1. In general, high-school guidance counselors really do not know much about colleges and universities, except for the local and state schools. And possibly their Alma Mater. Take advantage of senior skip days, and in some cases junior skip days set aside explicitly to visit college campus or university facilities. If your child does not get any visitation days officially from his high-school, then write him a note for a medical excuse. I cannot stress enough just how important visiting a campus is. Whether it is simple preference or even finding out glaring differences between reputation and reality, a campus visit with parents-in-tow can be a real eye opener. Try to schedule visits during the Fall or at least when a college is running at full steam with a maxed out student body bustling to and from classes and activities.
Send applications to as many schools as you can, even those where you have very little interest in attending. The reason for this is that going through the application process multiple times will help you key in on what is deemed important universally as far as the college admittance review processes go. Also if you expect to need financial aid, begin the process now. Fill out all the federal forms. It can sometimes take 24 months to adequately complete the process. Private lending processes are somewhat shorter, however their loan costs tend to be higher.
If you envision your child working even part time to help defray tuition costs, and you will need even moderate financial help from federal sources, by all means DO NOT CLAIM YOUR CHILD on either your state or federal income taxes as a dependent after they turn 15. Because of federal and state laws regarding Perkins Loans and Pell Grants, even if a child is fully emancipated from his parents at age 18, if they have been claimed as a dependent by either parent the previous three years, eligibility for federal Student Loans and Grants is determined by parental income and resources instead of the actual resources of the student. After age 24, the Federal Loan and Grant determinations assume any student is solely responsible for his our her tuition costs and they no longer care what the parents make.
This issue repeatedly causes problems for students coming from divorced parents, where one parent claims the child as a dependent, yet the non custodial parent provides financial support. When the child goes to apply for Federal Aid, he assumes only his custodial parent's income will be used to determine eligibility, yet when all is said and done, both parent's household incomes get added together, usually resulting in a denial of aid because it is assumed the incomes of both divorced households can pay for the tuition costs. So if your child is headed to college, and you claimed them as a dependent, and you will need financial aid, help your child get the aid as grants instead of loans, or deferred loans instead of delayed loans. Go back and re-file your previous three years of tax returns without your child as a dependent, and have them re-file theirs as individuals, claiming themselves. The difference to your eventual cost can be staggering if you follow this advice.
2. You go to a liberal arts or university to do one thing; LEARN HOW TO LEARN. You go to junior colleges and technical schools to learn specific skill sets or trades. It is a big difference. If you go to college expecting it to simply be a punch card process where you go for 4 years and then graduate to an office cubicle or other such guaranteed job, then you are going for the wrong reasons.
3. My personal advice? Take Latin in high-school or Advanced Trigonometry, but not both. If you are more attuned to vocabulary than arithmetic, then you would take the Latin. And if the reverse is true, take Trig. Realize that an extremely good score on one half of the SAT can buoy up a mediocre score on the other. As to the optional written test, it isn't optional. Get "The Elements of Style" by White
4. Financial aid, see point 1 above. But I cannot stress enough that if you plan or expect to need any grants or loans at all during their education process, IMMEDIATELY CEASE claiming them as a dependent. MAKE SURE THE FILE A TAX RETURN. Your goal is to be able to prove by Federal Financial Aid standards that your child was and is fully emancipated from your support. This means they handle what limited financial income they have had independently from yours. That you have allowed them to claim themselves for their own tax purposes. If you follow my advice, even if you find that you have to pay a difference in taxes paid by re-filing previous years, you will still be more likely to get full grants. IE. Your child fully emancipated financially from you would likely get the full Pell Grant, vs your child as a tax deduction for you, while he gets a minimal Pell Grant or none at all. Sure you get $2000 by claiming him as your dependent, but by doing so you totally screw yourself out of enabling him to get $7000.00 in Pell Grants a year.
5. Scholarships often get tied to what school he attends. Aside from an athletic or an artistic performance scholarship, most scholarships that are merit based will become apparent once they are already students. Needs based scholarships are usually made part of the offered financial aid package. You don't need to waste time surfing the Internet for secret scholarships devoted to Irish left-handed dyslexics. If you are going to get a performance based scholarship, the colleges will come to you with the offer. If once you are at college, you decided to go after a scholarship, your department professor or such will be more than willing to make you aware of their existence. To be honest, on most mid-sized college's quads, you will often see flyers advertising scholarships all the time.
6. Course-load. Take the number of classes that everyone else does per semester once you are in college. And for your freshman year NEVER take the Freshman Trifecta 101 English, 101 Math, 101 Biology/Chemistry/Physics. These are weeder classes. Taken in combination they can be deadly. Take instead the first 2 semesters or quarters any 100-300 level class that sounds interesting to you. Ignore what your academic advisors say the first few semesters. They see every freshman as a variable to be plugged into a pre-determined road-mapped formula. Part of their perspective is that they should encourage weak students to bow out of college quickly. Therefore they hit freshmen up with a couple of quarters of trifecta, resulting in many students giving up and going home.
As for high school, well that depends on if you have any flexibility at all in the coursework. Often the choice is between college bound vs not college bound. If you are college bound you take X number of English, X number of Math etc. It pretty much leaves you very little free space. In terms of A.P. coursework, some colleges acknowledge them with full credit, some allow you to substitute them for pre-requisites, and a growing number are offering nothing at all for your A.P. work other than a check mark on the application process. In general, take the hardest courses offered from the teachers everyone thinks is the hardest. If all his friends are taking a really popular, yet easy course with the favorite teacher, see if there is a harder course taught by a teacher everyone else fears because she rides students into the dirt.
My popular teachers in high-school I can no longer remember, but my Latin and AP History teachers still appear in my nightmares.
7. Remain UNDECLARED for at least 1 year. What 18/19 year old kid really has a clue as to what interests them enough to last the remainder of their life? It could take a couple of years to even figure it out. Make the process organic. Take what interests you first to see if you really like it. Only then get on a pre-determined Major field of study.
Other advice.
Choose schools suited to your child's learning style. If he is not quite ready for the freshman class that numbers in the thousands and has classrooms taking place in huge auditoriums featuring lectures by desktop video, then by all means do not encourage him to go to the state polytechnic university with a student body of 50,000. Whatever school he goes to, ask the admissions office for alumni contacts so that he can interview people who went there. Ideally once he has finalized what school he can afford financially and academically, the best addition to an application is a letter of introduction written by an alumni from his target school.
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