College Deadlines: Two Days and Counting

Today is the 28th day of April.  Your daughter or son must select one, and only one college in two days.  If s/he hasn’t yet made a choice, then this may be a sickeningly tense time in your home.  Here are five tips from Becker Academic, LLC, to help your child make a sensible decision in the next forty-eight hours.

Step One/Right Now:  Narrow the Field

Teens, parents:  Take a moment to breathe and focus your attention.  Inhale, exhale.  This is an important decision, but it is not a multiple choice test.  There may be–and very likely is–more than one right answer.

Look over the candidate colleges that are still in the running.  Should your child find more than three, encourage her/him to toss out the forth-, fifth-, sixth-place possibilities. There are not six number-one favorite colleges.  Three is a manageable number from which to make a choice.  Encourage selection of those three options.  Now.

Step Two/Five minutes from now:  Predict Student Indebtedness

Review the financial aid packages for the top three options.  Which ones include student loans?  What are the different dollar amounts of the loans?  If you multiply by four and add ten percent for escalating costs, what debt load will your child be carrying at the end of four years?  Discuss the implications of graduating with a debt, for which payments will begin nine months after your child is no longer a full-time student.

We at Becker Academic, LLC, recommend that an undergraduate not acquire more debt than the price that s/he would reasonably pay for a car in the first year after graduation.  The key word is ‘reasonably.’  For a teen who plans to major in electrical engineering, that debt could match the sticker price for a Lexus ISC-10 3.5-Liter V-6 convertible.  If your child wants to become a freelance journalist based in Paris, s/he should keep the student loan debt in the range of the Smart Fortwo Pure coupe.  (There are plenty of Smart cars in the alleys of the Marais.)  Should your child have no career plans at this stage, keep the level of indebtedness on the lower end of the automotive scale.

Step Three/Tonight or Tomorrow Night:  Assess Departmental Balance

To do this exercise, you will need access to the Internet.  Most public libraries have personal computers (PCs) for use at no charge, along with staff to assist you in the basics of PC operation.

For teens who have a prospective major, do the exercise for the respective academic departments of the two or three schools.  Otherwise, have your child select her/his preferred division within the liberal arts:

the Humanities (e.g., English, history, modern languages and literatures, mathematics, philosophy)

the Social Sciences (e.g., anthropology, criminology, economics, political science, psychology, sociology)

the Life and Natural Sciences (e.g., astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, physics)

For those students without a prospective major, use the department of English for Humanities preferences, economics for social science preferences, and biology for life and natural science preferences.  English, economics, and biology tend to be the largest departments within their divisions, and if these departments are lacking in faculty balance, then the smaller departments are unlikely to be better.

Divide a spreadsheet or a sheet of paper into five columns, with the headings:  College Name, Full Professor, Associate Professor, Assistant Professor and Other.  “Other” includes adjunct faculty, visiting faculty, instructors and faculty emeritii (retired).  These are the four categories of faculty rank that you will be considering.

Create a table with as many rows as there are colleges to consider, either two or three.

For each college, locate the official institutional website. (Hint:  the last four characters will be “.edu”.)  From the college homepage, click “academics” (usually in small print on the tool bar), then click “departments.”  Once you have found the list of departments, select the one that you will use for the exercise.  Within the department link, select “faculty.”

At this point, you should see a list of the current faculty in the department.  Sometimes there will be thumbnail photographs.  There may also be links to the webpages of the individual faculty members.

You want to identify the rank of each member of the department.  If you are fortunate, the ranks will be listed under or beside the names of the faculty.  If the college is less obliging, you may have to click on the individual webpages.  A rare few institutions do not rank faculty, in which case, you are welcome to call us and we’ll talk you through another option.

Place a “tick” mark in the cell of the table that corresponds to the rank of each member of the faculty for the first college.  Tally the marks:  e.g., 3 full professors, 4 associate professors, 2 assistant professors, 1 other.

Repeat the exercise for the other candidate colleges.

