Nobody Came to Hear This One. It's Still the Most Important Thing I Said All Night.

Last month I ran a webinar on the 12 deadliest college planning mistakes. About a hundred families showed up.

I opened with a poll. What's your biggest challenge right now? Getting into a decent school, paying for college, or you don't know where to start.

"All of the above" won. "Paying for college" came in a close second.

Nobody picked the thing I had listed as mistake number one.

That mistake is putting all your emphasis on the four years instead of the 40.

Everything in this process points at one moment. The decision letter. Families organize two years of their lives around it. And frankly the ads from people like me don't help. You've seen them. "93% of our students got into one of their top three choices."

You know how easy that is to pull off? Tell a Long Island kid to apply to Princeton, Stanford, and Nassau Community College. One out of three. Every single time.

So your kid gets in somewhere. Then what?

Getting in is not the finish line. It's the starting line. And where your kid goes is not who your kid turns out to be.

Let me tell you about a client of ours named Danielle. Her father owned a pharmacy.

She showed me her preliminary college list and every school on it had a pharmacy program. So I said, hey Danielle, I didn't realize you were planning on pharmacy school.

She said, "I'm not. My dad is. I just don't want to fight with him about it."

She hated chemistry. She was bad at chemistry. She had no interest in the family business. And she was about to spend four years and a mountain of tuition training for a career she had already decided she didn't want.

So we sat her down with our career counselor. Full assessment. Then the whole family got on a Zoom to go through the results together.

And for the first time, her dad saw it objectively. Not his daughter arguing with him at the kitchen table. Actual data.

Danielle went to college for what she actually wanted. Then grad school. She's a practicing therapist today, and she was recently listed as one of the top local therapists in Psychology Today.

Four years of frustration avoided. Probably a lot more than four.

Here's the part I want you to sit with.

Her list wasn't wrong because the schools were bad. It was wrong because it was built to answer somebody else's question.

Most lists are. They get built around rankings, or a parent's alma mater, or where the kid's friends are applying, or whatever the guidance counselor flagged as a "target."

Almost none get built backward from what the kid is actually trying to get OUT of it.

And no, your 17 year old does not need to have life figured out. Almost none of them do. Not knowing yet is fine.

Not thinking about it at all is not.

Think about what you're trying to get out of college. That's the whole mistake.

Onward.

-Andy "The Poll Results Don't Lie" Lockwood

P.S. Mistakes two and three are coming, and number three is the one that explains why kids with great grades and great scores still get turned down. If you'd rather not wait, the Lockwood Inner Circle is where we hand families the actual tools and let you eavesdrop on the advice we give our private 1:1 college advisory clients. You can try it for a dollar: lockwoodinnercircle.com