Make Careful Considerations Before Deciding on a Four-Year College

In “Other Ways to Win”, Penn State scholars Kenneth C. Gray and Edwin L Herr, tell students to carefully consider whether a four-year college is really right for them and provide many alternatives.

They are concerned that the following facts are not fully recognized:

A college might be easy to get in, but very difficult to get through.

Community colleges often offer an “open admissions” policy. Sometimes, you’ll even see this at a public four-year college. The fact is, though, that in these schools, only about half of students will graduate within six years.

For the foreseeable future, the number of job openings for four-year college graduates is far below the number of those qualified.

Furthermore, on average, technical workers who don’t have a four-year college degree will attain higher salaries than four-year college degree holders, with the exception of the “professional ranks”.

Technical jobs are the fastest growing, most lucrative, sector of the labor force.

And within this sector, the fastest growing, most lucrative, jobs require a two-year associate degree.

Bottom line: A four-year college degree is not the best solution for everyone. Two-year technical education provides many promising alternatives. More on this soon!

Overcoming the First Obstacle to Attending College: Money

Whether you’ve saved for college or not, don’t let your financial limitations stop you from considering college; any college. There are many colleges and universities that offer different educational experiences and they charge different prices. The majority of college students get financial aid to help pay for college costs. Much of that aid is based on financial need rather than grades. But grades are a big consideration in the type and amount of the award. Being knowledgeable and proactive will help you overcome the obstacle of money for college.

Working with the Admissions Department to Budget for College

If costs are a great concern, you should inquire with the admissions department about “nontraditional”, “articulation”, “early college” programs and scholarships; all of which can reduce costs significantly.

If you’re a desirable student, due to your grades, “legacy” status or athletic record, you may have more options.

Every institution has “recruitment goals” and you might fit the profile of what it’s looking for this year; particular if you are a “first generation” or “diverse” (minority or international) student.

If you’re very clear about your major, and you have good grades, make sure you let the faculty of your future academic program know about your interest in the college. Talk with them by phone or meet with them in person, and send them an email. Then, send a copy to the admissions departments, who usually keep track of your level of “expressed interest”. This may have some influence on the admission or financial aid decisions.

Communicate with the Financial Aid Department to Maximize Your Award

Soon after the admission decision is made by the college, the financial aid award will be determined. The financial aid awards begin right after January 1, The college’s federal aid allocations start to get tapped then, so apply early for the best chance to maximize your award.

Some colleges offer a special rate if you commit early (called “Early Decision”) to attending. However, this may affect your ability to compare aid packages from several institutions.

The financial aid policy of the school could become a major factor in your final college choice. Some schools will not meet all of your eligibility for financial aid, leaving you with an unmet need and requiring you to tap more of your family’s resources. Ask the financial aid department for its average “merit-based” (scholarships) and “need-based” financial aid award statistics, or look them up online. Merit-based awards are usually determined by the Admissions department, so it’s important to keep talking with your contacts there, too.

What You Can Control: Planning Your College-Related Expenses

The first step in preparing for a financial aid discussion is to gather your personal expenses and transportation costs. The obvious yearly college expenses are tuition, books and travel or relocation costs. These costs are on the rise for families but the “net cost” of college is actually decreasing. Get a true cost for these by itemizing them.

Beware of hidden costs, such as computers, laundry, parking, gasoline or bus fares. Costs for cell phones, entertainment, groceries, toiletries, clothing and entertainment are often underestimated. Books and supplies for some college majors cost more than others. Other easily forgotten costs include:

• Loan fees
• Study abroad costs
• Dependent care expenses
• Disability-related expenses
• Cooperative education program costs

“Free Money” Sources for College

Many students attend college at no cost; with the help of grants. Grant aid is available from a variety of providers. It’s much better to look for all the grant aid available – and especially to ask about each college’s “institutional grant” practices. Possibilities for grants and federal loans should be exhausted before you borrow money to go to school.

As mentioned, scholarships can be found at each college, but you can search for local or “special interest” scholarships for specific student groups. These may be easier to get, and are not always driven by your grades.

If the college has decided that it wants you, and understands that the costs are out of reach for you, they may offer a “tuition discount”. This practice has become more popular among private schools, as well as public universities.

