Glad you're here
You signed up to hear from me, which means you're looking for a steadier, more thoughtful version of the college admissions conversation than the one most families are getting. I want to make good on that right away.
This is a welcome letter, not a manual. I'm not going to walk you through deadlines or test prep timelines or how to write a Common App essay. Those things matter, and we'll get to them in future letters. Today I want to share the thinking that everything else in my work rests on, so that when the next email arrives in your inbox you'll know where I'm coming from.
I have been doing this work for twenty-five years. I started on the college side as an admission officer at a selective university, where I spent five years reading files, traveling, and sitting on selection committees. I then spent approximately twenty years as a Director of College Counseling at independent schools, here in the United States and abroad, before opening my own practice in Saratoga Springs. I have read tens of thousands of applications and walked alongside more than 1,000 students through every version of this journey.
What I have learned, over and over, is that the families who come out the other end of this process feeling good about it are the ones who refused, early on, to let it become about prestige. The students who thrive in college are the ones who arrived knowing themselves and knowing why they chose the place they landed.
That is the work. And it rests on two guideposts: reflection and evidence.
Reflection and evidence
Reflection
Reflection is the work of looking up and around long enough to think about who you are and what matters to you. It is not a worksheet. It is not a personality quiz. It is downtime. A walk in the woods. A long conversation in the car. A few minutes by a body of water with no phone. In an overscheduled adolescence, this is harder to come by than it sounds, and it is the single most important raw material for a college search worth having. Parents, in these overscheduled times it is essential that you allow your kids the room to just be themselves.
"These kids can't answer the most simple question I ask them: What do you do for fun? That's heartbreaking. And I don't want them on my campus."
A subcategory of reflection comes from external reference points. The most direct way I can express this idea is by sharing a supplemental prompt from Columbia University's application:
In 100 words, list a selection of texts, resources, and outlets that have contributed to your intellectual development outside of academic courses, including but not limited to books, journals, websites, podcasts, essays, plays, presentations, videos, museums, and other content that you enjoy.
Every engaged student, aiming for any level of college selectivity, should be excited to answer a prompt like this. They might even struggle to edit it down. Teens need space and encouragement to find their way to the ideas that excite them. Doing so will make the college choice and the experience that follows immeasurably more substantial and rewarding.
Evidence
The other guidepost is evidence. By evidence I mean digging into the colleges that interest students, and some that didn't initially, to understand what truly differentiates the daily lived experience. This is how we get past the popular reference points of prestige and selectivity and reach the substance.
Prestige is an ephemeral, abstract concept. Selectivity is a number manufactured and amplified by a multi-billion dollar college consulting industry. Neither one gets a student out of bed on a random Tuesday at their chosen college, excited for the day ahead. Neither one offers any insight into the quality of an undergraduate experience.
The external reference points I mentioned earlier also serve as exhibits in the evidence case. If a student thinks they know an area they might major in, they should dig into it. Keep up with the news feeds and trade publications. Read what people in the field are actually arguing about. The research never really stops once it starts.
A college is not a vacuum cleaner
You can rank vacuum cleaners. You can rank televisions. You can rank washing machines. You can rank anything where the customer's interaction with the product is more or less the same from one buyer to the next. A college is not one of these things. A college is a community of thousands of people, and what matters is how a particular student interacts with that community over four years.
The question rankings never ask is the only question that matters: for whom?
U.S. News, the same defunct magazine that ranks colleges, ranks Orlando the number one family vacation destination in America. A family that prefers Yosemite is not missing out on anything. They are answering a different question. The same is true for colleges. There are roughly 300 broadly applied-to colleges and universities in this country, and every one of them has the ingredients an engaged student needs to grow, learn, and thrive. The question is which one fits this student.
The goal is to be an active agent in your education, not a passive participant whose value is determined by a college name on a sweatshirt.
— The reframe I want every student to hold ontoThis is not a small distinction. It is the entire game. Once a student understands that their job is to be the agent of their own education, the prestige question collapses. The college brand stops being the prize. The growth becomes the prize.
