the different twist:  the overall income that women graduates from Ivy League schools earned was 14% higher than their non-Ivy League peers. That is certainly significant, but there’s a hitch.

The Ivy grads did not make more per hour in their jobs than their equally bright female peers.

Instead, these female Ivy grads earned more income overall because they stayed in the workforce longer. These women were more likely to delay marriage, to delay having children and stay working longer. The researchers also discovered that these women, who are more career focused, had a four percent lower chance of getting married.

Last month The Atlantic did a great job of summarizing all the research in this article:

Does It Matter Where You Go to College?

Bottom Line:

I think it’s critically important for affluent parents (and their children) to stop fixating on these elite research universities.

Attending these colleges perversely requires near perfection from admission offices. Teenagers must sacrifice their high school years in an attempt to achieve that perfection which can lead to abject misery, mental health and physical disorders and alienation from parents.

Here is an insightful and important post about the toxicity of the elite admission race that a guest contributor – Matt Steiner from Compass Education – wrote several years ago.

Why Affluent Teens Are Miserable

Get a Road Map for College

If you want to learn how to cut the cost of college and find wonderful schools, enroll today in my online course – The College Cost Lab. Discover what you’ll learn by clicking here.

The post Looking Beyond Ivy League Hype appeared first on The College Solution.

The college admission scandal that saturated the press this week made me think of a disturbing anecdote, which I heard last month, that blew my mind.

I want to emphasize that shocking me is tough to do since covering the higher-ed industry – and it is very much an industry – has made me quite cynical and disgusted about how the college admission process works.

College admissions is clearly rigged in favor of the rich and powerful against everybody else.

My conversation was with a mom, who runs in extremely elite circles. She told me about a friend of hers who was desperate to get her oldest child into a private high school in California that is known as a pipeline for elite universities.

When the private high school rejected the teenager’s application, the mom and dad tried something different. Through an intermediary, the parents offered to donate $5 million to the school.

Bingo!!

Two hours after the offer was made, the teenager received an acceptance. (In case you’re wondering, the parents didn’t even try to bribe at a lower amount!)

College Admissions and the Wealthy

Extremely rich parents don’t need to play by the rules and I’m not just talking about lawbreakers!

Sadly, too many of these parents see their self-worth linked tightly to their own children’s success. And they define success in quite cramped and pathetic terms: the wow factor of the college sweatshirt that their kids will be wearing when the college hunt is finished.

Here are some thoughts on this problem:

Colleges favor students born on third base.

No admission directors were implicated in the schemes. College coaches were the ones who got caught. That said, admission directors do favor the wealthy and privileged.

An eye-opening 2017 article in The New York times documented this favoritism.

The article discovered that 38 elite schools, including some caught up in the current scandal, have more students enrolled from the top one percent of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60 percent.

If you check out the article, you can type in the name of any state or private college and see how many one percenters attend any institution that interests you.

Here is a screenshot that show the schools that attract the most one percenters:

Here is something else the The New York Times discovered:

Roughly one in four of the students in households with the top 0.1 percent of income attend an elite college – universities that typically cluster toward the top of annual U.S. News & World Report rankings.

In contrast, less than one-half of one percent of children from the bottom fifth of American families attend an elite college; less than half attend any college at all.

The allure of full pays.

People gripe about affirmative action, but affirmative action overwhelmingly favors rich teenagers. You don’t have to be as accomplished if mom and dad makes a lot of money.

Schools love to attract what they call “full pay” (I.e. rich) students. Most colleges must give these children merit scholarships to attend their schools, but the most elite don’t.

These schools aren’t dummies – they know that parents are desperate to get their kids into the U.S. News’ darlings and they will pay any price.

The super rich can start at the development office.

A book published back in 2006, and still very much relevant, captured many ways rich students are treated preferentially. He revealed, for instance, that some wealthy parents simply start the admission process by heading to the development office with promises of a hefty donation.

