001hey good afternoon everyone my name is jamie knox i'm a school adjustment counselor at uh for the amherst regional public schools at summit academy um we are joined today with some panelists who in a moment will introduce themselves and are going to be talking about building a solid college list so the kind of process for today all of our panelists will introduce themselves they'll each take a few minutes to check in and share their thoughts about this process i will be keeping an eye on the comment section in chat section just to see what's coming up and we'll we'll give those questions to our panelists to answer so good afternoon everybody and dale i'm going to turn it over to you to introduce yourself great thank you my name is dale niemer i'm associate director
002of admissions at skidmore college in saratoga springs new york hi everyone my name is daisy ogunado i'm an assistant director of admissions with the university of massachusetts lowell hi everyone my name is abby stevens i use she her pronouns and i am as an assistant director as well at the university of vermont thanks for having us great and hello folks my name is rachel tampone associate director of admission and international recruitment at merrimack college over in north andover math great so i'm going to start and talking about ways you can start building your list of colleges and one of the ways i think you can start is even looking in your local area you are very lucky and that you live smack in the middle of some of the best colleges in this country but
003there's also a range of colleges out there and everyone needs to make some decisions early on do you want large small rural urban etc but we'll get there later but i think now in the time of covid things have changed a little bit and i know it is harder to get onto college campuses but certainly if you're out for a sunday drive or visiting a relative it's always nice to drive through a campus and just check it out and just see what appeals to you if you know students that attend some of the colleges that you're interested in i think that's a great way to find out what they like about that school and maybe their opinions as well websites are a really important way to learn a lot more and one thing about the
004website now is i think all of us on this panel would agree that our colleges are doing everything we can to build an important informative website so you can find out a lot about our campus culture the majors the size of the classes and also extra curricular life as well we all know there's lots of guidebooks out there um i think i always reference them with read them look through them and strain and sift a little bit of what you read but there is some really good information in the guidebooks with covid i don't know that all schools are doing college fairs anymore but hopefully we'll go back to those soon and i think that's one of the early best steps you can do is going to different tables to learn about different colleges their
005strengths what they're about but also making those decisions of do i want a large university a liberal arts college a small college a community college a trade school and just kind of realizing what all those opportunities mean um as you can in the fall typically all of us would be on the road visiting your high school unfortunately this year that's not happening hopefully next year it will be so definitely when colleges are coming to visit your high school you'll get to go and visit some of the counselors that come and ask the important questions you need to know of mouth parents your guidance counselors are probably the best resource out there they know many colleges they know us well and they also can use tools like naviance to tell you if you are in the
006ballpark your teachers are also a great reference but before i finish um as you're building your list you're the expert in your college search and you're the expert of what you need and what your educational goals are and it's great to take advice but trust your heart too i think i'll stop there and then come back and let somebody else continue for a moment oh i think sorry uh what i always advise students when they're planning on their college list is to make it a game first things first is to look up schools that actually have your major so what i suggest is get a sheet a google sheet whatever docs use google and just look up all the schools that you can find that have your major start writing as many of them down
007and then at that point take like 10 minutes to do all of that you'll probably find quite a few different schools what then i suggest after is to start figuring out which schools fit best for you the colleges are always talking about fit and you know what student fits best but you also have to find the school that fits for you so not only does it have your major but is it private is that what you're looking for is it public is it a community college or is it a specialty school for trade anything specific to you like hbcus or latino serving institutions and then try to figure it out from there then narrow it down even further does it have the clubs that you're looking for is it accredited in certain programs that you're
008interested in and then from there your list starts to get smaller and smaller another thing i always tell the students because i did have a group of students who played this activity and they were writing down lists of schools that didn't exist anymore or had merged and changed their name so make sure you're actually checking when you're doing all of that to make sure that those schools are still around some really helpful website to do all of this college board is very helpful naviance is great too i know a lot of students have access to that then we've got college green light which helps students find different colleges as well as scholarships then there's fast web which is also good for scholarships as well as searching google is super easy and as dale mentioned before
009using the school's websites just utilize as many tools as possible to make this not just a difficult you know process for you make it as fun as you can play it with other friends that are looking to get into college whoever has the most on their list that are accurate you know give yourselves a prize or something like that but there's definitely a way to make this interactive and also give you the opportunity to find exactly what you're looking for because no one wants to end up at a school and they realize hey this is not what i was looking for so a lot of research that you do beforehand is gonna save you so much stress in the long run and i'm gonna pass it on to someone else now awesome thank you i
