<p>Hi, first time post here, from a parent of an incoming HS student/class of 2015. I am just starting to get my head around the whole high school/college admissions thing and it seems a little overwhelming. </p>
<p>My kid is very bright and attends a very good private school -- just like thousands of other kids. He's read about Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and he wants to go Ivy League all the way. I feel a little intimidated after lurking in some of the college admissions conversations and all the things kids need to do today to get into a high-rated college. So, my questions are twofold:</p>
<p>1) is it a good idea to be thinking about this stuff now, before he even starts high school? </p>
<p>2) Does anybody have experience with using a college consultant early on in their kid's education -- I know lots of people use them later on, but it seems to me that it might be better to start planning way in advance, so it can be spread out and we don't miss any deadlines or opportunities. I don't know if a consultant can tell me anything I couldn't find out myself with some basic research.</p>
<p>I completely understand your thought process and concern, because your child’s future and happiness is so important to you. Especially with the first child, it’s can be difficult to figure out what to do. I would suggest you make an appointment with the college advisor in your son’s future high school. Every good, private high school we are familiar with has had a very knowledgeable and helpful college counseling advisor. You might be able to do this before the end of the semester to assure he is on the right tract as a freshman. To answer your questions as best I can:</p>
<p>1) Yes, I think it’s a good idea to be thinking of this now, because there are classes he must take as a freshman in hs as requirements for college admittance. It is important to assure he is on the right tract, i.e. Honors/AP/IB (for Ivy Leage) or minimally CP (general college) to assure he takes the requisite (+) courses.</p>
<p>He will need exceptional extracurriculars for most Ivy League. So , if he’s not involved in activities other than strictly studies, he should start now. He should aim for a leadership position in something if that’s his naure…find an activity of interest to him. He should look into clubs and sports, charitable activity or student government. One or more of them - depends on where his interests lie.</p>
<p>2) We did not use a college consultant, but we did pay for SAT prep when our d was a junior to assure she earned the best scores she could. She also took the ACT. Perhaps another parent who hired the consultant can advise as to whether it was worthwhile…</p>
<p>Best of luck to you … I hope your son enjoys his high school experience.</p>
<p>For my oldest we hired a college consultant. Was a waste of money. Got a lot more info reading this forum, although you have to read some of the comments with a jaundice eye.</p>
<p>Wish we had insisted that he take a SAT prep course. He didn’t and several of his peers who did scored much higher on their SATs. Always had thought that the SATs were a test that you couldn’t improve your scores by taking a course. Was proved wrong on that one.</p>
<p>In our area, it’s not really “the thing” to have an independent college counselor. Usually, people just go with whatever their high school offers. We have a friend who does this full-time. We decided to go with her. The total cost for 10-12th grades was $2000, so it wasn’t horrible. She was great - helped our S decide what classes to take (AP vs. honors vs. regular). She told him what SAT 2’s to take. She also encouraged him to get involved with different things and to focus on 2 or 3 activities, rather than a lot of little ones. The BIG help she gave him was when he was writing his essays. She told him his original idea for his common app essay wasn’t unique enough and he went in another direction. Last summer, they went back and forth by email editting and polishing that essay. There were also other essays for supplements she helped him with. On top of that, she went over his common app carefully, looking for errors, order of activities, etc. My S’s application was definitely HIM, but it was polished. Our college counselor also gave great advice about what schools to apply to. He wanted Cornell engineering ED, but she helped come up with alternate plans if that didn’t work. He applied to Michigan, GT, Notre Dame EA. He also was going Lehigh, BC, UVA, and some others RD. With all the work and stress of senior year, she encouraged him to get the app stuff done over the summer. Made for a more relaxed senior year. She told us he had a good chance at getting in everywhere he applied and she was right. She had advised him to go Cornell ED if that was what he truly wanted and he got in there on Dec. 9. Was it worth the $2,000 - ABSOLUTELY!!! Yes, this can all be done by research. There’s a lot of misinformation on CC - lots of it is based on personal perspectives. It’s helpful, but not always accurate for everyone. Our independent college counselor helped our S present himself in the best possible light without taking “him” out of the application. His essays still resonated “him” and that’s what we most appreciate. She knew exactly how to help him maximize his chances. If anyone wants her name, private message me. She works with people out of state. I love that she’s been to most colleges…</p>
