Hi, it's Andy Lockwood from Lockwood College Prep, and this is a quick presentation (really:  a lightly edited transcription of a short video presentation I did recently) on the 10 ways that you can sabotage your children’s odds of succeeding in college admissions and financial aid. 

I'm going to outline, very quickly, 10 of the biggest obstacles, pretty much each of which is self-imposed, that we see getting in the way of parents and children on their way to college success. 

College success, to us, means not only getting where you want to get in, but also paying discounted, “wholesale” = prices in most cases, and, most importantly, launching yourself for success post college. 

Serendipitously, this ties into Obstacle Number One.

Obstacle #1: Overemphasis on the Four, Not 40

I think there is an undue emphasis, almost to the point of craziness, on where you are going to college. 

To me, that's about as silly as if you were to put all of your time and energy and money into rushing to the airport, but you had no idea where the flight was going. It's that dumb. 

In our process, the first thing we do with kids, and this is very different, so it's not right for everyone, but the first thing we do is we sit them down with our career counselor, who happens to be a former college admissions officer, and she helps them draw out their “wiring” through the use of an assessments and other tools, and then looks at Bureau of Labor statistics and other types of information to match up fields, majors, jobs where a kid can love what he or she does so work doesn't feel like work, and also make a living, get off mom and dad's full ride scholarship.

It's a backwards planning approach, and it’s objective and scientific, not based on opinions or anecdotal evidence.

But also, it's not right for everyone.

Obstacle #2: Chasing Rank

Obstacle No 2. is chasing rank. A lot of people start and stop their college search with applying only to highly ranked schools, but this is silly. 

Rank is pretty meaningless when it comes to helping kids achieve success, post-college. There is no correlation at all between attending a highly ranked school and being successful financially. 

In fact, rank has much more to do with how much money a college raises than it does with anything else that's meaningful, including quality of education. That (quality of education) is nowhere in the US News and World Report factors that go into how they rank schools. Granted, it’s good to have a general idea where colleges are ranked, but I wouldn't base your entire college list solely on this factor.

Obstacle #3: Assuming Your Guidance Counselor Will Help 

Obstacle number three is assuming that your guidance counselor can help you. Now, don't take this the wrong way, I'm not bashing guidance counselors, but facts are facts: 

The average ratio of student to guidance counselor across the country is a whopping 400 to one. It's actually more than that. 

So if you're hoping to get personalized attention from your guidance counselor, it's a very slim chance that that's going to happen.  Studies show that guidance counselors spend only approximately 20% of their time on college advising matters, the balance on administrative and other duties.

Now, many guidance counselors are great, and we happen to love our guidance counselor at our high school, but they are not trained in the nuances of how the financial aid system works. 

They don't understand the landmines and loopholes lurking in the FAFSA and the CSS Profile.

And when it comes to advising children on extracurricular activities, both in and out of school, and summer activities and things that they can do to augment their chances of getting into a top college that has nothing to do with your grades and your scores, they fall short. Why?

Because most guidance counselors don't have that “college meeting” with children until sometime in the second half of 11th grade. 

What is the issue, you ask?

The problem is that your child’s entire body of work that ultimately will be judged by admissions officers commences in ninth grade, or maybe even earlier if you're taking advanced classes. 

So if you meet with your guidance counselor for the first time in the middle of 11th grade, that can be a big problem if that’s the first time you’re learning what you should have done two years ago to help your odds of getting into the colleges you wish to attend.

Obstacle #4: Relying On Your Accountant

Obstacle Number Four is assuming that your accountant can help you navigate the financial aid system and process. 

Now, even the easy form, the FAFSA (the Free Application for Federal Student Aid), has 1100 pages of regulations behind it. Accountants and CPAs hardly ever acquire the training necessary to be able to help you identify strategies to help you qualify for more financial aid.

It’s actually worse. Frequently, they give out information that is flat out wrong. I was on the phone last week with a client who insisted that we file his daughter's FAFSA and CSS profile this coming April, because his CPA urged them to do that so he’d get the best financial aid award. 