After you’ve put together these expenses and reported them to your colleges, let the financial aid officer know about any “special circumstances”, especially related to recent changes in family or health status, or job losses. Colleges sometimes offer more financial aid if your family is paying for private high school tuition, nursing-home bills, or the funeral of an immediate family member.

“Independent student” status usually allows for a more generous financial aid package, but it’s only possible if the student is 24 or older, married or a parent, a soldier on active duty, a veteran, or an orphan or ward of the court. However, a “dependency override” is possible if a student has been abandoned or abused by parents.

Middle income families can realize some tax benefits. If you’re not qualified for financial aid, you can still focus on maximizing the tax advantages of saving for college, such as saving in the child's name and gifting capital-gain assets.

If costs still seem insurmountable, you could consider working while going to college. But limit it to 15-20 hours a week, if you’re in college fulltime. Otherwise, research shows that it may take you longer, and cost you more, to complete your degree. Working ten hours or less, though, has been associated with better grades in many cases! You need to keep your academic performance up to maintain or increase your financial aid award.

By law, the college must take all of your resources into account when determining your financial aid awards, including grants/loans, work eligibility or need-based loans. In some rare cases, working can actually reduce your grants or scholarships in your financial aid package. So the best policy is for you to eliminate or reduce your work or loan commitments first, before negotiating your financial aid package.

If you wind up going into the workforce first, you can keep college on your radar screen. You may be able to earn college credit for your employment and life experience. Some schools administer their own tests and standards, while others allow you to take College-Level Examination Program (CLEP) tests for college credit.

Contact us for help with college and career planning, academic coaching, teacher training, and resources.

Six Ways to Be Strategic with Your Internship Search

An internship is supposed to help you enter the workforce with a likelihood of success and happiness. So don't treat it like "any old" part-time job search!

Plan ahead and develop an internship strategy. The first time, you could invest a few months into research, reflection and planning. If you do this once, you'll be able to do it faster the next time. Finding the right internship is like a real job search. You must match your skills and learning need to the employer's needs. And you have to be good at demonstrating that match in an interview.

So, to make an internship meaningful, don't wait until the last minute. You can get help from several resources below, but be prepared to do all of the leg work yourself.

1. Think about your long-term goals. What type of company of industry would you like to work in? What area of a company are you looking to get experience in? What type of duties would related to your long-term career goal?

2. If you're a college student, work with your faculty or advisor to put together a list of typical job functions, Many internship dutueis are negotiable for the top candidates.

3. Do some online research about the top employers in your area. Learn about their missions, business focus and news. Find the employers' annual reports on their web sites. Read the Chairman's Lettera to learn about the companies' current plans, successes and challenges.

4. Post your resume on the employers' sites. Include a career objective with keywords on your resume. Employers often look here first when searching for candidates.

5. Create a new job alert on sites like jobs.nuAlerts, nuResume, Indeed, SimplyHired, and Jobster. Answer the basic questions, select your areas of interest and join your favorite employers’ networks.

6. Professional associations are always looking to students to get involved as volunteers or in competitions. Attending their local functions as a visitor will get you direct exposure to hiring managers. Ask your college faculty which professional associations are most popular with specific employers in your area.

The more knowledge you have about the company and its goals; and the better you'll be to prove your fit for the job in your cover letter, get selected for an inteview, and convince the employer that you're the right person for the job!

Two Fun, Easy Tools Will Guide You To Your College Major

The gigantic World of Work is a daunting concept for most students. Two easy and fun tools developed from the research of John Holland,: the RIASEC codes and Career Clusters can alleviate much of your confusion.

According to Holland, you can plug into the World of Work through your personality and interest in working with either data or ideas, and then and people vs. things. For many students, this is intuitive. You just “know” whether you’d rather work on spreadsheets or concepts for new products, when given a series of choices in an assessment.

Holland also theorized that you can make a match between job, and appropriate work environments using six RIASEC codes. Career Centers often do an exercise called “The Career Party” because, again, this process is pretty intuitive. You already know what type of people you’d like to work with, when you read the descriptions of a Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, or Conventional personality. You might fit into one or more of the codes. More structured assessments do this, too.

Career centers might give you a list of job matches that fit your codes. But I find that this idea unfolds more naturally when you visually overlap Career Clusters over your RIASEC codes, such as assessment provider Lawrence Jones explains.

