Weekly Update: February 25

BIGGEST COLLEGE-RELATED NEWS OF THE WEEK

SUBSTITUTE TEACHERS IN UNIFORM

In some striking images this week, the New York Times covered the use of the National Guard as substitute teachers in New Mexico schools, where the teaching staff has been severely impacted by COVID-19. 

While New Mexico is the only state to use the National Guard as substitutes, National Guard members have also driven school buses in Massachusetts, and police officers in Oklahoma have also served as substitute teachers. 

FLORIDA CONSIDERS FINANCIAL LITERACY REQUIREMENT

Virginia is one of a few states around the country that require students to learn personal finance in the classroom - including balancing a checkbook and completing a loan application. Florida may be the latest state to add a financial literacy requirement for high school graduation. We are big fans of practical coursework like this - and find that students are always more engaged when they know that they will use the material later in life.

VIRGINIA MASK MANDATES LIFT

Most Virginia counties have made mask mandates optional in schools, in response to Governor Youngkin’s recent executive order. In fact, Fairfax County is the last holdout - the only county that has not committed to switching to a mask-optional policy by March 1. 

Update! Earlier today, FCPS announced that masks will be optional starting Tuesday. You can read more about that here.

For an interesting exploration of how politics has played into parenting, both when it comes to mask mandates as well as curricula and vaccinations, check out this Atlantic article.

BEST ARTICLES OF THE WEEK

Yale professor Laurie Santos, instructor of the famous “Yale Happiness Class” and host of The Happiness Lab podcast, gave an interesting interview this week discussing her own feelings of burnout, as well as the anxiety that her students are experiencing. This is a useful interview for anyone trying to support college students - and anyone just looking to lead a happier life!

Based on a recently released Common ApplicationⓇ report, the number of applications has continued to increase this cycle, now up nearly 14% since before the pandemic. The report identifies nine key findings from applications up until the February 15 deadlines (p.s., these findings are all listed on the first page, so no need to read all 19 pages unless you’re admissions nerds like us :) 

Finally, we’re so excited to share this article, which includes some really important information about affording college. We often hear from students and parents that are cost-conscious that they prefer to look at public universities. But as the editor-in-chief of the Princeton Review says, “Never cross an expensive school off your list… by sticker price alone.” If you consider the possibilities of merit aid, whether schools consider financial need in admissions, and other factors, it is possible that a private education can end up being less expensive than a public one. 

OFFICE HAPPENINGS

February has FLOWN by and we are so excited to start reading student essays as they work through the STAGE Program with Staci. If you are a junior who has not yet booked your essay coaching meetings, make sure you get on the calendar to begin this process! 

Learning students’ personal stories is one of the best parts of this job - in fact, all week I have been thinking about an essay that one of our students wrote about his Ukrainian heritage (during a different application cycle). Such a devastating situation and we have been watching the news nonstop along with the rest of the world.

On a (much) lighter note, we have also been enjoying the end of the college basketball season! As some of you saw on instagram, my kids and I got to see Virginia beat Miami over the long weekend - so fun! Hopefully we will see another win against Florida State this weekend.

Have a great weekend and stay warm!

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Weekly Update: December 3

December already! We are excited to have heard some good news from our early applicants and are busy wrapping things up with the last of our late-late-start seniors.

BIGGEST COLLEGE-RELATED NEWS OF THE WEEK

NC STATE ENGINEERING INCREASES ENROLLMENT

Good news for engineering applicants! NC State is planning to add 2,000 more undergraduate students to its engineering program over the next five years. The College of Engineering at NC State offers sixteen majors, including computer science. Thanks to a state initiative called “Engineering North Carolina’s future,” the school will receive $20 million to hire new faculty and $30 million to upgrade facilities. 

UGA RELEASES EARLY APPLICATION DATA

Congrats to our students who received early acceptances from UGA last week! It was a competitive cycle, with applications up 3% over last year despite the fact that the Georgia system was one of only a handful in the country that required test scores this cycle. 8,900 students were accepted, 9,300 were deferred, and 2,000 were denied. If you received a defer decision from UGA, let us know ASAP so we can help you strategize for next steps. The admissions office notes that “We want to be able to have a more in-depth review of you, including short essays, activities, recommendations, etc.” - so send those requested materials!

