What You Need to Know

With the ever increasing number of applications by better and better qualified students, colleges and universities are finding themselves in the envious position of being able to hand pick their freshman classes. And they’re willing to pay the price to get the students they want.

Today’s aggressive college environment, with colleges and universities competing to meet their bottom line or attain brighter, larger or more diverse student population, has caused the financial aid and the admissions processes to become more and more entwined in order to facilitate this shift toward “enrollment management.” Increasing amounts of financial assistance are finding their way to middle and upper-income families. Yet at the same time, the rationale for this “strategic packaging” becomes more and more evasive. So how does a family figure it all out, and figure it all out quickly?

The secret to this need for “extreme college planning” is simply two words.

The first is “process.” The major challenge in college planning today is not finding information. We're drowning in information. If you’ve been on the Internet and searched for college planning or scholarships, you know how many matches come up. It would take weeks to screen all the matching entries. So the problem is not the availability of information, but rather what to do with it once you've got it. How do you manage that information, bring a focus to it and make it meaningful to your student? How do you use it to make good educational and financial decisions? The answer--process.

The second is “involvement.” You must be involved--involved in the process, involved in every aspect of the process. You cannot afford to let the system take its own course. There are too many variables and too little information flowing between families and colleges. You have to be involved to insure that everything goes according to design; that the right things are being done at the right time, in the right way. You'll see as we continue, the basic principle to effective college planning is--involvement.

An “involved process” then is the key to your success. This involved process encompasses exploration and discovery, shopping and analysis, facilitation and negotiation. Through exploring the student’s skills and personality in conjunction with potential job and career opportunities, the student will discover the proper educational direction to support that career. Required education along with the student’s scholastic profile, personal and family preferences, provides parameters by which we can screen the pool of colleges and universities. Coupled with available information on those institutions’ historical financial aid performance and internally controlled scholarships and grants allows us to analysis them for “best value.” Once the field is narrowed to those colleges and universities we wish to apply to, applications and supporting documents must be facilitated for maximum effect and financial aid award letters analyzed and if appropriate, discussed with the school.