Warning! Warning!

The approach to planning for college I am going to describe here is not going to look anything at all like what your student’s high school guidance counselor is going to send home.

Let me begin by sharing an anecdote with you:

A few years ago my adult daughter had two boys about to graduate from high school. She had been working on their college plans for eighteen months. In December before their May graduation, the high school scheduled a financial aid planning session for the parents. I asked if I could tag along.

The school had invited in a financial aid officer from a nearby college. In her presentation, she took us through the various loans available. (In my opinion, that’s not financial planning, but the lady did know student loans inside and out.)

After the meeting, my daughter—much more of a social butterfly than her old man—must have talked to a half dozen of her fellow parents as we worked our way out to the car. (Her boys had been in the school system for six years, and she knew almost everyone.)

When we got to the car, I looked at her, and she looked at me. At the same time we both blurted out, “This is the first time these parents have thought about this.” Approximately fifteen weeks before their kids were to receive their financial aid awards letters, these parents had done little or no financial planning.

Obviously, starting to plan for college in December of your kid’s senior year is too late. But I think you are going to be surprised by my thoughts on when you should start.

Are you sitting down? If a four-year college is potentially on the horizon for your student, I recommend you start planning in middle school.

Hear me out.

Homework

Making a success* out of college today is very difficult. Most of those matriculating fail by my standard.

If you think your teenager and their guidance counselor are going to pull this off with a little bit of help from Mom and Dad, as we say here in the Midwest, “You’ve got another think coming.”

In the last twenty years, it has become very difficult to make college pay. Just ask any millennial selling Nike’s at Dick’s Sporting Goods and trying to pay off $30,000 in student loan debt.

The process is very complicated, and your teenager can’t navigate this maze on their own. You will be lucky if your kid’s guidance counselor manages to get the necessary paperwork to the right schools on time. (High school guidance counselors are overworked, and they are using an obsolete protocol that doesn’t take into account how the game has changed.)

Go to the library and get these books:

• Kalman A. Chany with Geoff Martz, “Paying for College Without Going Broke,” (New York, New York: Penguin Random House LLC, 2016).
• Frank Palmasani, “Right College, Right Price: The New System for Discovering the Best College Fit at the Best Price,” (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2013).
• Bonnie Kerrigan Snyder, “The New College Reality: Make College Work For Your Career,” (Avon, MA: Adams Media, 2012).

You need to study every word in these three books. You’ll want your student to read and discuss most of the topics. (Your kid can skip the part about the IRS.)

When your offspring hits age seventeen he will discover that you, his parents, know absolutely nothing about anything. You are never going to have more influence over your child than you do now. Your family is going to be preparing a multi-year, multi-part plan. This is the time to start the conversation on post-secondary education options and marketable majors.

Communications and managing expectations are absolutely crucial.

I suggest you print out that sentence and stick it on your refrigerator door.

Academic Planning

It takes the average family slightly over five years to get their student through a four-year college program to earn a bachelor’s degree these days. Start thinking now about shrinking that timeline to four years or less. One of the notable factors that impact the timetable is having your student arrive at the gates of their institution of higher learning without any idea of their ultimate destination.

I suggest you seriously you consider, “Flipping the College Decision Making Paradigm.” (This is also going to help you in choosing the right college and in your financial planning.)

http://www.iscollegereallytherightchoice.com/choose-major-world-average-student-loan-debt-40000/

The second subject is grades. Your student’s high school GPA is very important. It is going to influence which schools will accept your offspring and their financial aid.

The time to discuss this subject is NOT in December of your kid’s freshman year in high school when she brings her first report card home. You want her to hit high school running (academically speaking). Given the grade inflation of the last twenty years, forty-seven percent of high school graduates have a GPA close to 4.0.

From the day your student starts high school until you have made a final decision about college is only around forty-four months. This time period is packed, and it is going to fly by.

You can “get a jump” on high school by planning the eighth-grade schedule carefully. The purpose of this is to create some “wiggle room” in grades 9-12 in order to accommodate:

• AP and college credit plus classes.
• New interests your child discovers and wishes to explore.

For example, you might want to schedule Algebra I and a foreign language in the eighth grade.

You have some “breathing room” on standardized testing, i.e. SAT or ACT. You will need to develop a “test strategy,” and you might want to be thinking about the best time to take the first practice test.

Financial Planning

Here is a version of a question I see every week:

“I have been admitted to Purdue, the University of California-San Diego, the University of California-Irvine, and the University of Washington for Computer Science. Which one should I choose?”

My polite response is always, “Congratulations on choosing a marketable major. Which of these schools can your family afford to send you to without you incurring excessive student loan debt?”

I’m hoping someday to get an answer.

There are two possibilities here. Perhaps the dozens of students who have asked this question all come from families with a “money tree” in their backyard, or perhaps these teenagers are giving no thought to “affordability.” (This goes back to what I said about communications and managing expectations, i.e. five out of eight teenagers ASSUME their parents will pay for any college they choose. Most of them are wrong.)

I asked you to get the book, Right College, Right Price, from the library. You need to do the “affordability” exercise. The advantages of doing this when your child is in middle school rather than weeks before high school graduation are obvious.

For many families, their children’s post-secondary education is their second biggest expense category after housing. Facing up to these costs now, give your family five years to marshal your financial resources and begin the necessary detailed planning.

Secondly, you can begin setting expectations. For example, maybe the only way the “numbers are going to work” is for your student to start in community college for two years. It is a lot easier to have that conversation now than when they are a high school senior.

Perhaps the arithmetic doesn’t work at all. There are other options—much less glamorous than college–that can be considered.

The second protocol that the author, Frank Palmasani, describes is how to find an affordable college that “wants” your kid. (By “want” I mean the school will provide financial incentives. This unique protocol works.)

I will finish this topic up with a tip on scholarships. Your library has lots of books on the subject. Most families see this as an issue that the student deals with after they get their college applications completed.

Your student can start applying for scholarship money in middle school. (There is a legal restriction related to privacy laws that require your child must be thirteen.)

Conclusion

That’s my argument for starting college planning sooner, rather than later. There is a lot more to the planning process, but this should get you started. If you went to college twenty-five years ago, you might think this is overkill.

College in America doesn’t work the way it used to.

Notes:

*My definition of college success is that your student graduates, get a well-paying job, and isn’t buried in student loan debt.

The very fact that not one of those three books I recommended are in your high school guidance counselor’s library should be a “red flag.” High school guidance counselors’ first priority is to funnel as many teenagers as they can into college. They are focused on “acceptance,” not “outcomes.”

Some parents are going to be faced with having a very bright child who just isn’t interested in school. My suggestion is NOT to badger them about grades or homework. Find their “trigger.” I know a young lady who determined she wanted to be a nurse through acting as a volunteer. “Of course, I’m going to college. I’m going to be a nurse. Did you know you have to have really good grades to qualify?”

Road trip! Road trip! Many families can’t wait to begin those college visits—some as early as the spring of the student’s junior year. This sets expectations. When the numbers don’t work out, these expectations can translate into excessive student loans. If you only visit schools you can afford, things will go much smoother.