001this presentation will cover the college planning and application process for students and families hello redhawks i am mrs exodactylus and i serve as the college and career counselor at acit the intended audience for this presentation is any student or family who would like to learn more about the college admissions process i hope all of you are happy healthy and staying safe and are as focused as you can be during these very uncertain times so you will notice throughout the presentation there will be page numbers at the top of many of the slides those page numbers are referring to the acit college and career planning guide which is available on our website or by clicking the link at the bottom of this presentation you can either print out the guide or download it to your desktop
002and refer to it as needed the guide goes into further detail regarding many of the topics we will discuss today and will be another resource for you and your family as you begin to decide on your students plans for after high school any time you hear me mention the term post-secondary that is a general term that means any plan a student has for themselves after high school or their post-secondary school the majority of this presentation will be focused on four-year colleges and that planning process but i will briefly touch on the other paths as well many of our students leave high school and enter the world of full-time employment enroll in a career or technical school enlist in the military or the reserves or apply to a two-year community college we encourage all pathways here
003at acit however like i said this presentation is intended for students and families who are planning to apply to a two or four year university i would like to take some time to talk about some myths about college the first is that test scores are everything that is really not the case test scores certainly are important but they are not the main driving factor your transcript is your transcript is a listing of all the courses you have taken since freshman year and the grades you have earned in those courses so please keep that in mind the second myth is that there is one perfect college for every student there are over 4 000 colleges and universities in the country so do not get tunnel vision keep an open mind and research your options the third
004myth is that you need to know exactly what you want to be or what you want to study or what you want to be when you grow up as soon as you apply to college but one of the things we recommend and will encourage you to do throughout your junior and senior years is to utilize naviance to do some career exploration every student in the district has an account with a naviance college and career planning platform i would encourage any student who is unsure about their career path to begin to explore their options through naviance i am available for appointments virtually or if you would like to sit down to talk about your college lists those meetings can be held in person or virtually the myth that i did skip over was to wait until
005you're accepted to visit there's a myth that says don't visit until you get accepted that's usually something that the students wouldn't do in a traditional sense but given the circumstances where you can't go visit many colleges campuses in person right now due to the pandemic this may be a reality for you so we just kind of have to wait and see i've been in contact with many college representatives throughout the few last two weeks they are all fully aware of the situation that is going on and they know this is going to impact the class of 2021. they have all explained to me that they're going to be very flexible in the fall of 2020 when students are applying to college they will understand if a student is unable to visit a campus in person
006many universities and colleges are offering virtual college tours and virtual one-on-one tours so i would encourage you if you are interested in a specific school to begin looking into those options [Music] so many students will come into the college and career center and ask if a college is good or not one of the responses that i like to say is i don't know i don't know what good means to you um so some students might like a really small school where whereas another student might like a penn state with a 45 000 undergraduate students so the idea of good is really subjective but through this process hopefully you will learn a lot about yourself and your family and what makes the best sense for you as a family financially academically socially and logistically um you
007know all of those things you know i can't tell you whether the school is going to be the right fit for you but i can certainly help you figure out what questions to ask so moving on to talk about the college planning process on pages 11 and 12 the college planning guide there are a lot of really great information about this whole process a couple things to keep in mind working together as a family is really important and having those open conversations about you what you are all comfortable with because many times it's going to be compromise students have to take ownership of their plans this is really critical in the application process because many college universities are looking to find out who is college ready and who isn't schools such as university of delaware
008actually have students feeling fielding phone calls and emails and tracking how many times a parent contacts them versus the student so i can tell you it can adversely affect a student's application if the students themselves are not contacting the colleges directly so just have the student take ownership of this process you also want to start talking about finances openly and start early so you can reach your deadlines like i said in these unusual circumstances and times certainly these deadlines may change for you so you want to make sure that you're meeting with your counselor often obviously counselors are very busy with their virtual meetings but anytime a senior wants to discuss their plans please have them reach out to their counselor or me for further assistance moving on to finding colleges and some things that