<p>If you are thinking about using a consultant, it’s best to do it early on, like freshman year. It’s pointless by the time a student is junior or senior. A good consultant won’t tell your kid to do anything he doesn’t want to do or has no interest in. </p>
<p>I have been on CC for a long time. If you could get a good consultant, it is not a waste money, not all consultants are good.</p>
<p>I say, save your money, do your own research via online websites such as Princeton Review, Collegeboard, Petersons, US News Rankings, buy books etc and frequent this forum, you will self-educate yourself. </p>
<p>Buy “Paying for College Without Going Broke” Kalman Chany, Princeton Review, 2011 Edition, take your tax returns for 2010 & calculate your EFC, (Expected Family Contribution), know what you are up against financially! </p>
<p>Also, find the 2010 Edition of this book online and keep it, it shows how to calculate the IM (Institutional Methodology) EFC, which many private schools use. The IM calculation is dropped from the 2011 Edition of this book as the Collegeboard would not release the information to Kal Chany for publication. </p>
<p>My H & I are putting 4 children through college for 11 consecutive years, so we are self-educated in this process. Best of luck!</p>
<p>Laurel- take the money you’d have spent on a consultant and invest it.</p>
<p>I think there are more kids who get into their “dream school” (if such a thing exists) only to discover they can’t afford it, than there are kids who don’t get into a college that suits them due to lack of a paid consultant back in Freshman year.</p>
<p>Make sure your kid has a library card and uses it; make sure your kid starts to read the newspaper every day; leave interesting magazines like the Economist and Atlantic and New Yorker and the New Republic lying around (both for the breadth of subjects they write about and the quality/complexity of their writing) and make sure your kid gets a good nights sleep more often than not and doesn’t eat dinner every night out of a bag in the back seat of your car— and you’ll all do fine.</p>
<p>I think it all depends what you are trying to achieve. If your kid is applying to schools with admit rate of less than 10%, it doesn´t just happen. A consultant alone is not going to do it for your kid. I know my kid is working her butt off. In the last few months, it has been 2 hours of SAT practice (both I and IIs), on top of her IB course load, 15 hours of dance, writing essays for summer program application(s). She has sacrificed a lot of personal time with friends.</p>
<p>I should let my kids (at least one of them has strong desire to go to a top college. she is entering HS) read oldfort post. It may inspire her or scare her, whatever, it’ll be good for her. :)</p>
<p>You say your son is in a private school. Doesn’t that mean that he already has a pretty good college counselor there? </p>
<p>There is a lot to learn about the college admissions process, but IMHO, it’s all very interesting stuff and by starting on this forum you CAN educate yourself.</p>
<p>Early on in high school, a private consultant may not be able to give you much more than what the college counselor/advisor at your kid’s school can give you and what you can find out on your own. Specifically if your kid goes to a very good private school, they’re going to have good college counseling at the school, because one of the things that they’ll be focused on is how to get all the kids there into a very good college. </p>
<p>Also, keep in mind that your kid is 14. He may be 100% fixated on the Ivy League now, and that’s great, it will be a good motivator for him and a great goal. But as he goes through high school, he may suddenly fall in love with Amherst, or Stanford, or Bard or something else. </p>
<p>The main things at his age to help him down the line are the things any good college counselor at his school, or any book on top tier admissions can tell you: he needs to be getting good grades in the most challenging courses and he needs to be pursuing the things that interest him, whatever those are. His goal should be a leadership position in whatever extracurriculars interest him, whether that’s first chair in the orchestra, lead in the school play, captain of the team, president of the speech club, editor of the yearbook, etc. Doesn’t have to happen his freshman year, but something to aim for. And for Ivy Leagues it helps if he’s involved in more than one activity, though better he should be a leader in one intensive activity than a dabbler in several. </p>
<p>If his school doesn’t make everyone take the PSAT starting as freshmen, you might want to consider signing him up on your own. It doesn’t count until your junior year, but it’s good to practice now, it may help him during junior year when his scores will qualify him for the National Merit scholarship program (or not).</p>