You may want to check it out:

The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges–and who Gets Left Outside the Gates

The author is Dan Golden, a journalist who won a Pulitizer Prize on the subject for The Wall Street Journal.

In a recent article in the Washington Post, Golden remarked that some rich parents treated his book as a how-to-guide to game the college admission system!

News articles since the current scandal broke suggests that the donation required for an easy admission at some elite schools has risen. A $10 million donation might not be a guarantee at some elite schools.

The thirst for prestige is insatiable.

Harvard and a few others could charge $1 million a year for tuition and they would still turn away most applicants.

There is a reason why schools inquire about parents.

Ever wonder why the CSS Profile, the financial aid application for selective private schools, wants to know the identity of the parents’ occupation and the colleges they are attended?

A parent who got an MBA at Harvard University and is now a venture capitalist is going to be more attractive to a school than a parent who got an associate degree and is a dental hygienist.

And schools can discriminate against those who need help. Parents are understandably freaked out by a question on the CSS Profile that asks if the family intends to apply for financial aid.

No school would admit that answering yes to the aid question will jeopardize admission chances, but it certainly happens.

Don’t expect anything positive to happen.

Some people are hoping that this scandal will encourage schools to examine their practices that are so heavily weighted towards helping those who don’t need it.

In an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Todd Rinehart, the vice chancellor for enrollment at the University of Denver, said that after the scandal broke he was encouraged to see many of his peers double down on their promises to examine and remove barriers to low-income students.

I wish I could be encouraged, but I’m not.

The wealthiest universities in the country that could end legacy admissions and accept more “normal” students haven’t done it.

These institutions have always catered to the powerful and the wealthy. Despite what they say, it’s their mission.

Stop stressing!

Rich parents need to stop thinking that they have failed as a parent if their children don’t attend an elite research university.

Conveying this attitude towards a child, even if it’s unspoken, is toxic. And, yes, heart breaking.

This, by the way,  is only a preoccupation of parents from very affluent communities.

Learn more…

If you want to learn more about this topic, The Chronicle of Higher Education has gathered what its staff has written in a special report. Some of it is only for subscribers, but a lot is available to anyone.

Admission Through the Side Door

Fight Back!

Okay, so you don’t have millions to get the attention of some Harvard big-wig. Big deal.

The best way to level the college admission playing field is to take my course – The College Cost Lab. Join now and you’ll start becoming a smart college consumer IMMEDIATELY!

The post College Admission Scandal: Symptom of a Larger Problem appeared first on The College Solution.

Should your child apply early decision to college?

This is the time of year when high school seniors aiming for more selective to elite colleges and universities must decide if they will apply early decision.

When students submit an early decision application, they promise that they will attend if the institution accepts them. A student accepted via early decision must withdraw all other college applications.

Early Decision Gamble

Unfortunately, students must make this ED commitment before they know what kind of financial aid or merit award the school might provide.

Because students are supposed to commit without this essential financial information, the ED route chiefly benefits wealthy families who can pay regardless of whether or not they are happy with the award package.

Early Decision Advantage

It’s easy to see why early decision is so popular.

Teenagers enjoy a significant admission advantage at many schools that offer early decision.

Colleges provide the admission advantage to ED applications because they want to lock in early as many incoming freshmen as they can. With so many students applying to large numbers of colleges, ED is a way for institutions to better control their admissions process.

You can discover if there is an early decision or early action advantage at a particular institution by heading to the College Board’s website.

I’m using American University to illustrate what you’ll discover because I don’t know of any other school where the ED admission advantage is so massive.

Step One:

Type in the name of the institution in the College Board’s search box.

Step Two:

Click on the school’s Applying link which is located in the left-hand column.

Step 3:

At the top of the Applying page, you’ll see the acceptance statistics for regular decision, early action and early decision applicants. You’ll also see the wait list stats.