The three stages of student-centered counseling
I guide students through a three-stage process that helps them arrive at a college list that is balanced, manageable in length, and shaped by their own self-knowledge and goals.
Can you do this yourself, as a family? Absolutely. You can cultivate these three stages with an open mind, free resources like my Quick & Dirty List Starter, and some ground rules for engagement. (One ground rule I recommend: limit the college conversation to designated days and times. The dinner table is not a counseling office.)
Three dimensions of fit are worth keeping in mind throughout. Admissibility relative to your teen's academic and personal profile. Affordability given your financial picture and a college's willingness to meet you in a workable place. And the personal elements that lead to a thriving educational experience.
One more thing about fit. It is never perfect from the beginning. With wear and growth, a good fit breaks in and improves over time once a student enrolls. A "good fit" college should come off the rack a little baggy and unflattering. With time the student grows into it.
Reflection and self-assessment
It all starts here. My work with students begins with a conversation, and that conversation continues until a final attendance choice is made. There is no substitute for one-on-one talks. My years working in independent schools gave me the professional grounding in adolescent development and psychology to connect with very different kinds of students and help them learn to talk about themselves.
As we kick things off, I ask my students to work through some guided reflection rooted in intentional questions. Many of them come from the best-designed college application supplements. Others are harder to answer at first, but they help students understand what they need to be working toward as they make use of their time in high school.
This reflection is ongoing. Its conclusions and the leads it generates into college options will evolve with time. That is part of the beauty of this human process. Along the way we identify goals and plan our work to keep the search enjoyable and on schedule.
Even the earliest products of this reflection will come back around to inform the final list and the narrative a student tells in the application itself.
Discovery and building evidence
This is one of my favorite phases of the search, and many families miss out on it. Public conversation about colleges has narrowed to a handful of names, and some college "experts" simply reinforce the biases that families already have.
With an open mind, we take what came out of the reflection process and apply it to the wide-ranging landscape of colleges and universities available to students in the US and beyond. As a trusted guide I make initial suggestions that I think could meet the student's needs and preferences. I demonstrate effective ways to conduct meaningful research, and I provide some specific web-based tools that I find especially informative. The goal at this stage is to get past perception and understand the daily, lived experience of a given college, informed by the data and perspectives we can gather from admission officers, current students, and faculty when possible.
Two bodies of research anchor my discovery work with students. The first is the Gallup-Purdue Big Six, which identifies six undergraduate experiences — faculty mentorship, deep learning, hands-on application, a sense of belonging, and others — that predict long-term thriving after graduation.
The second is Challenge Success, a nonprofit at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education that works with schools and families to push back on the prestige-and-rankings arms race. In my school life I had the chance to collaborate with Denise Pope and her team, whose 2018 white paper A “Fit” Over Rankings: Why College Engagement Matters More Than Selectivity pulls the Gallup-Purdue findings together with the rest of the best research in the field — Matthew Mayhew’s 1,800-study review of college outcomes, Dale and Krueger’s labor-economics work on earnings — and lands on a plain-language point I come back to often: selectivity does not predict learning, job satisfaction, or well-being. Engagement does. Or as the paper puts it, “a good fit is a college where a student will be engaged — in class and out — by what the college has to offer.”
Based on this research and a lot of experience, I believe that the best college is the one that is the best fit for a particular student — academically, socially, and financially. Every school we consider, every visit we plan, every conversation we have, gets pointed at one question: would you thrive here?
Beyond the elements of personal fit and need, we look honestly at the financial picture and the probability of admission based on hard, recent data. I give my students accounts on two different platforms that use admission data from the previous year to assess whether a college is a likely, target, reach, or unlikely option. Every student can find good personal, academic, and financial fits in each of those categories if they invest in the research and stay engaged with their own self-assessment. If your family qualifies for need-based aid, I keep track of the schools that meet that need most fully and generously. If you do not qualify, I can identify schools that are likely to offer your student a merit-based scholarship to entice them to enroll.