CORNELL PRECOLLEGE WINTER COURSES

If you are looking to add to your activities list and take an enrichment course but don’t have the time to spend on it during the summer, Cornell’s Precollege Program has you covered! This is a really great program that we recommend to our clients, and applications are open now for winter courses that run January 3-21. Students can apply here by December 6 (or book an appointment to work on this or any other enrichment opportunity applications!). If you’re not already a current client, use this link instead.

BEST ARTICLES OF THE WEEK

We all know that students have been through a lot this year. And while most students are now back in school, they may still struggle to adjust to in-person learning after so much time away. This article provides some helpful guidance for parents who want to help their students make the adjustment back to in-person school. In addition to learning loss, students are struggling to develop age-appropriate social skills after being out of school for so long (just think - the last time seventh grade students had a completely normal school year was fourth grade!). 

But the article encourages parents to focus on support, rather than solutions. I know this is tough - after all, as parents, we want to be able to solve problems for our kids! But it is even more important for them to know that we are in their corner and supporting them during a difficult time. 

If you are one of the students who has already received an ED acceptance and knows where you are headed next year, you might be excited to share your plans with family over the holidays! But for most students, hearing “What are your plans for next year?” at every holiday gathering can cause a lot of stress. If that’s you, check out this article for tips on how to deal with this stress-inducing question. 

We’ve written before on the blog about some of the graduate degrees that don’t offer a return on investment - remember those masters students in film at Columbia? Even so, it is still generally accepted that professional degrees, like JDs and MDs, will offer students the opportunity to earn significantly higher salaries.

Surprisingly, the Wall Street Journal found that this is not always the case anymore - even professional degrees in essential fields like dentistry and veterinary medicine are leaving students with high debt that is not relieved by high salaries. The debt is bad news, particularly for medical fields like chiropractic medicine and optometry where practitioners are carrying a lot of debt. 

Everyone in higher ed right now is wondering about the impact of the omicron variant on campuses this spring. While things will certainly change, this Slate piece on the ways that various top schools handled Covid this fall is worth a read. Keep in mind, though - this is written by a student at Yale, and that perspective shines through. I got a laugh at the idea that by limiting the size of on-campus parties, Wash U “forced drunk college students” to go to bars with unvaccinated people from Missouri and therefore “exposed [the students] to higher chances of getting COVID.” I guess that’s one way to think about it… 🤷‍♀️

Finally, an interesting article in New York Magazine this week explored the possibility of “socializing” college sports. We’re not sure we agree with the idea, but it is interesting to explore, particularly the author’s assertion that colleges put caps on coaching salaries, arguing:

“A system like that would mean college football and basketball would no longer be able to compete for coaching talent with the pros. It would instead have to draw from coaches who just want to mentor college students. Would that be worse?”

This is worth considering particularly in light of the news about Lincoln Riley and Brian Kelly, who reportedly received compensation packages in the range of $100 million to coach football at USC and LSU, respectively. 

OFFICE HAPPENINGS

November 30 was the deadline for the UC and CSU system applications - and yes, the application sites crashed. Luckily for applicants, the systems extended the deadline until midnight yesterday - but they had been glitching for quite a while in advance, so even with the deadline, students lost valuable time to work on their applications.

This goes to show that YES, crashes happen! In fact, this kind of issue happens on application websites all the time - just one reason why we encourage all of our students to submit their applications as early as possible (at least two weeks before the deadline!). In case you are wondering, none of our students were impacted - because they all submitted their apps early!

Not surprisingly, Common App is experiencing a similar issue this week - the image below was posted online just before the 12/1 midnight deadline.

Hard to believe it is already December, but we’ve been working this week on holiday cards for all of our amazing clients - we are so grateful for you!!

Plus, some surprises in the works for our very hard-working colleagues in local school counseling offices ;) We love partnering with you to help students achieve their dreams!

Enjoy the weekend!

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Sleep Training and the College Admissions Process: Different Ages, Same Lesson

Did anyone else have kids that were awful sleepers as babies? I was always so envious of parents whose babies slept all night or woke up just once or twice.

That is NOT how things went in my house! When I had my daughter, I thought there must be something wrong with her because she just wouldn’t sleep. It was like she was nocturnal or something. Then I had my son and realized that maybe my daughter wasn’t quite so bad after all.

