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.

Test-optional practices favor affluent families.

When colleges roll out test-optional policies, they like to emphasize that this will boost the diversity of their campuses.

That’s because SAT and ACT scores are highly correlated with income. Teenagers with a household income of $200,000, for instance, will, on average, have higher test scores than students whose parents make $150,000 and on down the income ladder.

Peer-reviewed research by my friend Andrew Belasco, the CEO of College Transition, however, suggests that colleges tend to be no more diverse than before they roll out their test-optional policies.

The practice, however, does benefit colleges by increasing applications and boosting published test scores. The practice also favors high-income students, who can pay full price while keeping their mediocre test scores private.

Here is my blog post from back in 2014 when the research came out:

Who Is Benefiting From Test-Optional Admissions?

There is a reason why schools inquire about parents.

Ever wonder why the Common Application 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 Common Aopplication 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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When should you appeal a financial aid letter?

I wanted to answer this question from a mother in Seattle because during this coronavirus pandemic, it’s relevant to many more families. If you haven’t received enough help to pay for college, please keep reading and good luck!

Lynn O’Shaughnessy

Question:

If you’ve had one financial setback and you think more are likely to follow, should you wait until everything bad has happened, rather than sending a new letter with each calamity.

For example, one parent has had a wage cut, but there may also be a month-long furlough and the other parent could lose a job and the tenant could stop playing rent and there might be medical expenses if someone gets the virus.

Answer:

I would recommend to parents that they do not hang back with their request while they wait for other bad news to develop.

Parents should appeal their child’s award letter based on what their financial situation is right now.

I am sure financial aid offices are getting deluged right now with more aid requests. Parents need to get their requests in now because the money will run out. Think for a moment about how many people are unemployed and underemployed and that figure is only going to increase!

(The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has projected that unemployment could reach 32%, which would far exceed the peak unemployment during the Great Depression!)

Learn more about appealing

I wrote a post about appealing aid awards last week. Those who haven’t seen it, should check it out. Here is the link:

Appealing a Financial Aid Award During COVID-19

Great financial appeal letters

It’s a fact that there won’t be enough financial aid money to meet the legitimate financial needs of families. There never is, but this year it’s going to be worse.

You will boost your chances of capturing more money, however, if you know how to write a winning financial aid appeal letter.

The good news is that College Essay Guy, which is an excellent website for learning how to write college essays, has posted sample financial appeal letters. Here is the link:

How to Write a Great Financial Aid Appeal Letter

The post When should you appeal a financial aid letter? appeared first on The College Solution.

Earlier this month, I discussed the current college admission landscape with Mark Salisbury, the creator of TuitionFit, a nonprofit that’s been compared to the Kelly Blue Book of college pricing.

We shared our thoughts about what happened to college admission landscape last year and also shared our predictions about what will happen to college admissions in 2021.

If you are a parent of a student in high school, a college consultant  or a high school counselors, I’d urge you to watch the recording. It could save households tens of thousands of dollars, if not more by being smarter about targeting colleges.

We covered a lot of ground in the 81-minute discussion including these realities:

• The SAT/ACT test-optional move boosted applications to elite schools even more (as if they needed help.) Without needing test scores, teenagers thought they had a shot at the most elite universities, but in reality, this just made these institutions even harder to get into.
• The pandemic has illustrated even more keenly the huge divide between the rankings darlings and everybody else. Most colleges continue to struggle to attract enough students to fill their freshmen classes. And those are where the deals are.
• Don’t assume the first offer you get from a college is the last one! Schools, which aren’t swamped with applications, are often amenable to talking. The worse a school’s freshmen deposits are going, the more they are likely to deal.

You will learn a great deal more about becoming a smart college shopper by watching our conversation below!

The post Taking advantage of today’s college admission landscape 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.

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…

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