One thing worth saying out loud: reflection and self-assessment recur throughout the research phase. There are an incredible number of college options out there, but the number is finite. As students start to see where college experiences overlap and where they differ in ways that matter to them, their criteria sharpen. Well-planned campus visits can yield insight at this point, and I help with thinking those plans through.
Thoughtful and intentional execution
Done well, with the right framing and support, the college application process can be approached as a capstone experience for adolescence and a chance to lay a foundation for what comes next. It is an opportunity for a student to gather the insights from reflection and evidence collection and put them into practice with the executive skills they have been building in school. A significant personal project, completed on a deadline that matters.
The key to successful execution is a thoughtfully chosen, balanced list. That is a project we work toward up until the summer before senior year, and in my view the list is still somewhat changeable until the end of the first semester, as students take in more experiences and discover new directions.
When I say balanced, I mean two things. First, a manageable length. Twelve applications is usually a reasonable cap for most students. More than that leads to diminishing returns and lower-quality work. Many families do not realize that you do not just fill out the Common Application. You will likely have additional supplemental essay work for many of the colleges that use that platform, and once you have applied, each college has its own portal or other set of tasks to maintain communication. I have seen students receive denials simply because they were not monitoring a portal that asked for an easy answer to a question. Keeping the list from getting too lengthy is one of many reasons the cap matters.
Second, balance means a distribution of colleges that, based on our evidence and my professional judgment, represent options that are likely, possible but not guaranteed, and lightly reachy but within reach. That middle category is often called "target," and it is the sweet spot for most lists. Every college on the list, regardless of selectivity rate, needs to be a place the student would welcome the chance to attend.
These likelihoods can shift based on how we use the application calendar: single-choice Early Decision (binding), non-binding Early Action, or Regular Decision. That is a complex piece of decision-making we can only fully tackle in early senior year, once the list is mostly shaped.
The rest of execution mainly involves using the pieces of the application that are within our power to write, to best tell the student's story.
The five fundamental pieces of a college application
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The transcript
Always the central piece of an application review. The two primary insights it offers are the rigor of a student's curriculum relative to what their school offers, and the student's performance as measured by grade trend (up, down, or consistent) over time.
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Standardized tests
The SAT and ACT are now optional at many colleges, and not accepted at some others. These tests are a snapshot of a single morning bubbling in forms in a quiet room. Studies show that the tests most effectively demonstrate family income and parental education, more than they predict student achievement. That said, they can still be helpful where they are accepted, if scores are strong and matched with a strong transcript.
Free advice: it is not an effective use of time to take any of these tests, or to prep for them, before tenth grade is over.
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Counselor and teacher letters
These tell the story of the student in the classroom and the wider community. Cultivating this support requires being a good citizen and a thoughtful classroom participant.
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Activities list
The first of the components that a student gets to shape at the time of application, though, like the others, it still reflects a record of high school choices and actions. Despite what you may hear, there are no right or wrong ways to spend your time, and no formulas for college admission. The simple act of being engaged with your community, exploring thoughtfully and intentionally to find the ways you enjoy spending your time, and then deepening that engagement over time, is what produces a strong activities list.
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Essays
This is the piece of the application that is entirely in the student's control when they apply. I find it an exciting and rewarding experience to guide students as they write them. You can start too early on this and end up with writing that does not reflect the student's maturity or state of mind when they actually apply, so we typically dive in the summer after junior year.
Good personal narrative writing takes many drafts and a lot of feedback, with time to settle and bake along the way. It requires an open mind, a commitment to an honest voice, and receptiveness to feedback. Sometimes the key to a brilliant essay originates from half a sentence in a first draft that I highlight and we tease out through conversation and rewriting. Usually we have the primary essay wrapped up by October, and in August we begin the process of writing the college-specific supplemental essays once they are updated and published for the year.
A note for parents
The next pages contain questions to ask your child. Before you ask any of them, I want to share a frame that has changed how I work with parents during the most anxious stretches of this process.
It comes from my partner Mindy Rose, who runs Big Idea Breakdown and works with families on decision-literacy and structured thinking in high-stakes moments.
The decision is theirs. The anxiety is yours.