So you’ve taken over 30,000 job titles and chopped your list down to 5000. Progress, right? Now the ball is back in your court. You’re now going to decide if college, other training or work is your next step. Each path has an “opportunity cost”, because you have to give something up when you follow it. But there are gains too, of course. Which decision fits you best? That’s another blog entry!

Info@whatsyourmajor.net

Sizing Up Campus Culture

The best time to dig deep into a college's culture is after you've determined that the college meets your academic and financial and practical needs, and you've visited once. When you're ready to put together your final list of eight to ten colleges that meet all of your basic criteria, you need to further evaluate your chances for success at them:

1. Read about the college‟s mission statement, strategic plan, and President‟s message on the web site. Ask to see the most recent student satisfaction survey, which should be on file in the President's office.

2. Don't assume that a college that is affiliated with a religious institution will express that heritage in daily campus life. The influence of that institution may or may not be dominant on campus.

3. Ask the tour guide and college representatives about the social tone, campus culture (or campus climate) and to provide examples of how they experience it.

4. Visit your final choice colleges a second time, after you‟ve been accepted, but before you accept the financial aid offer. On this visit:

- Pay attention to verbiage used in event posters, student newspapers and presentations. And ask random students on campus for their opinion about the campus climate.

- Take advantage of overnight stay programs that are commonly offered by the Admissions Department.

- Have your child visit or call the residence halls, explaining that he/she is a prospective student and ask the same questions that you asked of the tour guides and official representatives.

5. To fully understand how diversity and collaborative learning impacts daily campus life, take the extra effort to interview faculty members (especially those in your child‟s field of study). Be sure to ask for specific examples or data about the following questions:

- How does the institution encourage activities where students from different backgrounds meet and work together? Ask for examples where the activities impacted the majority of students, not just members of club or academic program.

- How often do students work in teams to complete assignments, solve problems or apply course content?

- How frequently do students engage in service learning or take part in community-based projects to fulfill class requirements?

- How many students collaborate on research with faculty members?

- How many interdisciplinary courses are offered? Are they open to all students?

- How many students are involved with living and learning communities? How is the faculty involved with these communities?

7. Since retention and graduation rates are correlated with student satisfaction, look them up on the College Board College Matchmaker, or other, college search engine, and compare your final choice colleges.

8. Consult student-written guides and forums about campus life, which are available for selected campuses. The most popular guides are:

“The Insider‟s Guide to The Colleges,” The Yale Daily News
“Students‟ Guide to Colleges”, The Penguin Group
“The Big Book of Colleges”, College Prowler

Visit online forums, where you can read comments and pose questions to experienced parents and students:
www.collegeconfidential.com
www.campusdirt.com

9. You may want to have a discussion with your child about the importance of campus diversity and culture to his or her happiness as a student. But don‟t expect tremendous insight. Your child‟s personality is still in a formative stage and he or she has a limited worldview.

10. Resist the urge to judge the campus morals and values, superficially. What you think is best for your child might not, in fact, be best. Listen beyond what your child says about a campus. He or she wants to please you and may be telling you what you want to hear. Look for signs of genuine enthusiasm.

Rankings vs. Reality: How Do You Assess Your College Choices?

College rankings publishers are getting smart about answering students’ real questions about what makes for a great higher education experience. Whether you use or believe these rankings, or the methodology used, the newer, more creative rankings publishers, can open students’ minds about what might really be important in their college decisions.

Look on the home page of any college web site. If it made the cut on one of the U.S. News and World Report or The Princeton Review’s favorable lists of distinctions, it will certainly be promoted there. U.S .News and World Report rankings are developed by peer ratings from college administrators, while The Princeton Review’s come from student surveys.

So, despite the controversy over rankings, colleges care about them.

Most students make final college choices on the basis of some reality: financial, career or just how the campus “feels” to them. However, it’s also worthwhile to look at how the college might impact you as a person.

Some publishers have responded creatively to new and different issues raised by the public, the media and even higher educators themselves about what makes for a great college experience. Since 1996, Colleges That Change Lives (CTCL) , a non-profit organization, has member schools who are recognized as having “students heavily involved in cooperative rather than competitive learning, and a faculty of scholars devoted to helping young people develop their powers, mentors who often become their valued friends."