<p>If you can afford it and can find a very good counselor, yes, it can make a difference. It can help to have an outsider knowledgeable in a field working with your student. It can also provide the incentive that mom’s nagging tends to kill. If I could find one that I knew was very, very good, and if I had the money, I would do it.</p>
<p>It’s good to be aware of what it takes to reach his goals, but don’t obsess about it. And especially not in front of him. Way too early for that. Come here and work out all your parental angst. :)</p>
<p>One concrete thing you can do freshman year is start his resume – just write down what awards he wins as he wins them, etc., so that come application time you don’t have to try to remember it all. You can start doing research on summer camps (there’s a forum for that!) if you want. Lots you can do here, behind the scenes, to get ready for when it matters.</p>
<p>Another idea: Find a mentor at your school, another parent who can teach you the ropes of what your ds needs to be doing at his school – tricks of the trade, best teachers, etc.</p>
<p>I was just at lunch this week with two people who used a college consultant, the same one, and both were lukewarm in their feelings about it. One only used him for financial information, and she did think that was helpful in terms of giving her ideas for how/where to move money, but she had an unusual situation in that she was getting a divorce, selling a house and lots of other things that were affecting finances.</p>
<p>Good luck! It’s a fun time if you don’t drive yourself crazy!</p>
<p>Truly, getting a good college consultant is like finding a good shrink. A lot of things have to click in addition to the person being good at what s/he does. </p>
<p>For those parents truly lost in the world of college apps, a consultant can serve as a guide. It’s just that the process is so danged expensive already that to add another high cost item really hurts my gut. I know for my rising high schooler, test prep including tutoring for it will probably be a good investment, but, man, coming up with the funds is going to be so difficult for me. I got zero from all of the test preps for my last one, which I suspected would be the case, because I worked with him pretty well too. Just not good at those tests. And just too slow, way to slow. But this next one tends to score high so getting the numbers up could make a big difference in merit and selectivity options.</p>
<p>We hired a college consultant thru a recommendation of a friend (she had use her and had a daughter at Princeton and another at Wellsley) in Jan of my daughter’s freshman yr of HS.
For us, it was worth it because our daughter, very smart, but didn’t understand the first thing about college.
We knew she would take advice, direction and be kept on track better from a counsultant than from us. Also, it was invaluable to have someone for her to go to with questions that we didn’t have answers for and that her school guidance counselor just wasn’t prepared to answer or help with.
Making a list of colleges, working on the common app, what tests to take and when was also a huge help from her consultant.
But, it all depends on the kid. Our daughter is what I’ve always referred to as the reluctant brainiac. She needed that someone to keep her one step ahead of everything you have to do to get into the college of your choice and fortunately she got into her number one choice.</p>
<p>Completely unnecessary, imo, especially if you are at a good private school. Also, imo, freshman year is too early to be thinking about getting into certain colleges. Let the kid enjoy high school for a bit, without the additional pressure of having to take certain courses, do certain things because of how it will look on an application. The process is already drawn out enough already.</p>
<p>Youdontsay’s advice to find a mentor parent at your son’s high school is great. A senior parent can give specific wisdom about inspiring or irrational teachers that no one from outside the school would know.</p>
<p>Other great sources of information:
CC
college websites, college newpapers online, college student blogs
common data sets for each college
your HS’s Naviance profile or equivalent data from the college counseling center.</p>
<p>My two favorite books to recommend to a freshman parent are Elizabeth Wissner Gross’s book “What High Schools Don’t Tell You” and Cal Newport’s book “How to be a High School Superstar”. Both have kind of silly titles, but useful advice about strategic planning from the beginning of high school.</p>
<p>Our experience with private school is that the schools themselves start the college conversation as early as middle school (yes, it was ridiculous), because their reputation, indeed their very existence, rests on where their grads get in. It’s likely there’s a counselor on staff dedicated solely to college advising. With that kind of support and expertise, a private counselor would be a real waste of money. (I’m assuming we’re talking about an independent school, not a religious one–the latter don’t provide the same level of services.)</p>