Junior year is starting for my daughter. We have a preliminary college list and have made 2 visits.
Besides academics and ECs which will be her focus – what are some steps we should be taking regarding college planning?
Visits
ACT/SAT prep
Anything else?
ADDING ONE QUESTION: When should students reach out to talk with the Admission Officers? End of Junior year?
ETA: I’m going to list some of the suggestions below as they come in
Second half Junior year
Ask for Recommendations
Start common app essay
Get comfortable reviewing college pages; get familiar with the colleges on her list (prep for final selection and also gathering info for supplemental essays if needed)
From an online source:
Get to know your counselor at school if you don’t already -as they will write a letter for most of the more selective colleges.
Students at my daughters high school started asking for letters of recommendation second semester junior year as well as starting the common app essay.
Your budget. Finding the right college is locating the sweet spot between academic fit, social fit, and financial fit.
Figure out what your budget is before you or your daughter begin making lists so that that metric is incorporated into whether or not a school is right for the list.
Editing to add:
This is a great resource for getting a quick read on merit and need based aid at different schools; if you’re seeking merit aid check the percentage of students that receive it, along with the average amount awarded. Then check your student’s stats against the stats of students at that school to get a rough idea for whether or not she would be a candidate for merit aid, and approximately how much she might be considered for. You will also notice that the more highly selective/rejective a college is, the less likely they will be to offer merit aid.
So toward the end of the year she could be talking with recommenders [Edit: also recommended by others]
Otherwise, if you have not already, or unless you are comfortable being full pay anywhere, you should probably be having a serious budget conversation and developing a habit of making sure any college of interest will be on budget, or might be with reasonable merit. [Edit: again, also recommended by others]
I also think she could start getting into the habit of diving into college webpages. Looking up departmental pages, faculty pages, club pages, student newspapers and blogs, and so on.
That we have done! I run the NPC for everything and I’ve been asking at the visits if they think they are accurate. While the funding is better at the more highly competitive schools, we do have some safeties/likely that will fall within budget as well.
The net price calculators are currently set for students starting in 2025, and if I’m reading correctly, your daughter will be graduating HS in 2026.
So please view anything you get now as an estimate. Financial aid policies DO sometimes change, and so does the cost of attendance. You will need to run these NPCs again in Sept of your daughter’s senior year in high school.
If she is a 2026-2027 first year college student, those NPCs will use the 2024 tax year info. That year hasn’t even ended yet.
If you can, do a visit soon to a few colleges with different sizes and locations, sometimes kids have a whole idea of what they want and a visit upends everything .
Take a hard look at your investments/college savings right now and make sure that your risk ratio is appropriate for needing that first tuition payment in August before your kid starts college. You can’t afford to move to cash (or cash equivalents) because you still have a timeframe for leaving money earning for you, but you can’t afford a huge market hit right before you need the cash. Now is the perfect time to map out what you’ll need and when you’ll need it.
And while you are at it- time to evaluate your life insurance plans, disability, etc. and make sure that you are continuing to max out on your retirement savings at least for another year. Many people have to cut back while their kids are in college, but take advantage of this non-tuition year and contribute the maximum.
If only this were a real issue for us. We qualify for need-based aid especially using the CSS due to limited assets. But good to put here because I’m sure it will be useful for other people.
For first visits, rather than picking out schools where she might apply my suggestion is to start with visits to various types of schools in your region. Take her to a large public in both a city area and bit more isolated college town, LACs in urban and rural areas, and so on. The point is to get a sense of what the options out there feel like (locale, class size, diverse or not, and so on) which may be very different from what she is used to in her HS. Knowing what type(s) of schools she prefers can help guide college selection.
Some schools care about demonstrated interest and track it not only via visits but online. Have her set up an email account for admissions that she’ll use to request info, when registering for tests, and when she applies. And if she receives emails from college she should know they can tell if a student has clicked on links.
Stuff I wish we’d known/done/thought through earlier (some of it already mentioned):
PSAT: targeted prep, if a good test-taker (both b/c NMSF is an honor unto itself and b/c of possibility of scholarships). Figure out what the typical threshold is for your state, and note that the formula double-weights the verbal part of the exam (so prepping and practicing for those bits is important.) (DS had an uncharacteristically low showing on verbal and is likely to miss the cut-off by one point.)