The only problem with this advice was that the client’s daughter will graduate next year, so her FAFSA and CSS profile won't become available until next October.  The CPA had no idea what he was talking about.

Another example of misguided advice from an accountant:  I was speaking to another one on behalf of another client a couple of days ago, because we were in the process of appealing (negotiating) her financial aid award.

The accountant insisted that we send a news article from some website I never heard of that described how personal trainers in the state of Georgia were facing gym closures. Somehow that was supposed to help more than providing the client’s current income, which the accountant was refusing to do, incidentally. 

Putting aside the fact that our client is a personal trainer in New York,  the accountant was oblivious to the fact that financial aid offices have SPECIFIC procedures and regulations to follow, none of which involve submitting random bits of information or opinion from the Internet, which should go without saying (but apparently, and sadly, not).  

My point, in case you missed it: just because your accountant is good with one thing, tax returns, does not mean that they understand another thing, financial aid forms.

Obstacle #5: Assuming You Won’t Qualify for Anything

Okay, mistake number five is more than assuming that you can't qualify;  it’s that you don’t bother to apply because you assume you won’t qualify. 

So many parents reflexively assume that they're not going to get anything because they earn too high in income. 

The fact of the matter is that there is no “magic ceiling” that, if you cross, it means that you won’t qualify for need-based aid. 

Yes, income IS very important in terms of the financial aid formulas, but there are 77 factors. Income is NOT the sole determinant of whether you will qualify for financial aid or not. In fact, we have a client who makes more than $300,000 who received a very nice set of offers for his son from schools such as Villanova.  His circumstances, like yours, are particular to him.

So don't assume you can qualify. The average tuition discount by private colleges is 52.2% currently, as I write this in 2020, and that number has been increasing every year according to the National Association of Collegiate Business Officers.

At most colleges, roughly 25% only of the families pay full boat, they're subsidizing the other 75%. 

Dumb question (but that never stopped me from asking), which group would you rather be in? 

final comment:  understand that colleges prefer to give money to high income families. So that does not mean that you're not going to be able to qualify. Everyone should apply.

Obstacle #6:  Failure to Negotiate

Obstacle number six is assuming that your financial aid or merit aid offer is final. Now, I just finished writing a book on this, How to Negotiate Your Crappy Financial Aid and Merit Aid Offer. 

You should know that the financial aid awards and merit aid awards that come are not written in stone. They are negotiable. 

You miss a hundred percent of the shots you never take, according to the great hockey player Wayne Gretzky, so there's no harm in trying to negotiate. 

Now, if you have younger children and you're a year or so away from applying to college, understand that the best defense is a good offense. Having a set of colleges that you can ruthlessly play off against each other because they compete with one another can only help.

Obstacle #7:  Missing Key Deadlines

Obstacle number seven is ignoring or being oblivious to deadlines. There are numerous deadlines throughout the college admissions and financial aid processes. 

There is NO one universal deadline to file a financial aid form, just the same way there is no universal deadline to file your college applications. 

Each school has its own set of deadlines. If you're applying for Early Action or Early Decision for college admissions, you could have a deadline of October 15th or November 1st or November 15th or some other day. 

If you are also applying for financial aid, there is a separate set of deadlines, called “priority financial aid deadlines” that you've got to adhere to also. Each of those deadlines is listed on your college's respective websites. 

Many people overlook one or both of these types of deadlines, which typically hurts their chances of admissions and getting financial aid. Hopefully you will not do that just because you're being introduced to this information right here, so congratulations in advance!

Obstacle #8:  Writing the Wrong Essay

I have so much to say on this, but I'm going to try to keep this section short. 

The college essay is not a high school English paper. You can get an A on an English paper because it has a nice introduction, body and conclusion, and it's grammatically correct, but it could also be the world's worst college essay. 

In our practice, we have five former college admissions officers who have each reviewed one thousand applications each year from anywhere between two to 12 years, and each of those applications, particularly in schools like University of Chicago, where four of those admissions officers hail from, contained between four to six essays.

