Selecting the Best College

Tailor the Choice to Your Child and Income
Selecting a college is one of the many major decisions parents help their children make. As you read on, we well consider how to tailor the choice to your child’s personality, how to help your child set goals, maximize standardized test scores (such as the ACT or the SAT), and how to pick colleges suitable for your child. In another post we looked into financial aid, ways to maximize the offer your child receives, and finding a bank or loan program that will minimize your costs. You can read the financial aid post by clicking here.

Where does you child want to go to college? Help your child make a choice that will be a comfortable one. If they have rarely been away from home before, then a school that is across the county may be too difficult to handle. Your child may need a college that is close enough to allow him to come home and visit once in a while. This is a tough choice for parents to handle dispassionately because they naturally want to keep their children close, but not stifle their growth. It has been my experience that most children need to get home once in while. I have seen gifted students, who had superior academic records in high school, fail out of colleges that were very far from home. There are many pressures placed upon new college students and getting home once in a while may be just what they need to remember who they are, and the values and traditions they were brought up to respect and appreciate.

Starting off at a two-year college may make sense for your child and your income. Spending the first two years at a community or junior college and the last two years in a four-year school can offer a substantial savings over attending only the four-year school. This is especially true if the child can commute for the first two years and must live away to attend the four-year school. Sometimes some of the credits earned at the two-year college will not be accepted at the four-year school, but many two-year colleges have arrangements with two year schools in their area to accept their credits. This should be thoroughly looked into before making your decision.

What to Ask Your Counselors
If you decide to apply to a four-year college directly out of high school, you should get to know your admissions counselor and you financial aid adviser. The admissions counselor can help you and your child decide what is the best program to enter. You child may have the grades and college test scores to enter any program the school offers; but even if they don’t you, may still be able to get them into the school. Some schools have lower entrance requirements for certain majors such as general studies or social sciences. If your child’s standardized test scores are low, ask the admissions counselor in which courses of study your child would most likely be accepted. Sometimes a freshmen can gain entry into one program for a semester, establish a respectable grade point average and then apply to transfer into the program that is their first choice. This will most likely not be effective until after they complete their second semester, but if this is what you must do, try to pick courses during the freshman year that will be acceptable in the major you child eventually plans to enter. Here again the admissions or other counselors can help you select courses. You can, and should, carefully read the college catalog, be sure to obtain one for the year under which your child enters. The admissions counselor should give you one and explain what courses students are required to attend and point out where this is written in the catalog, both for the major they are entering under and the major they plan to transfer to. If it takes one full year to transfer, ask if you will need to obtain a catalog for that year, or if you follow the catalog for the year in which the student first entered the college.

Of course if you want to enter a four-year school directly out of high school, you shouldn’t only apply to one college. How many schools you apply to will depend on the number of entrance essays your child can write and how much you can afford to spend on application fees. Some schools are very difficult to get into. Your child’s chance for acceptance will depend on a variety of criteria such as their score on standardized tests, their grades in high school, how well they write the entrance essay if any, evidence of involvement in community activities, and perhaps other criteria depending on the college. There are many other items you will need and your high school guidance adviser, college admission counselor, and the college web site should all be checked to make certain you haven’t overlooked anything. At a minimum you will also need to fill out the college’s official application form, provide at least two letters of recommendation, a high school transcript, and have standardized test scores sent directly to the college.

Check for Discounts and Scholarships
Some colleges offer discounts, such as waving the application fee, for students who fill out an application online or who attend a campus visit and make an application during their visit. The college counselor of the school’s web site should have this information, be sure to ask or to look for it.

Scholarships and financial aid are the two best ways to reduce college costs. When you visit the web sites for the colleges you are interested in, be sure to take a moment and review the scholarships the school offers. There just may be one that fits you.

Co-op Program Provides Valuable Experience
Co-operative education, or co-op, is a program available at many colleges. The way the program runs differs at each college. Generally it means that your child will work at a job for an employer in order to get job experience and also go to college. At some schools this may mean working a few hours a week and also taking classes, or it may mean working over summer vacation at a job the student and college select. At a few schools, the students will take courses with a traditional college schedule for a period, and the college will help the students select jobs appropriate for their majors. The students will then work at the job full-time for half a calendar year (six months). These six-month terms are alternated with six months of full-time attendance at college. This last type of plan usually means that the student must go to college for five years to complete the normal four-year program. I believe that actually working fulltime for half a year is the best way to get real job experience and build up a young graduate’s résumé. It also offers the employer the opportunity to assign a more important job to the co-op students because they can keep the position open by simply changing the co-op student every six months. In some schools there is a brief overlap of the two co-op cycles and the outgoing student can help train the incoming co-op student.