Compare your results.  You are looking for balance, rather than size.  A balanced department will have similar numbers of faculty in the three main categories and fewer numbers in the “other” category.  Ideally, the numbers will peak in the middle, at the associate level, because this is often the most productive stage of a faculty member’s career.

Departmental balance contributes to the mentoring of undergraduate students.  Mentoring includes providing opportunities to participate in research, to pursue internships, and to conduct independent study.  It extends to assisting the undergraduate with presentations at professional conferences and with courses approved for the major in study abroad programs.

Step Four/Tomorrow:  Consider Current Student Satisfaction

For the fourth step, your child needs to take the leading role.  S/he should telephone the admission offices of each candidate institution, identify herself/himself and ask to be put in contact with several current students.  If s/he has a proposed major, then students in that major are optimal contacts.

By cell phone, text, tweet or archaic email, your child can reach out to current students to explore key academic  issues, along with the social, athletic and extracurricular concerns that s/he may have.

Discuss the results of these exchanges with your child.

Here are a few sample questions, which are, alas, too long to tweet:

How often in a typical semester do you meet with your faculty advisor?

What topics do you discuss with your advisor in these meetings?

Are you or any of your friends doing research with faculty? What’s it like?

Can you describe the research project done by you or a friend who has received a summer stipend?

How have you handled difficulties enrolling in courses of your choice?

Step Five/For the Duration:  Resist Institutional Outreach

Every year, selective colleges and universities make stronger efforts to attract the high school students whom they have admitted.  The headline on the latest issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education (April 30) reads, “The Sweet and Subtle Science of Wooing the Admitted.”  Among your remaining parental responsibilities before your child’s high school graduation is encouraging a realistic appraisal of these institutional efforts at outreach.

If not exactly science, enrollment management is certainly big business.  In tough economic times, all colleges and universities–and their nicely compensated enrollment managers–are striving to increase their yields.  The “yield” is the proportion of admitted students who elect to attend the institution.

There is an arsenal of tactics to increase yield.  They range from receiving a friendly phone call from your child’s regional admission counselor to having your daughter discover the red rose left by local alumnae on the hood of her car. (I did not make up that example, and the recipient of the rose was a young woman.)

Encourage your child not to be swayed by these tactics–although s/he is certainly welcome to keep the rose. Focus decision-making on the cost and the value of the options for higher education.  Help your child grasp that her/his undergraduate years will center upon strong, positive relationships with the women and men of the faculty, not with the smiling faces in The Office of Admission.

. . . . .

As a last bit of advice for a stressful week, remember to breathe deeply.  And, don’t forget to celebrate together this weekend as a family!

cheering good choices,

dkb

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Money Matters: Tax Returns, College Costs, and the EFC

Okay.  Exhale.  April 15th was last week.  This Monday marks a new beginning, with 361 rich days to enjoy before the next hazing ritual of tax returns. There are few experiences that I detest more, despite the ease of online filing and electronic transfers.  Couldn’t I replace the tax nightmare for just one year with a nice trip to the endodontist?

If you are a parent with a child entering college next fall, the month of April can be worse than a double root canal.  Along with the tax mess, there comes the final selection of a college.  By May first, your teen needs to make a decision that will shape her life choices and life chances.  Before that date, you must decide if you can support her choice by fulfilling your Expected Family Contribution (EFC) to her dream school.  The two decisions are linked, and now that the offers of admission have been made, financial aid often become paramount.

At Becker Academic, LLC, we are not financial advisors.  However, our eight years of experience as educational sociologists have given us solid insights into the realm of EFCs and their appropriate role in college selection.  Here’s our quick take on seven aspects of the subject.  If you have other questions, send us an email and we’ll do our best to provide an answer or a suitable referral.

1.  What is the EFC?

The Expected Family Contribution is the dollar amount that parents/guardians are asked to make toward the annual cost of the child attending an institution of higher education.  The EFC will vary from year to year, depending:  1) on fluctuations in household income, 2) on the number of children currently attending college–but not including graduate school, and 3) on changes in the mathematical formula that the college or university uses to calculate the EFC.