009you should consider on pages 13 and 14 we talk about factors you want to consider when finding a college some things to consider when you sit down and start planning would be obviously the cost you want a list of schools that vary in cost you also want to think about size sometimes students write off similar small i'm sorry they write off smaller colleges and then later realize that when they really needed or wanted to get into a college they had already written it off because they said it was too small so don't be closed off to smaller schools and don't have all huge schools on your list have a variety of options so location and distance from home is sometimes a very important factor for various reasons you may start this process thinking you want
010to go to school in california or hawaii and then when you realize how hard those locations are to get to then you may amend your list based on that so you want to have a list that is diverse in location as well additionally you want to start thinking about majors you do not need to know what you want to do or be right now but narrowing it down to two or three areas that interest you or you feel strongly about would be a good way to start to narrow down your list credentials are really important as you begin to utilize naviance much more and we really encourage you all to start doing so you will start to get a better understanding of what schools are looking for and what a good fit for you would
011be academically so if you start to use the graph features in naviance it really does help you to figure out what is a reach school versus what is a safety school or what is a probable school for you oddly enough i have added residence halls here on this list because for some students this is really critical um you're going to be living on those campuses so you want to make sure that the creature comforts and certain specific wants and desires that the student has that you're aware of them and that you all know if the college will provide you with those opportunities so if you're not comfortable with where you're living that could really adversely affect your college experience so you want to review the housing situation before committing to any school and finally special
012programs and pockets of excellence this special programs could include anything from athletics visual performing arts things like that if you're seriously interested in certain special programs you're going to want to make sure that the schools on your list offer those opportunities regarding pockets of excellence there are many schools that are not big in name recognition but they specialize in certain majors for example drexel university has a world-renowned co-op and internship program rowan university has one of the top engineering schools in the country and stockton university has one of the top occupational therapy and physical therapy graduate programs with a direct entry medical school program and they also have a top criminology major and a hospitality and tourism program a lot of students don't consider these schools because they want the bigger name or the more
013prestigious uh name or college university but sometimes one of these schools with a pocket of excellence might just be the right school for you so the next slide we talk about hitting the road and visiting these colleges so obviously right now visiting colleges is not really feasible for many students and parents however on pages 15 and 18 of the college planning guide you will find a lot of helpful information and advice for when you are able to make those visits to campuses or if you're able to do them virtually we strongly encourage you to take advantage of some of the resources available on the college and career planning sites such as you visit that are free of charge you can virtually view the campus grounds the resident halls and get a better feel of the
014campus the college and career center will be hosting various virtual inter virtual information sessions with college universities throughout the fall and winter students should log into naviance to see a full list of college virtual information sessions and register for those that they want to learn more about this year colleges are putting emphasis on a student's level of demonstrated interest so has the student visited the school website have they attended a virtual open house have they scheduled a virtual tour colleges want to accept the students who are highly interested in attending so on pages 16 and 18 of the planning guide will help you narrow down your list of schools i encourage you to keep your list in the range of six to eight schools certainly students are but some students are below that range and
015some students are above but you really want to try to narrow it down so that when you come to school in the fall right now of your senior year you should have a solid list to work from ideally we would hope that college bound seniors will return to school in the fall with their list of colleges added in naviance and this list of schools should have a few of each like i mentioned a few reach schools a pre-probable schools and a few safety schools so now we're going to talk somewhat about admissions terms and you'll find some more information on the college and career planning guide on pages nine and ten for the purposes of this presentation i will focus on the top three on this list early decision early action and priority because they
016will impact you the most recently so early decision is a binding contract meaning if you want to go to that college or university you will sign a binding contract which means you have to attend that college or university that following fall now there are risks involved in that because you don't have your financial aid award package yet you can certainly reach out to the college's admissions office to see if they are willing to give you an estimated package but having that discussion as a family is really critical so you may be asking why does anyone choose to do early decision quite frankly i use lehigh university for this example their overall acceptance rate for traditional applicants is 18 which is low but they accept over 40 percent of their early decision applicants so if you