Election Night 2016. A terrible night in every respect! We found out later that he had acid reflux.

He routinely screamed all night long. Every night. For months. It was extremely unpleasant and ultimately got to a point where I just couldn’t take it anymore.

As soon as he was old enough to sleep train, we sought the guidance of a sleep trainer who we also used with my daughter five years earlier. (If anyone knows a parent with an infant, her name is Suzy Giordano and an hour with her is probably the best gift you could ever give someone).

I can honestly say that this woman saved my sanity and my marriage. Probably more than that. My business. Everything. I could not function because I was not getting any sleep and had to work all day.

So now that I have finished singing her praises, I will tell you that Suzy is not cheap. At all. I gave her information to a friend in an equally awful situation, and she was appalled that I would pay so much for sleep training. She clearly thought the sleep deprivation had gotten to my head.

Don’t get me wrong - I know she’s expensive, obscenely expensive. I am not the kind of person who routinely pays people $500/hr to do things for me, let’s put it that way. But the one thing I learned from paying Suzy Giordano was the difference between cost and value.

Let’s think of the value that woman brought to my life. I am not exaggerating when I say that I would have taken out a second mortgage on my home at that point to get some sleep. I was in a seriously desperate situation. Paying Suzy $500/hr actually represented an incredible value when you consider how working with her turned my life around. She was worth sooooo much more than we paid.

Recently I had a mother ask me to tell her point blank why my team is worth the cost of the prices we charge. In almost a decade, no one has ever actually asked me that.

After thinking about it more, I decided we probably weren’t worth it for every family. I’m being honest. There are definitely cheaper options out there - much cheaper - particularly if you’re willing to work with someone that doesn’t have college admissions experience but has helped their own child, or maybe knows absolutely nothing about college admissions but is a good writer who can help with essays.

If your situation meets all of these criteria, you are reading correctly - we are not worth the cost. Find someone cheaper!

• Your student already knows exactly how and where he wants to apply and the schools aren’t all crazy reaches (I say this because someone who only wants to apply to crazy reaches has a very high likelihood of ending up at NOVA when they don’t get in anywhere at all. Then they call me in May and the whole family is in tears and can’t figure out what went wrong. Every year this happens.) I’m talking about the straight-A kid with a 35 ACT who is involved in every activity under the sun and applying ED to UVA/ED II to William & Mary, as well as a number of other safer options. No out-of-the-box strategy or tough conversations about being realistic needed. Just write strong essays and make sure that the recommendations and applications are also done well.

• Your student is 100% (or at least 95%) motivated and does not need constant reminders to stay on task. You tell him that he needs 20 essays by August 1, he is able to self-regulate his time while meeting with a tutor once per week for extra help, and has 20 perfect essays ready to go on July 30. This kid does not need Rebeccah reminding him multiple times per week about every individual task he needs to finish in order to meet his ultimate goal and then checking up to make sure he completed each of them.

• Your student appreciates constructive criticism from his parents and takes it at face value without giving pushback or needing an intermediary to deliver tough messages. No fighting. “Thanks for your input, Mom! I’ll make that edit right away!”

• Your student is good at developing original ideas (he doesn’t have to be amazing in terms of style- you can hire a writing tutor on the side to help with that - but somebody familiar with the school, without the voice of a 50-year-old mom, has got to be able to help with content creation for that 600-word “Why College X” essay!).

• Your student has taken detailed notes from every college visit, is a regular on “College Confidential” and generally understands the specific unwritten requirements that many individual schools have. Yes, that means that the “Why Columbia” supplement needs to reference the core curriculum and the “Why Penn” supplement needs to reference the city of Philadelphia.

Okay, so I was kidding a little bit about having a teenager that appreciates constructive parental criticism, but other than that, there really are families out there whose kids meet the other criteria. They typically do not work with me on an ongoing basis but I see them for strategy sessions.

For the other 90% of families, it’s important to consider the difference between cost and value. College is likely the most important investment you will make as a parent - ever. I’ve written about this before in our FAQ: while we are not the cheapest option in town, there is absolutely zero question that we provide the best value.

P.S. My friend’s kid did not sleep through the night until 18 months. Mine did by 5 months. She will be hiring Suzy the next time around.