And this fall, the Washington Monthly evaluated schools based on:

- “Social mobility” - the recruiting and graduating of poorer students
- Research - the support of scientific and humanistic study, by producing PhDs and by the winning research grants
- Service – the school’s effectiveness at giving back to the country, through either military or civilian service

One can certainly imagine the positive impact on character that would come from a collaborative learning experience in an environment that focuses on social impact. Ask creative questions of your prospective faculty on these matters when you whittle down your college list.

You Control the The "You" Factors in Career Planning

Don’t know what you want to be when you grow up?

If you’ve already graduated from high school, you may not know yourself well enough to give a career counselor all the information he or she needs to help you.

He or she will probably suggest one or more of the most reliable career assessments: perhaps the Strong or Campbell Interest Inventories. They’re quick, a good investment and the results statistically represent your age group results. Or, a career counselor could use a values assessment, to determine what’s important to you and where you could find those qualities in a job.

These assessments work on the premise that you will be successful at things you like, and believe in. That’s very true, but how do you know what you COULD be good at, and interested in, if you never get exposed to new ideas and get a chance to try them out? For young adults, in particular, assessment results are limited to what they’ve been exposed to up until now.

The most sophisticated tests used to guide career planning are available through a psychologist or someone trained in tests of personality, ability (like the DAT for PCA) and intelligence. Still, the results here are somewhat fixed, and speak only to the potential for you to fit a career. They’re more apt to help an employer make decisions, not you.

Even if you could get interested in a new skill, there is a ticket to admission into this career path: Your skills may have to be developed. Should you go to college, or to a career center? Or somewhere else?

Discouraged? Please don’t be!

Yes, these decisions are expensive, both in time and money. And, like any service, even a medical doctor, your career counselor needs your direction and thoughtful responses to their questions. No one can give you all the answers.

The thing to remember is that you are in charge of this process; not the professionals. And it’s a lifelong process. That’s why so many college students change majors; many more than once. And so many college students are undecided about a major. Many college graduates never pursue the job that they went to college for. Any many adults change careers.

As you move through your work life, you will make better decisions when you understand all the factors that uniquely drives your satisfaction in a job: interests, abilities, personality, and values. You’ll be more motivated and confident about the investment you might need to make in training or education. Our Career Explor-a-tion workshop might just be a good place to start! Write to info@whatsyourmajor.net

Linking Majors and Careers was Never Easier! (Still, You Have to Do Some Legwork)

It’s never too soon for students to explore careers; and conversely, it’s never too late for an adult. You can learn about the types of high school and college coursework needed, and -- whether or not you go to college -- the types of jobs that you can prepare for, in each cluster. At the States Career Clusters Initiative, there are 16 Career Cluster Plans of Study; and 81 Pathway Plans of Study across them.

According to the site, “A Plan of Study can serve as a guide, along with other career planning materials, as learners continue on a career path.” Course recommendations should be individualized to meet each learner’s educational and career goals and each school’s entrance and graduation requirements.

Knowledge and Skills Charts are available at the links provided for each Cluster and under the "Resources" tab on the site. Secondary and post-secondary coursework is detailed “across the disciplines” of math, science, social studies and English/Language Arts. Other required courses, electives and learner activities are also provided.

Since many professional jobs these days don’t require a college degree, coursework in both career and technical programs and degree major courses are provided for each cluster. A sample listing of job titles gives you an idea of the types of jobs that can result from following these study programs. For example, in the Marketing, Sales and Service cluster, common job titles include:

►Copywriter/Designer
►E-Commerce Director
►Entrepreneur
►Field Marketing Representative
►Forecasting Manager
►Interactive Media Specialist
►Inventory Manager/Analyst
►Logistics Manager
►Merchandise Buyer
►On-line Market Researcher
►Public Relations Manager
►Promotions Manager
►Retail Marketing Coordinator
►Sales Executive
►Shipping/Receiving Clerk
►Telemarketer
►Trade Show Manager
►Warehouse Manager
►Webmaster

Armed with this information, you can jump over to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Outlook to learn about salaries, what the jobs are like, and the growth projections in your region. Contact me at jill@whatsyourmajor.net for help with streamlining this process.