The most recent acceptance rate for regular applications at American University was 31.5%. In contrast, the ED acceptance rate was a whopping 81.2%.

You’ll have to do your own math to generate the acceptance figures.

Another Early Decision Resource

Rather than researching schools individually, you can head to College Transitions, a college consulting firm based in Georgia that provides admission advice to families across the country.

College Transitions has compiled these admission figures for you. You’ll also find many other important college statistics in the firm’s Dataverse resource section.

Here is a sampling of College Transitions ED/EA list:

Should your child apply early decision?

Every year I get emails from parents who wonder if they should risk applying ED if they are going to need financial aid or merit scholarships.

There is no one right answer to this because you need to appreciate whether you are seeking need-based aid and/or merit scholarships and how generous a specific institution is with its aid policy.

American University and Early Decision

Let’s take a look at American University. This isn’t a school that is generous with its financial aid. According to College Board statistics, only 12% of students who have demonstrated financial need get their full financial need met.

The average need-based aid award at American University is $29,118, but the tuition and room/board is $64,769. And that doesn’t count transportation, books and miscellaneous expenses.

What’s more, the $29,118 figure is what the average award was to students who ended up attending. Add in the offers to applicants who walked away and the average award would certainly be lower.

For families looking for merit scholarships, American’s average merit award is just $13,347, which is a pittance compared to the price.

Should a family go ahead and apply ED to American University when the odds of getting accepted are so high, but the price tag could also be too high?

Net Price Calculators and Early Decision

To answer the ED question for American U. or any other school, families must use the institution’s net price calculator.

For those who don’t know what a net price calculator is, here is a quick description:

A net price calculator will provide a personal estimate of what a school will cost after any grants and scholarships from the institution itself are deducted from the price tag along with any applicable state and federal grants. A good calculator will ask for information such as the following…

• Parent and student incomes and assets
• Number in college
• Parent marital status
• Home equity (most schools don’t require this)
• Size of the household.
• Student’s GPA, test scores, class rank (won’t be asked if school doesn’t provide merit aid)

The federal government mandates that schools post a net price calculator on its website, but most families unfortunately don’t even know this invaluable tool exists.

For those concerned about cost, the use of a net price calculator is essential before applying ED anywhere.

But here’s the bad news…

Unfortunately, about half of the nation’s colleges and universities use lousy calculators that are just about useless. These pathetic calculators use a free federal template that ask the users few questions.

It’s a good bet that the calculator is a poor one if it takes about a minute or less to use. Another tip-off is that the calculator  won’t inquire about family’s assets and only asks for a household income range rather than requiring figures from the parents’ tax return.

Most selective schools do not use the terrible calculator offered by the federal government. One of the private institutions that relies on the faulty federal template, however, is American University’s net price calculator.

This makes applying to American U. via early decision even more of a crap shoot.

Applying Early Decision to Georgetown University

In contrast to the American U. decision, applying to elite schools with excellent financial aid doesn’t have to be so dicey. I’m using Georgetown University, which is also located in Washington DC, as an example.

For a family who has financial need, Georgetown U. says it meet 100% of demonstrated financial need for 100% of its financial aid students.

On the other hand, Georgetown, like most of the highest ranked universities, doesn’t provide any merit scholarships. So if you won’t qualify for any need-based aid, you will be required to pay full price.

Georgetown has a good calculator so you will know if this school is affordable before applying early decision. If the price is too high, look for other schools.

If a student needs financial aid, I don’t think it’s much of a risk to apply to elite schools like Georgetown that offer excellent financial aid packages. If a college has pledged to meet 100% of the demonstrated financial need of all its students, I believe it will usually be safe to apply.

Walking Away from an ED Acceptance

What if a child applies early decision and gets a lousy financial aid package?

As a practical matter, no school can force a child to attend. If the financial aid isn’t adequate you should talk to the school to seek more assistance and if that doesn’t work you can walk away.

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