That is a much different experience compared to an English teacher correcting and grading a paper, because first of all, you've probably never seen anything that your English teacher wrote, and second of all, your teacher has never been in The Room deciding whether to admit someone or to deny them, one thousand times a year, year after year. So the essay is not a boring English paper, the essay is a much different type of writing. It's about you, or it's about the student.

Most of the time in high school, kids are asked to write about other stuff, a book they've read, a passage, some historical event, you name it. 

In contrast, college essay writing is about the student. It's the last, best opportunity to answer the single most important question that is on every admissions officer's minds as they review their applications. 

Ironically, this question does not appear anywhere on the application. Here it is:

"Why should we take YOU, compared to these 5,000, 20,000, 90,000 other competitor applicants who have the same grades and the same scores?" 

I'm sure your child is special in many ways, but on paper, they can be perceived as commodities. Like it or not.

So the essay is the last, best chance to say, "Well, this is why I'm different." It should display your child’s character and it should be about something interesting. 

It should NOT be about the same stuff that everyone writes about and ridden with cliches.  It should be detailed, not generalized. And, contrary to what many parents and children think, it doesn't have to be about some huge highfalutin, pretentious thing. 

You can “go small,” as one of our college essay advisors, Sarah, talks about. 

So those are my two cents on the essay.

Obstacle #9:  “Winging It”

A lot of people think, "What's the big deal? “I managed to do okay getting into college back in the day.” 

Well, a lot has changed in the last 30 years since we applied to school. Personally, I applied to only one school. I got in and I was done. 

But today, between all the marketing that colleges do and all the pressure from other kids, parents, teachers and even to some extent, superintendents, the College Board, the ACT and colleges themselves, it's a perfect storm.  The college process has changed so much more than it used to look like back in ancient times.

To make matters worse, now, it's incredibly easy to graduate college and not have a job that requires a college degree! 

Even before the pandemic, this was a huge problem, 50% of college grads who graduated in the last two years didn't have a job that required a BA or a BS. 

Not to mention the 1.6 Trillion of student debt that’s crushing kids. 

Or failing to go into college with a Plan A, Plan B and more.  If you switch majors once or twice because you don't do enough thinking about how you're wired, and what it is that that makes that wiring jibe with majors and careers that could be a good fit for you,  then if you switch majors a couple of times, which 80% of kids do, you could end up on the “six year plan” at $50,000, $60,000, $70,000, maybe even $80,000 per year. 

Not to mention the opportunity cost of not getting out and working on the schedule that you should have stuck to. So that could be a $100,000 to a $200,000 problem if you don't have a plan. So please don't wing it!

Obstacle #10;  Starting Too Late

The last obstacle is very closely related: starting too late. 

Now, I want to be clear. I'm not advocating that everybody start in ninth grade. 

What I am saying is that you should start in utero. 

No, I'm kidding.  Some children SHOULD start with a college consultant in 9th grade, but many kids are NOT ready to work with someone like me that early, and they won’t benefit from the advice, so it would end up being a waste of money. 

However, regardless if you and I were working together that early, I’d advise you to start thinking strategically about building that body of work and positioning yourself financially through legal and ethical loopholes and strategies to be able to not only multiply your odds of getting in to the colleges that you want to get into, but also to pay only wholesale prices to qualify for generous tuition discounts. 

The earlier you start thinking in this fashion, and the sooner you begin implementing those thoughts and strategies, the better.

Next Steps (Optional)

If you are ready to talk about coming up with a winning college game plan, you’re invited to schedule a time to chat with either me or someone on my team. 

All you have to do go to BookLockwood.com,  and as long as we are currently still taking on new clients, we will schedule time to see if you qualify for our programs,  and for you to be able to judge for yourself whether you think that we're a good fit or not. 

Thanks for reading this report, I hope to speak to you soon. 

Sincerely,

Andrew Lockwood, J.D.

Founder, Lockwood College Prep.

[email protected]

516-882-5464

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Working with Andy and Pearl relieved so much stress we were feeling during my sons junior year. I never had to worry about him writing his essay because Andy spoke to him directly, guiding and prompting him along the way. The application process went smoothly after Andy helped us make a list of schools we were all happy with.

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