010think i'm up those are both such good pieces of advice i love the game and and the fit and so oh i would echo both of those um general statements i love the idea of going to visit your local college even if it's not on your list going to check it out but before this panel i actually got some help from some experts which i will put in the chat after but it's a video of our current a couple of our current students giving honest college advice and how they kind of felt what they wanted to know in their search process and i loved watching the video and and i will put it in the chat um and throughout they all had little different nuggets of wisdom that i thought were great and spot on
011but they all echoed the same statement that it's this is your choice it's up to you and your family what is the best fit um and just like daisy said you know you hear the word fit so much and what does that mean so for example i think a place where students might get caught up is size do you want a big size or a small size what does that actually mean um you know for students coming from a smaller high school setting maybe they think okay i've had a small high school um i need to stick with it and have a small college or maybe um you come from a small high school and you're like no way i'm done with that i want a huge school that that will be great for me
012so there's so many different sizes um and i think it's a great question to ask when you go to these different visits whether they're virtual or in person what are your what's your class schedule like right now what kind of classes are you taking because the student of um student to faculty ratio at all these schools are going to look pretty similar after a while so really just hearing anecdotally from students i think about you know do you have a mix of classes are all of your classes very small um is a good way to get to know it and and then their one piece of advice i think is helpful so you know we all know what size means large and small but how does that feel for you and what does that mean
013i think is important um yeah i think i will go ahead and stop there and excited to hear some questions thanks awesome um so i can jump in i think my colleagues from all the other schools have done a great job of explaining how you go about building the actual list so kind of once you get to that point you've done your research you've narrowed down by major by location by extracurriculars athletics religious affiliation size there's a lot of things to consider so you have this list now narrowed down considerably but now you have to think of yourself and your own academic profile and who you are as a student and where you may fit in these institutions um so there are different buzzwords that people throw around like reach schools and target and likely
014and safety schools but really just thinking about it it's a way to make sure you're giving yourself enough options the right options it's always good to to have some reaches you know some things that are aspirational but i think the biggest part about this list is you know the safety schools or those match schools target schools um those are schools that you should find yourself very happy at and that would be very lucky to have you so you know don't put all of your eggs in this one one or two reach baskets because there are so many institutions where you can find a fit so just kind of thinking of that so things that you'll want to keep in mind when kind of planning your lists and and what your applications are going to look
015like you're going to want to keep in mind you know the school's acceptance rate what their average gpa may be do they require test scores and what are those averages um just to kind of look at your own academic profile and see how that's in line with what's typical for the school so that's kind of how you'll curate that list of you know okay well my gpa is a little bit below this but i like all they have to offer i'm gonna put my application out there and you know see what happens um or this school you know is right on par with my gpa that's what i'm gonna apply to i would be very very happy if i was able to get in and go there um so it's just good to really give
016yourself options you don't have to break any world records for how many schools you apply to um you know a healthy list could be anywhere from five to up to you know 15. there's no magic number but you do want to give yourself options and flexibility a few other things that that weren't mentioned that i wanted to just kind of speak upon and give you some ideas maybe you have classmates that you played sports with did extracurriculars with that went on to some schools you might be considering that are maybe freshmen or sophomores now you know can you reach out to them in your network and see what their experiences are like there's nothing better than you know a current student or someone you know to give you a little bit of advice another thing
017that i just like to point out in kind of making these considerations is affordability and cost um so first thing you know if you're going to be applying to a lot of schools do you need a fee waiver do schools have fee waivers that they can help make the application cost more manageable for you um you can always reach up to an admission counselor to ask those questions um also just thinking about cost affordability i work at a private institution so you'll see a sticker price but no student's going to pay that so every school legally does have to have a net price calculator available on their financial aid website so that is just some self-reported information about family financials as well as your own academic history that can kind of spit out a more
018accurate cost of just what you can expect to pay so that's kind of another thing you know parents family students you might want to take into consideration in kind of building these lists to also have options that you know might be attainable as far as um both financially as well as fit so those are just some other options that i wanted to put out there um and like everyone else said utilize the websites utilize the virtual visits schools are doing some amazing things online now so i know travel is difficult but utilize those things that are out there so i'm going to hop in here with a slightly different perspective i come from landmark college in putney vermont a four-year a private institution exclusively for students who learn differently students who may have dyslexia adhd