017know that one particular college is the best fit for you and you've discussed and agreed as a family and that school offers an early decision option by all means go for early decision as it may be the best option for admissions now early action on the other hand is what i think is the best thing going you can apply to colleges early you find out if you get accepted early and you still have until may 1st to decide if you will attend so early action is non-binding when you see a term like priority it means that the school really wants to see your application so for schools for example like old dominion their deadline priority is december 1st and if you do not apply by their priority deadline you will not be eligible for scholarships
018through the college the same for montclair state university their priority deadline is december 1st so you want to if you want to be considered for l to be eligible for certain scholarships for certain schools you want to make sure you're following their priority deadline so many many students and parents ask me so how are applicants evaluated what are the hard factors um the top factor that any admissions representative will let you know is they want to look at the students the rigor of their schedule so how hard were the courses that the students took did the student challenge themselves from year to year and how did they do in those courses did they do well now certainly they are not expecting every student to have taken all ap classes in all honors classes that would
019not be realistic they want to see a student have a mix of classes and levels and that they have challenged themselves from year to year and that they are doing well in those classes that's what they're looking for and then of course placement testing sat act and sat subject tests you can find out more about each of those tests on page 19 of the planning guide i will mention that many schools this year due to cove 19 are going test optional and what does that mean so a test optional college lets students decide whether they want to submit test scores with their application most test optional schools will consider sat and act scores if they are submitted but focus on other factors that they believe are stronger predictors of a student's potential to succeed in
020college there will be a full you will be able to access the list of colleges that are test optional at the link on this page so there are other factors that admissions representatives consider as they are reviewing an applicant's application file and especially this year i believe these are going to become very important and critical in the application process soft factors like letters of recommendation are going to be important so make sure you're requesting letters of recommendations from teachers who will speak highly of the student's academic abilities and overall strengths the student's academic resume highlighting all of the awesome things that the student has done inside and outside of school will be another important factor for admissions additionally the college essay will become very important this year while it will not make or break an
021admissions decision a good college essay can help you get in and finally demonstrated interest this is what i mentioned a few minutes ago this is talking about when a student has reached out to the campus either for a visit to request information or for a virtual tour admissions offices track students who demonstrate interest so the more a student connects with the college prior to applying for admission the more likely they are to be accepted so let's talk a little bit about the application process on page 11 you will find information about the college application process most students utilize a platform called the common application to submit their college applications you can find more information about the common application on page 22 of the college planning guide the com application is a great time saving tool
022because students can apply to multiple colleges and universities using one application platform they will enter their demographic personal and academic information one time and it will automatically populate all of their applications there are over 900 colleges and universities that utilize the common application so be sure to check it out the common app also provides students with 10 college essay prompts to choose from that remain consistent from year to year i recommend any juniors who would like to get a jump start on the application process to take a look at the common app prompts and get started on their college essay as early as their junior year so if a school does not accept their applications through common app they will require what is referred to as a direct to institution application in those cases the
023student would go to the college's website and go to their admissions page their student will be prompted to create an account and complete the application directly on the college's website many students become worried when a college accepts both the common application and in addition offer their own school specific applications sometimes they feel that if they submit their application through common app the school will review it negatively because they did not use the school specific application i can assure you that this is not the case i speed up i speak to admissions officers regularly and they all report to me that there is never any preference given to which application a student submits honestly the common app was created by admissions professionals to help reduce some of the stress in the college admissions process so if
024the college uses the common app i recommend you take advantage of it so this checklist is something that i provide to students and families as a way to check to make sure that you are following all of the steps that you need to get all of your application materials together i usually have this as a requirement that has to be turned in when a student is requesting their application materials this year obviously with students remote and with things being kind of up in the air we're going to try to be somewhat flexible with this signed checklist as long as the student has verified to us that they are applying to that college they can request the transcript this way the parent hopefully will see the checklist and will sign off on the checklist verifying that