2.  How is the EFC calculated?

Colleges and universities may use one of two options for assessing the EFC.  The first relies on a federal methodology and uses information that you provided on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).  The second inputs data provided by you to CSS Profile into parameters established by the individual institutions of higher education.  This second approach is sometimes called ‘the institutional methodology.”  Because the parameters for institutional methodologies differ, the dollar amounts of the EFCs for a student to attend different colleges seldom match.

3.  Why is there a huge range in the EFCs?

The EFCs of different schools can vary dramatically for a single family.  We often see variations that exceed ten thousand dollars.  When the difference in the EFC of two schools is relatively large, factors other than the institutional parameters are probably coming into play.  In these cases, check the college websites to determine whether the institutions are “need blind” and then see if their financial packages include merit aid.

4. What’s the significance of “need blind” admissions?

“Need blind” colleges and universities purport to make their admission decisions fully independent of the financial need of applicants.  Most schools making this claim abide by it.  However, if admission decisions and financial aid decisions are made in a single office at the college, full independence cannot be guaranteed, regardless of the claim.

Institutions that are not need blind may offer the disclaimer that they “do not meet full demonstrated need.”  A college or university that does not meet the full demonstrated need of all applicants, as determined by its institutional parameters, is free to entice select students with greater financial incentives.

5.  Should I be concerned if a non-need blind college offers my child a great package?

Yes.  You should be concerned that this marvelous offer may be a one-time deal.  When the college is meeting full demonstrated need for all, its EFC will not change much from one year to the next, so long as your family situation remains the same.  Any institution that does not guarantee to meet the full demonstrated need of all students can use financial aid as an inducement to attract newcomers and then lower the aid substantially once the students have acculturated to the institution.

6.  What about merit aid?

Merit aid is awarded for accomplishments or contributions that your child has made and/or can reasonably be expected to make to the college community.  Scholarships are the common form of merit aid, and they may be awarded by the institution or another organization.  Most scholarships are institutional, and the great majority are for academic merit.  You can also find scholarships for leadership, service and artistic pursuits.  (Athletic scholarships are a special category of merit aid, which relies upon direct student recruitment.)

Be sure to determine whether the merit aid will continue throughout the undergraduate career, assuming the student meets stated conditions (e.g., maintaining a specified grade point average).

6.  The EFC at my child’s dream school is totally unreasonable. What can I do?

First, determine whether the institution meets full demonstrated need for all students.  If it does, then you have the sole option of trying to negotiate an increase in merit aid.  Some admission officers have a small discretionary fund in the less familiar merit categories of leadership and service.  Review your child’s resume for possibly overlooked accomplishments in these areas.  Explore these possibilities in a conversation with the director of admissions–not with the admissions counselor for your region.

If the institution is not need-blind, then you have additional options when opening a dialogue with the director of admissions.  You can, for example, point to the more attractive offers that your child has received from competing colleges and ask whether the target school will meet the best offer.  Several outstanding institutions state plainly that they will match any offer from a college or university of comparable calibre.  Many schools are willing to consider the matter, although they do not make a public pronouncement to this effect.  In short, try bargaining! (But, remember the warning about continued funding.)

7.  The EFC at my child’s dream school is still totally unreasonable.  Now what do I do?

You have several options remaining.  You can ask the director of financial aid at the target institution to review your EFC.  (Processing errors do occur.)  You can meet with your financial advisor for suggestions about bridging the gap between the EFC and reality.  You can conduct a family discussion to explain the financial shortfall and to explore making good choices under constrained circumstances.  If you and your child have conducted a comprehensive college search, then other schools on her list will have made acceptable offers.  If there are no acceptable offers, consider the colleges with rolling admission deadlines, because these schools may still have openings and funds for the fall of 2010.

Read my next post for hints to help your child understand that our dreams come true in different ways and in different places.

Cheers to solvency,

dkb

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