019maybe on the autism spectrum so i'm going to take the conversation about building your list towards the one in five students that the national center for learning disabilities say have some kind of learning difference now everything that the other panelists said also applies to you and it's all wonderful advice that all of you have given but let's take a look at um as a foundation some of the statistics of the students who receive accommodations in support in high school only 17 percent go on to access the resources that are available to them in college and then i think about how does that impact outcomes i was really surprised to learn that nationwide of all students trying to earn a bachelor's degree only 50 some percent succeed and the odds go down if you're a student
020with learning differences only about 33 or 34 of the students succeed in earning the degree that they're after and i tell you this not to be discouraging but to tell you that you can take charge of the situation you can change the odds by accessing and utilizing the supports that are available in colleges today so what kinds of support are available the the landscapes uh somewhat different than it what is for you in high school i break it into four different kinds of levels of support at the base of this triangle if you can picture it are the 4 300 or so institutions of higher ed throughout the country all of whom are required by law to give provide accommodations that give equal access to students with disabilities now those accommodations may vary greatly from
021institution to institution and how easy or hard they are to access can vary as well a smaller subset of these 4 300 colleges offer some kind of support services in addition to accommodation so that can be like executive function coaching math and writing labs what's important to know is that studies have shown that for every hour of these kinds of services a student utilizes their gpa increases again a smaller subset of colleges are traditional colleges that within them have structured programs of support so they may be programs aimed at a particular learning difference like adhd or autism they may be more broad based but they are comprehensive programs of support that usually come with additional fees for the kinds of supports that you access and finally the very top of this triangle a very small
022group of schools and post-secondary programs are exclusively for students who learn differently so landmark is one of the two colleges in that category the other is beacon and then there are various other post-secondary programs so how do you incorporate that information into building your college list i think the first thing to be aware of is what are the services and supports that you're receiving currently in school and assume that you are going to need the same supports in order to be successful college isn't easier than high school it's more rigorous both in terms of the academic demands and the executive functioning skills that it requires to be successful so be aware of what you receive now and then look at those various kinds of supporting colleges and find the one that will best match the
023services that you need to best ensure your success fern thank you so much so um this has been so lovely to hear all of you we have quite a number of viewers right now um and we do have one question that came through so in profile of a college clinic directory published this year likely reflect the reality two years from now may some schools be very different postcoded sure go ahead i think what i would do is i would um look at that data and you know interviews are recommended at many schools or feel free to just call the college office and ask them if it's still current i think this year some of the differences you'll see is many of us are going test optional some of us who always look very closely at
024demonstrated interest understand that can't really happen this year um we have families usually coming right now from all over the country international families and it's it's limited now so i would feel free to call a college and ask them directly like is your profile changing but i think best of all or most of all this year that i'm hearing from my school and other colleges is we're all going to be very flexible because of the circumstances right now um so that's what i'm hearing and i just wanted to mention one thing i don't know if we gave a real definition but as i understand it the dream college is a place that it might be challenging for you to get into your likely schools are there's a good chance you're going to be admitted and
025the safety are you're likely to be admitted but you know even at the safety level there's never any guarantees and sometimes it's hard i think to understand why did so and so it get in and i didn't but it's it's um it's a process but rely heavily students on your guidance counselors yeah i can i can add a little bit to that too um just in regards to i know there's a lot of anxiety just around coven and around will schools have the same amount of space that they had last year and do you have so many students deferring that you know by the time i apply is the acceptance rate going to be skewed um it hasn't been very you know honest and transparent um for the most part schools are kind of still
026operating the way they have been we are reviewing applications we're very understanding of the circumstance as many students that we had defer typically also some took leave of absences so there are still plenty of seats at many of our institutions so i definitely don't want students to stress and feel like you know acceptance rates are going to change wildly this year and next year because that's certainly not the case for the most part across the board i think abby you want to go first okay i would just jump in and i certainly concur with that you know we get that we've been getting that question a lot like is it going to be so much more competitive and because of different you know enrollment data scientists and things that are above my pay grade it's
027not we have you know plenty of room and at least from our standpoint at uvm it's going to be a very similar process and i think it's important to note that the new application or no excuse me the new question on the common application if you plan to use common application to apply um there is a space to provide more information if you felt like covid altered something that you want to give context to um but i think knowing that who the committee reading your application this year and next year in the following year we all have this context in mind and and can see it very quick clearly all right so i would just you know check it now presenters you've done a beautiful job thank you our gratitude for spending so much time