025they know what the responsibility of the student and the parent are and versus what's the responsibility of the school so letters of recommendation this is an important part of the application process it's one of those soft factors i mentioned earlier students should request two letters of recommendation from two core academic teachers from their junior year we are hopeful that each student has at least two junior to your teachers who they feel comfortable asking for a lot of recommendation now it does not i say academic teachers and some students us will then say to me well what about my academy teacher i consider that an academic teacher as well your academy or career technical education teacher i think is a great option for the students to request their letters of recommendation especially if that student wants
026to continue studying in that field of study so for example if your student is a health science student and they are planning to continue their education in the health science field a lot of recommendations from their health science instructor would probably go a great length in benefiting their application so many students ask if they can get letters from people outside of the school for example many students are involved in athletics or community organizations some students volunteer or involved in their church community you absolutely can request a supplemental letter from any coach employer mentor etc they will simply email the letter to your counselor and that counselor will add the add the letter to your application file in naviance so you really want to give some thought to who you're going to ask to write your
027letter does this person really know you well can they speak to your strengths confidently if for some reason a teacher does not agree to write your letter please don't take offense to that they could say no for a number of reasons they may already have received a high number of requests or they may not feel that they can confidently write confidently write a strong letter for you so on to the next slide also continuing to talk about letters of recommendation we are asking that you reach out to the teachers directly via email or in person to make the initial request for the letter of recommendation once the teacher agrees to write your letter we are asking that you forward them the student brag sheet which is available on the previous slide the brag sheet is
028a form that all juniors are recommended to complete if they will be requesting letters of recommendation the break sheet is a place for students to highlight things about themselves that the teacher may not otherwise know it will also also ask students to cite specific examples of times in the teacher's class that held meaning to the student many times the teacher will use these anecdotes and examples to write a really personalized letter so make sure you are taking time to really fill the brag sheet out thoroughly the brag sheet and letter recommendation request form should then be forwarded to the teacher directly finally the student must then go into their naviance account and submit their letter of recommendation request once the student requests the teacher in naviance the teacher will receive an email notification of when
029the letter of recommendation is due the teacher will then upload their letter directly to the naviance portal okay we're going to be moving on to college admissions testing which you can find additional resources on pages 19 and 20 of the college and career planning guide obviously this is a challenging topic for me to cover during these unique times in our world the old rule of thumb for a student was to take two to three sat tests and one to two act tests we will just have to wait to see how things unfold with college admissions college board is constantly changing their website telling us what college admissions testing is going to look like over the next couple months if you registered for march or may's sat they obviously have issued you a full refund if
030you are attempting to register for a fall test you want to make sure you create an entire new registration otherwise they may try to charge you the 49 for the change of date fee we'll talk more about the differences between the sat and act shortly but i do want to stress that there is no harm in doing both in fact i highly recommend it now colleges are trending to super score act sub scores with sat sub scores for example a student did great on the sat in math but the critical reading score was higher on the sat they will take both of those scores into account and keep in mind that college uni colleges and universities are in the business of wanting to accept you so remember that i also wanted to talk about sat
031subject tests applicants that are looking at the most highly competitive colleges in the countries ivy leagues such as cornell mit harvard yale and stanford those students really should consider taking two to three subject tests students can take up to three subject tests on one test date they are each one hour in length however it is my opinion that students should limit the number of subject tests that they take on one day to one to two tests many students choose to schedule their sat subject tests to align with their ap exams because a lot of the time they're covering the same information so i mentioned that i was going to discuss the differences between the sat and the act and on this slide you will see a table comparing those two placement tests many students and
032parents don't know this but the act is actually the most widely accepted college placement test in the country it happens that we happen to live on the east coast and the east coast is the college board belt so the s.a.t is a lot more strongly emphasized than the act on the east coast but again there is no reason to focus on the a.c.t if you feel better if there is no reason to excuse me to not focus on the act if you feel that that is a better test for you the act is a little bit shorter but down at the bottom you will see that the biggest difference between the tests is that the act offers a science section where the sat does not the act also has a lot more questions in a
033shorter period of time so with the act you are getting 215 questions with about 0.49 seconds per question whereas on the sat you are answering 154 questions with about a minute and 10 sec 10 a minute and 10 seconds per question to answer so the act is definitely what we consider a power test it is actually designed for you to run out of time and for some students it is a better assessment option so please take that into consideration which when deciding which placement tests to take so i mentioned before many students are feel that they do better in class but they don't do so well on standardized tests if you are one of those students or if you are one of those parents believe me you're not alone as of the date of this
