As juniors and seniors in high school you are probably well on your way to planning your college career. Getting ready for college can be extremely stressful on top of everything else you have to worry about, but luckily most high schools have resources to make the search and apply process a lot easier.

Many high schools host college information nights for juniors and seniors, and their families. Information nights give students and parents a broad overview of the college application process. Guidance counselors are on hand to provide direction and answer questions. Sometimes a school will even bring in a college admissions counselor to lend advice from their perspective. These events are particularly helpful to families who are sending their first child to college, but everyone should consider attending since things change so frequently.

The following is a list of topics that are usually covered at college information nights:

SATs and ACTs: All of your questions about when and where to take the SATs or ACTs will be answered. You will find out what the test dates are, where they are being offered, where to send your scores, what scores you should aim for and how many times you should take a particular test.

Visiting Colleges: You will learn how to schedule college visits and when the best times to visit are. You will find out what questions you should ask when you take a tour and how many schools you should visit to make the right decisions.

The Application Process: College applications are more than just pieces of paper. Someone from the guidance department will outline everything you need to include with your applications from the essay to the application fee.

The College Essay: Someone will go over the basics of writing a college essay. They will cover how to choose a topic, how long the essay should be and who should see your essay before you send it off.

Letters of Recommendation: Most colleges require that you submit letters of recommendation with your application. A guidance counselor will explain who these recommendations should come from, how many you should submit, and what they should say about you and your achievements .

FAFSA and Financial Aid: Financial aid can be the most confusing part of applying to college. Someone from the guidance department will go over when and how to fill out your FAFSA, what kinds of federal student loans and alternative student loans exist, and how to search for scholarships.

May and June is graduation time. Congratulations to all of you who have made it through. Now – time to start looking for a job – if you haven’t already.

One new resource for college graduates:

http://www.GraduateCenter.com

For those of you looking for work, check out their career center:

http://www.graduatecenter.com/careers/

and download their free eBook on How to Write a Great Cover Letter!

New York Times

April 1, 2008

The already crazed competition for admission to the nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges became even more intense this year, with many logging record low acceptance rates.

Harvard College, for example, offered admission to only 7.1 percent of the 27,462 high school seniors who applied — or, put another way, it rejected 93 of every 100 applicants, many with extraordinary achievements, like a perfect score on one of the SAT exams. Yale College accepted 8.3 percent of its 22,813 applicants. Both rates were records.

Columbia College admitted 8.7 percent of its applicants, Brown University and Dartmouth College 13 percent, and Bowdoin College and Georgetown University 18 percent — also records.

“We love the people we admitted, but we also love a very large number of the people who we were not able to admit,” said William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard College.

Some colleges said they placed more students on their waiting lists than in recent years, in part because of uncertainty over how many admitted students would decide to enroll. Harvard and Princeton stopped accepting students through early admission this academic year; that meant that more than 1,500 students who would have been admitted in December were likely to have applied to many elite schools in the regular round.

Many factors contributed to the tightening of the competition at the most selective colleges, admissions deans and high school counselors said, among them demographics. The number of high school graduates in the nation has grown each year over the last decade and a half, though demographers project that the figure will peak this year or next, which might reduce the competition a little.

Other factors were the ease of online applications, expanded financial aid packages, aggressive recruiting of a broader range of young people, and ambitious students’ applying to ever more colleges.

The eight Ivy League colleges mailed acceptance and rejection letters on Monday to tens of thousands of applicants. Students could learn the fate of their applications online beginning at 5 p.m. on Monday, so three of the colleges said they were not ready to make public their admissions data. But the expectation was that they would also turn out to have been more competitive than ever.

“For the schools that are perceived to have the most competitive admissions processes, there has been this persistent rise in applications,” said Jeffrey Brenzel, dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale.

Ten years ago, slightly fewer than 12,000 students applied to Yale, compared with the 22,813 who applied this year, Mr. Brenzel said. Yale’s admittance rate — the proportion of applicants offered admission — was nearly 18 percent in 1998, more than double the rate this year.

“We’re really happy with the class,” Mr. Brenzel said of the students offered admission. “On a day like today it’s also easy to be aware of the incredible number of fantastic students who you have to turn away, because you know they would be successful here.”

At Harvard, as at Yale, the applicant pool included an extraordinary number of academically gifted students. More than 2,500 of Harvard’s 27,462 applicants scored a perfect 800 on the SAT critical reading test, and 3,300 had 800 scores on the SAT math exam. More than 3,300 were ranked first in their high school class.

Admissions deans and high school guidance counselors said they spent hours at this time of year reminding students who had been put on waiting lists or rejected entirely that there were other excellent colleges on their lists — and that rejection was often about the overwhelming numbers, rather than their merits as individuals.

“I know why it matters so much, and I also don’t understand why it matters so much,” said William M. Shain, dean of admissions and financial aid at Bowdoin. “Where we went to college does not set us up for success or keep us away from it.”

By ALAN FINDER

A recent article in the New York Times tells the story of a young man from Pennsylvania who had no help and yet got into George Washington University. The focus of the article is on how wonderful it was that this young man was able to get into a college without help. I will be the first to admit that many students are able to find a good college without using professional help. However, the real question is whether the college is a good college for that student.

In reading through this story several items jump out at me. First is the list of schools to which this young man applied. He applied to Columbia, Delaware, Skidmore, Boston University and George Washington. All fine schools but all very different colleges. We have colleges in the middle of New York City to rural colleges. Large universities and small colleges. Extremely competitive to much less competitive. And the feel of each of these colleges is going to be very different from each other. These are colleges that do not normally compete for students with the other colleges on the list. Maybe there was some factor that made each of these colleges make sense for this young man but it appears to be a random list of colleges whose only similarity is that they are all on the East coast.

The second thing that struck me was the apparent lack of understanding of how financial aid works. The colleges this young man applied to range from one that provides 100% of need to one which only provides 79% of need. And many of these colleges have limited merit awards. With a middle income parent he did not have a financial safety college and may be paying more to attend college than he would otherwise need to if he had investigated the financial aspects of attending college.

Was this a good list of colleges for this young man? Possibly. But I suspect that this is really a story about a typical student who had inadequate guidance and ended up applying to various colleges without investigating who he has and what he wanted from a college. Without doing such self reflection a student ends up at a college that may be adequate for their wants and desires but won’t be the best fit.

I don’t see this story as a triumph of the little guy against those who had professional help. Rather, I think this story further illustrates the failure of most students to understand what it takes to find an appropriate college for each student. Do all students need professional help? No. But if they don’t have such help they must take the time to understand the process of finding the right college and the basics of financial aid. Otherwise, they face the very real possibility of finding the wrong college for their needs and paying too much for college.

Original post by College Admissions Partners

Trying to evaluated a financial aid award letter? Maybe compare one colleges award with another? A web site called FinancialAidLetter recently launched that posts actual financial aid award letters and evaluates them on the information provided in the letter.

The web site currently has 5 letters written to actual financial aid recipients which are given a grade depending on the information provided in the letter. It may be helpful for students and their parents to see some actual financial aid award letters to see what they look like and to see some of the possible information included. The site indicates that they will be including more financial aid award letters which would provide even more help for students.

The web site also offers a glossary of financial aid terms as well as some financial aid tips. This portion of the web site is less helpful as the financial aid definitions include so many terms and often in such detail that people not familiar with the financial aid process may get confused. Also the tips are not as well organized as they could be to help people understand the financial aid process.

Original post by College Admissions Partners