That sentence does a lot of work. It names the imbalance most parents feel during this process without judging it, and it points to where the work actually has to happen. Not on the student. On the parent.
Mindy has built a parent-facing framework called Circles of Control that sorts a parent's anxieties into three concentric categories: what I can control, what I can influence, and what is out of my hands. The framework draws on Understanding by Design, the curriculum approach developed by Jay McTighe that is now the most widely used instructional framework in schools around the world.
What I can control is small but powerful. My language. The questions I ask instead of the directives I issue. My emotional regulation. Financial transparency. Letting my child speak first.
What I can influence is wider. Surfacing information through campus visits, current students, and good data. The home environment. Whether I allow time, ambivalence, and silence to exist. Which external voices enter the room.
What is out of my hands is most of it. Which school my child chooses. Other people's reactions. Whether it turns out to be the "right" choice in some final sense. The post-enrollment experience. The imagined narrative I constructed for them years ago.
Mindy has a working principle that I think every parent of a college-bound teenager should write on a sticky note and put on the fridge: every suggestion you make before your child has landed on her own is one more moment where her thinking gets replaced by yours.
The questions that follow are not an interrogation. They are an invitation to your child to think out loud in front of someone who loves them. Ask one or two at a time. Leave room for silence. Resist the urge to follow up with your own opinion. The goal of these conversations is not to extract information. It is to give your teenager the experience of being heard while they figure something out.
Mindy also built the Notice & Know Field Guide, a decision-literacy tool families can use throughout the college search. I recommend it to my own clients. It is the work of Mindy Rose at College Clinic / Big Idea Breakdown, and you can find it at noticeandknowbycc.netlify.app.
Questions and conversations
If you want to start a real conversation with your high schooler this week, try one of these. Not all of them. Just one. Maybe in the car, where neither of you has to make eye contact. Then listen.
Starting questions
A simple but very important question: Why do you want to go to college?
Are there any significant factors you already have in mind for your college search? Geography, campus culture, areas of study, activities, affinity groups, learning support resources — anything that comes to mind. Follow up: can you identify, honestly, which of these are non-negotiable needs and which would be nice but not deal-breakers?
If one of those factors is an area of study, why are you interested in it? If potential income is part of the answer, what would you say if income were not part of the decision?
In general, do you like school? What do you like about it? What do you not enjoy about high school so far?
Do you tend to enjoy classes where you engage in group discussion, or do you prefer to take in information from a teacher lecturing or presenting?
What high school classes or teachers have you most enjoyed so far? What made them stand out for you?
Deeper questions
Picture yourself at college in two to four years. What do you see? What do you imagine yourself doing? What are you looking forward to?
Have you thought about taking time off between high school and college (a gap year)? If so, is there anything you have in mind to do with that time? Note: studies show that gap year students enter college refreshed and are more likely to start with motivation and finish well and on time.
Do you have an interest in art, performing arts, or athletics that you hope to continue in some way in college? Do you want that to be the focus of your college life, or an activity alongside your academic interests?
What is something non-academic you have accomplished that you are particularly proud of? Or: describe an intellectual experience within the last two years that has given you great satisfaction.
Imagine you have a free day with no school or other obligations. What would you do with that unstructured time? The ability to answer this question honestly and enthusiastically is essential to being a balanced human being and a successful college applicant.
If you meet another student your age at a camp or a soccer showcase or, let's say, on a plane or train, and you are talking about yourself — what are your reference points for what you are into and who you are?
Try answering some of these yourself, and share with your child
Forget about grades. Describe a time in your life when you felt the insatiable drive to attain understanding or mastery of an idea, a skill, a concept, or a trick — whatever it was — just because it inspired you.
Would you rather be somewhere where you are known, where your teachers mentor you and provide opportunities corresponding to your interests, or would you rather be in a more anonymous environment?
What motivates you? What is important to you? Not because it sounds good or impressive, but genuinely?
Some colleges ask for a list of music, books, magazines, websites, podcasts, art, blogs, and so on that you have consumed and that interest you. What would make your list? Do you feel that your answer represents you well and shows that you are intellectually curious outside of assigned homework?