034presentation there were over 1 000 colleges listed on fairtest.org which is a listing of all college universities in the country that do not require sat or act scores what they will focus on is your transcripts your letters of recommendation and your college essay many schools are trending to offer students scholarships and honors college placements without test scores just based on that transcript which is your record of grades and the strength of your schedule so take a look at this list on fairtest.org you will notice notice some schools have a little symbol next to them for example rowan university is test optional but if you are applying for their engineering program they are not test optional meaning that you they do require test scores for those specialized programs so talking about testing accommodations if you are
035a student who requires testing accommodations be sure to reach out to your school counselors now to let them know that you would like to apply for accommodations for standardized testing such as the sat or the act your case manager will assist you through this process so students with an iep or a 504 plan may be eligible if you are a student athlete or potential student athlete or you may be potentially recruited to play collegiate sports you will want to log on to the ncaa eligibility center website and get registered this is a really important step if you intend to participate in division one or division two athletics in college so at the beginning of the presentation i did mention naviance so i wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about naviance naviance is
036the one-stop shopping resource for all college and career planning and i cannot stress enough how important it is that you become familiar with and comfortable with using the naviance platform play around do college searches do career searches take a career interest profiler to down to narrow down your interests and aptitudes and then connect with careers that highlight your interests counselors will assign you tasks on the naviance home page so you want to make sure that you are paying attention to that and you should be logging into naviance at least weekly when you are a senior if you are having trouble logging into naviance please reach out to your counselor or myself and we can get you up and running on that program so this year a lot of students are utilizing a program called niche
037n-i-c-h-e niche is an awesome resource for college searching the only negative to the niche program is that it does not really give you accurate statistics and what i mean by that is when you are in naviance and you are looking at a graph for a particular college and whether or not you'd be admissible or admitted for that school that's a really hard true and fast data that will give you a realistic perspective on whether or not that school is a good fit for you whereas niche is not accurate in those details so our information is uploaded by the counselors and is reflective of our students rankings and their gpas so you will be able to see where your gpa and rank fall as compared to other students in the past from acit who have applied
038to those colleges and whether or not they were accepted so we're going to talk and kind of close out the presentation talking about paying for college obviously this is really critical and you can find more details on page 30 and 31 of the college planning guide you will find some really great information there some things i want to highlight you can file the free application for federal student aid more commonly known as the fafsa as early as october 1st of a student's senior year so yes you can and should be submitting your fafsa application as soon as possible if your student is a senior and they are intending to go to college in the fall the big thing i want to emphasize about the fafsa is the efc and net price calculator the efc stands
039for expected family contribution and is and it is what the federal government believes your family should be able to afford and pay per year for college you will get your efc after filing the fafsa you can go ahead do that ahead of time and figure out what your efc will be by visiting fafsaforecaster.org take a look and explore that to determine what your family's efc will be the net price calculator is located on every college and university website no matter what it's the law you will be asked to put some personal information and some financial information into the net price calculator and that calculator will give you an idea or an estimate of how much you would be paying per year for that specific college so that is a great way to figure out your
040financial diversity on your college lists the css profile is also something you may see if you apply if you are applying to private colleges or some competitive colleges these schools will likely require the css profile to be completed so if you see this or come across it in your application process it is a really critical piece of information for the colleges for example drexel university if you do not get the css profile in by the deadline you will not be considered for merit grants or scholarships and drexel is probably around 71 to 72 thousand dollars per year so it's really important that you adhere to those deadlines so that you are going to make yourself or your student eligible for all of the full financial opportunities that they are that they can be many of
041our students are choosing to go into the military or reserves and rotc programs to pay for college i highly recommend those and can certainly help students navigate through those if they are considering those for the future okay so i know i threw a lot of information at you but this should provide you with some insight into what you and your family should be doing now and help to prepare for the college application process but as always if you need more help through this process we are here to help to answer questions and to help you navigate as winston churchill said he who fails to plan is planning to fail you for your time and your consideration as you attended this presentation my contact information is available on the following slide if you need an appointment
042please click on the link to request thank you