028today was there any kind of last questions or comments as you listen to one another speak that anybody wanted to to speak to yeah go ahead um so for me with searching for schools this year it might actually be a lot more beneficial for students it's you know as we talk with houses i think it's a buyer's market at this point um you're going to be talking to a lot more schools before because they have more access to talk to students virtually um they're setting up virtual meetings they're having info sessions you know you're going on virtual tours it's not the same obviously as going to the campus but you know even today you're talking to schools that you probably might not have seen before so you know take advantage of this this is probably
029a weirdly once in a lifetime thing um so do your best because i know if i was your age and i was still looking at colleges like i wish this happened it was hard enough to get out to go see schools and you know were there flying trips available now where it's like you don't have to fly in anywhere because those schools are coming to you at your school on whatever virtual platform there is to offer i highly highly suggest going to meet with schools that you've probably never heard of before because you can find out something wonderful it looks like we do have one more question just there's another comment in this oh sorry guys i think my connection's a little wonky so i'm a little i'm a little behind you all my apologies
030so there is another question if if folks see that any idea what the s-a-t a-c-t test scene will be next year my child is a junior personally i would say don't let it stress you out at this point in time um it's been very humbling to see how many colleges and universities have moved to test optional practice um that's not 100 across the board but the numbers are extremely extremely high um in cases that they have in a few schools in florida state schools um you are still working but a lot of it is board of directors that are kind of making those final decisions but for the most part i think you can just rest easy and knowing that we have your best interest in mind we're not trying to put any students in
031an unsafe testing situation we don't want you flying across the country to try to get a test date um and we're going to do what's best as we have that information i think you know my institution has always been very test optional so we're pretty inclined to you know know how to review applications but i do think this cycle will be really nice for for other schools that are kind of making this change for the first time they're going to have a real different holistic review that maybe they didn't have before so i'm hoping that that some of those changes stick around um but but overall i wouldn't stress about it um things will change as they change and if testing becomes a thing again you know schools will make their own decision but i
032think in good faith um most universities that you'll be applying to are going to be understanding of the circumstances all right and we do have another comment in so so jump in folks um are your schools in person or remote this year and how's it going for those of us with kids who are juniors we're assuming all schools will be in person in two years but our school um our students are on campus they're all in dorms um typically at skidmore first-year students could be in a double or a triple we have no triples this year and to accommodate that some of our upperclassmen are living in some local hotels however lucky them but um we've been doing very well our students have been incredibly responsible they're in a hybrid of classes some some of
033their classes are online some are in the classroom and we are all tested weekly and i will tell you that everybody has a really good attitude and so far so good so it's hard to know what we're going to be doing but we are planning to be back the same format next semester at landmark uh we are in a really fortunate situation we only have 450 students we are small in a very intentional way because it's very personal education and we are vermont is one of the safest states in the country so we are able to have students in class we are testing regularly we brought students on to campus from all over the country with stringent safety procedures in place and we've done really really well i think if anyone can continue to have
034in-person classes given the low density of our population i think we'll be able to continue but right now it's been going really well in person and the students are really glad to be back on campus um so unfortunately we have about 18 000 students that attend our school so being in person just wouldn't have worked this year so we are majority remote um we have about two probably probably 200 classes in session in person right now for students that needed to complete labs to graduate and the majority of students that we have currently living on campus are because they had need to live on campus so either international students or students without homes etc or just needing to get out of their home so it's actually going really well we've only had two cases total
035which i was surprised by and you know we're doing extensive contact tracing um testing regularly and which is really helpful because uh with our lab sciences we know that we we're part of the process of looking for you know this cure for kovid um at merrimack we are we give students the option to choose what worked best for them in their own educational journey their own safety so we did have about 70 percent of our students elect to return to campus which was great so we are able to give them that in-person experience both living and in the classroom we do bi-weekly testing we use mit broad institute so um testing is is certainly underway we have really robust contact tracing so if there were to be a small outbreak which we did deal with
036at one point in the year um it was very easy to isolate contact trace and continue to make the campus safe um so that is something that was important to our students i just think one thing to know is that things just look a little bit different when we're in person this year obviously social distancing safety protocols mask wearing events are more spread out a lot of things happening outside a lot of new tents a lot of new eating options really just spacing out students we ordered 50 new fire pits that are kind of all spread around campus um so still giving students that like interaction but just knowing that this is a little bit of a new normal now maybe until there is a vaccine but that we are still giving students that kind