College visits: Easy to get overwhelmed by the options and also to develop the mindset that you need to visit a school in order to make an informed decision about it. I think in hindsight it’s good to think about exactly what you want to glean from the visits and remind your kid of the limits of any given visit (you might not like the tour guide. the weather might be bad. an annoying prospective family might rub you the wrong way, etc.) I second the large/small, urban/rural dichotomy (although honestly I think some kids are kind of agnostic on those fronts and are more looking for vibes). You can’t possibly go everywhere. Maybe prioritize (for vacations) places that you couldn’t get to on a long weekend. Also? get your kid to dig into a book of colleges and come up with a list of potential places to visit. And be sure to see places that are likely admits for your kid – not just long shots/reaches.
Keep priorities straight: be aware that junior year, for a lot of kids, is extra hard. The AP courses are often a notch more work than they are used to. It’s the last big year for grades before the fall applications. For UC schools, it’s the last year of grades that will be considered. It’s also the year in which students need to make a really favorable impression on their teachers because they will need recommendations. Missing school, or coming back from break sick/exhausted instead of refreshed, can have consequences. So if college visits cut into class time, AP/SAT/ACT test prep, relaxation, important sports/etc. events, etc., think twice and maybe dial it back. It’s not worth it.
Admissions consultants: if you’re thinking of going this way, be aware that many of them get booked pretty far ahead of time. But also, evaluate your kid’s strengths and weaknesses and think about what you really need. Are they self-directed/motivated? Do they enjoy doing research? Have they been preparing for this since they were born? Is your school counseling system decent? You might not need as much help as you think.
Teacher/counselor recommendations: it’s not a bad time to check in with parents of older kids and get the scuttlebutt on how it works at your school. Which teachers are known to do a good job on recommendations? what is the process for requesting recommendations? (at our school teachers needed to be asked immediately after spring break, and kids filled out forms, and it was competitive. Yikes…) If your kid is shy/reluctant to elbow their way into class discussions, maybe brainstorm other ways to build relationships with teachers who could serve as recommenders (this is a skill for life, not just for this one need).
Brag sheets: there are templates about these all over the place. Get your kid to read through one and start to think about how they might fill it out. Note where there are gaps. If your kid hasn’t yet had a job, or done any volunteer work, now is a good time to plug those gaps.
All of this is kind of generic but also maybe geared toward a kid who is aiming for more competitive/rejective admissions. As one who is feeling kind of jaded about the whole game, I do want to also remind you that there are a ton of great schools that are not super selective, schools where a kid with a solid B average and a couple of additional stories to tell can get in with no problem. And, as people keep reminding me, letting our kids take more ownership of the admissions process is a good way of helping them grow into a person who will take ownership of their college education. (easier said than done, I know…)
In terms of SAT/ACT, I recommend getting started as soon as possible by taking a practice test in both SAT and ACT to see which one suits her better! The SAT tends to go deeper, but you get more time. The ACT, on the other hand, is very fast paced and generally takes longer.
Some students wait until May or August to take their first exam, but I don’t recommend it. It could be best to take it once in the fall, and then possibly take it again in the spring. If needed, there’s the August and October test dates for a last try.
I recently posted a bit about this here, but of the things that haven’t been mentioned yet:
Register for the SAT/ACT for the desired dates as early as possible (dates through June are currently available). I’ve heard many stories of people (especially in California) needing to travel several hours away and either getting a hotel the night before or leaving the house in the very wee hours in order to take a test. There’s nothing saying that you can’t register for an April date in August.
You and/or your kid can be talking to the English teacher about whether they will work on the common app essay in school. (They can start the asking and then you can follow-up as a weightier contact, if desired.) If your kid is on a block schedule, start that conversation the first week of the semester (or earlier!). Continue to ask/pester the teacher throughout the year until you get a yes answer. Desist with the questioning after getting a yes until mid-spring when you send a reminder email asking when the common app essay will start. For schools that seem to work on the common app essay at school, it seems most common to do it after the AP tests/last month of school.
And let your kid be a kid. Let them explore what interests them, not necessarily what will look “best” on a college application. And make sure to support their social and emotional health throughout the year.
