College Admission Help

College Counselor Advice: Choice and Change Make College Seem Strange
By Dr. Patrick O’Connor
There’s a lull in the wonderful world of college admissions, so this is the perfect time to talk about why choosing a college is so hard, in 3 words or less: Choice and change
This sounds pretty simple, but there is a world of “Whoa!” behind the idea that students can choose the colleges they apply to. Most students don’t have a choice about kindergarten, middle school, or high school—you go to the public school that’s closest to your house, or you go to the school your parents have in mind. After 11 years of being trained to go where you’re told, someone like me comes by and says “OK—2600 colleges on the menu. What looks good?”
No wonder you’re scared you’ll make a bad choice—you’ve never done this before, your friends have never done this before, there’s 3 million other students with the same lack of experience you have trying to get into the same colleges you want to go to, and there’s all that paperwork. This is not only a big deal, it’s a new deal…
…and to quote the only U.S. President who flunked out of Columbia Law School, the only thing you have to fear is fear itself. You may be a little green when it comes to choosing schools, but you figure out what to wear, eat, listen to and do on weekends without much help at all—and given the huge number of choices about Internet Web sites, choosing 8 colleges to apply to out of a paltry 2600 should be a breeze.
Of course, it’s easier to make a choice if the choices don’t change very much— but colleges are better at making change than the soda machine at school. Just this week, New York University changed the tests they require for everyone applying for admission; you can now send just the ACT, the SAT with two subject tests, the SAT and two APs, the—well you get the idea. NYU says they made the change to offer students—you guessed it—more choice, but many counselors say this freedom creates more stress than it reduces; just tell the kids what to do, and they will happily comply.
Sometimes I wish college was like that, but it isn’t—neither is life, and part of college involves getting you ready for making the most out of what you know, even if you don’t know everything. Once you have some colleges in mind, check their Web sites about application procedures for next year. After that, call them to ask if they plan on making any changes to those procedures this summer—with this economy, they may make changes about everything from the application fee to financial aid procedures. You don’t know that—heck, maybe even they don’t know that—but asking will most likely make you smarter, even if the answer is “We don’t know yet. Call again in August.”
As you start the college search, you can tell yourself you don’t know enough to make this choice, and that the changes are just too confusing-- or you can think about who you are, what you like, what matters to you, and go from there. Yesterday in the school cafeteria, you chose between the gross brown casserole and the gross yellow casserole with less background knowledge than that—lead from your strength, do an online college search, (collegeboard.com or princetonreview.com have two nice ones) ask a lot of questions, and persist. Knowing what you don’t know is the first step to freedom—and wouldn’t that be a nice choice for a change?


College Counselor Advice: Choice and Change Make College Seem Strange