037of in-person experience that many of them wanted we also do all of our courses now in multi-modality so what that means is if it's an in-person class you can still take it virtually so you could take a week off if you're sick if you visiting family if you're an athlete you're traveling so that's actually really lends itself nicely to kind of the future of having these multi-instructional options where students can either be in person or they can still not miss anything kind of live stream right in and join into the classroom sure and i'll just give a quick update about university of vermont we similarly had um you know a uvm strong committee with a you know come back with this plan to bring students back on campus every student got the option to be
038completely at home or on campus and 85 percent of our student body chose to come back um they get tested every week we just got an update that since uh since august 0.05 of our student and faculty and staff have tested positive so it's really low and we're really fortunate to be in vermont and we're really fortunate to have the students we have which it's fun to get updates from all these schools because i think overall you know a lot of these colleges just blown away by you know college age students wanting to be on campus and understanding what they need to do to stay there and be in person we just got an update today of just different things that happened last week on campus and in all the photos students are masked but
039interacting we have students at our cream dairy barn which is a fully student-run dairy barn we had students out in the centennial woods which is our environmental science labs right by campus we had the white coat ceremony for uvm medical center and it truly almost brought me to tears because if you had told me this in july this is what it was going to look like and students were going to do the thing come back and it was going to be it's gonna work um i was i was nervous so it's really wonderful to see and we're glad that students can still get these community and learning opportunities on campus right now and yes like the question said hopefully in two years who knows so who knows so i just wanted to respond there was
040someone in the comment section just asking um so this is being recorded so if you've jumped onto this session late this all of the sessions that are happening today are being recorded and will be available um on the arps youtube channel for later viewing um so we'll be able to to watch that when when we're done i think it takes just a little bit of time after we're done recording um i do see one final question i have to wonder if it was maybe directed at one of the presenters maybe something you had said um so if anybody wants to take this how do you determine the number of students in each class if the faculty student ratio is the same for different schools that doesn't mean that the classes you take will be the
041same size right i think that's confusion from what i had said earlier about sometimes that student-to-faculty ratio starts to look the same on different pamphlets and it you know it is different and it's important to look at that ratio for each school but understand um you know at each school it's going to be different like for example i don't want to speak to like i'm guessing at landmark there's much smaller class sizes than typically them but at uvm you're going to have some classes that might be lecture format which would be 200 students but then you might have you know four classes that semester that will be 15 students so i guess i that was kind of confusing um but i hope that clears that up i guess that just means you know if it's
042a larger institution i think students sometimes write it off as in i'll never have any faculty connections or small class sizes or i won't even have a small class until i'm a senior which i know a lot of schools work to make sure that's not the case for example i'll give an example of uvm we have a teacher advisor program so your first semester as a student here one of your classes will be capped at 15 students and the teacher the faculty member teaching that class will also be your first faculty advisor so you might go on to switch majors and switch faculty advisors later on but right away you have that kind of faculty student interaction that faculty is your advisor they know about you and they can kind of help advise right away
043so i guess that's sort of what i meant about the student faculty ratio and please anyone else feel free to clarify i think i would add to that that for at skidmore for exam example we're a small liberal arts school our ratio of students to faculty is eight to one that doesn't mean that the largest classes are eight to one faculty that's just the overall average of the total number of students 2500 and the denominator being the uh number of faculty we have just to jump in with a little bit about landmark which is a very different situation really than some of these other schools our uh student to faculty ratio isn't that much different than yoursdale um it's six to one but class sizes are intentionally really small the average class size has always
044been eight to twelve students and there aren't any lecture classes on our campus it's just in the nature of what we do to teach in that kind of a personal very hands-on way so i think folks unless i see any final kind of questions or comments come through i am grateful for the expertise in the room for sharing of your time today so generously grateful that other students who maybe jumped onto other sessions will be able to review this after it's done so if there's any closing remarks please take the floor now otherwise thank you so much for for your time today as someone once said to me a long time ago uh when you have these aspirin colleges and you think i'd love to go to this particular school i i'm not sure and
045you read all the data and it's like well i might get in you don't get in somewhere you don't apply to so you know go for it as well great thanks everyone for having us um one thing i would say is utilize us as admission counselors um every school has folks that work with students from a certain area um so any of those questions you're not finding on the website or from your virtual visits um utilize us as resources we're here to help you we're not scary admission officers we are here to help students you know on their journey and and we want to find students that will be good visit our institutions so have those conversations um certainly all right hey thank you all today i hope you have a wonderful rest of the
046day thank you for everybody watching and have a good afternoon all thank you bye