Senior Course Selection's role in College Admissions

       By the time a student reaches their senior year of high school, they should have acquired most of the data that will be decisive in their college admissions. They’ll apply to college in the fall, so the GPA colleges will see will likely be the one they have at the end of their junior year. Hopefully, they’ve been taking standardized tests and should be nearing their peak score there. And, they should be well down the road of building a resume that includes their extracurricular activities. So, among the significant cards they have left to play as they head into their senior year is the strength or rigor of their 12th grade curriculum.

In many cases, a senior might have met the majority of graduation requirements following their junior year. They may be able to enjoy their senior year with a relatively easy schedule. However, this is often not a smart move for a college-bound student.  The appearance of a rigorous senior curriculum can be crucial to a student’s chance of admissions. Colleges want to see a senior who is continuing to challenge themselves and pursue a robust education. They are looking for students who want to reach higher and higher each year and are dedicated to their studies. Taking a bare-minimum schedule does not accomplish this.

College bound seniors should take courses that continue to move their education forward and make a positive impression on the colleges they hope to attend. I think there is a bit of a sliding scale here too. Students who are already well-positioned for the colleges they want to attend might have a little more leeway in their senior course selection. Students who really want to attend a reach school, maybe don’t. So, let’s say you really want to attend a given state university. You do some research and find that last year, that school’s middle range of SAT scores from students who were accepted was 1180-1300 and weighted GPAs ranged from 3.7-4.2. Your SAT score is 1390 and your GPA is 4.4. You should already have a pretty good chance of getting in and thus might be able to take some liberties with your senior schedule. If your friend also really wants to go to that school but has an 1150 SAT and 3.4 GPA, they don’t have that same luxury. 

Thus, maybe you and your friend have debated taking Spanish 4. You both are in Spanish 3 and are doing okay, but feel like you are reaching your ceiling in the subject area and are losing interest. You’re trying to decide between Spanish 4 and a health class you’ve heard is pretty easy. You might be able to take the health class and have a little “break” in your senior schedule. Not your friend though. They are playing the admissions game at this college from behind and might not be able to afford to take such a chance. I would advise them to take Spanish 4 in this scenario in an effort to “max out” their senior curriculum. To say it succinctly, the lower your chance of getting into the schools you want to attend, the more impressive your senior courses need to be. Well, to a point at least. You’ve still got to “live” that schedule and you want to be somewhat successful in it. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. 

Executing Demonstrated Interest in the College Admissions Process

         This college admissions cycle, I had the pleasure of watching a good friend deftly exercise a seldom-discussed element of college admissions strategy. That is “demonstrated interest.” This is the concept of conveying to a college that you REALLY want to go there. To be impactful in this area, one really needs to go beyond simply applying as an early action candidate and/or writing your personal statement about how you’ve wanted to go to this college since you were a little kid and both your parents went there and their legendary quarterback is your idol, or whatever. To fully actuate this element, a student really needs to DEMONSTRATE their interest in the school.

So, my friend’s son, a senior who we’ll call Brian, really wanted to go to this large university. Admission to this school is very competitive and Brian’s test scores and GPA were a level below the range we typically see admitted to the school. Honestly, his numbers were far enough away that I didn’t think he had much of a chance of getting in. I think Dad understood this, but was determined to give it his all. 

The first thing Dad and Brian did was to go and tour the campus and meet with an admissions rep. I can’t overstate the importance of an official tour here, especially in cases such as this where no one in the family has a tie to the university. How can you say that going to a given school is the most important thing in the world to you if you’ve never even been there? Colleges absolutely track who signs up for their official tours and align that data with the applications they receive. If you don’t bother going to see the college, you’re not really making an effort to demonstrate your interest.

The other key thing they did here was meet with an admissions rep. Indeed, Brian has a great personality. He’s magnetic. Dad understood he had a kid with traits that can make him successful well beyond his high school numbers. Admissions reps are the same individuals who read applications and make decisions about students. This meeting established a relationship and made Brian a face and personality that went along with his application.

So, the relationship was established and Brian was on the radar. Between that meeting and the time admissions were released, Dad and Brian worked to foster the relationship they had with the admissions rep simply by staying in touch. They sent an email every so often with a question or just to check in and reiterate how much they felt the school’s program of study in Brian’s intended field was perfect for him. Conveying an alignment between what a school offers and what a student wants to do in their career path is also a crucial piece of effective demonstrated interest.

This continued contact kept Brian in front of the admissions rep, likely brought him familiarity in the whole admissions office, and he was eventually accepted. Brian plans to start school there this summer. As the school released data from their admitted students, Brian’s numbers remained well short, but he got in anyway. It all goes to show the important role demonstrated interest plays in the process.

What is an IEP Plan

         An IEP plan is an educational document that provides support and certain school-based services to students who have a disability. IEP stands for Individual Educational Plan and today stems from the Individuals with Disabilities Education ACT (IDEA), but has its roots in several other educational acts that go back farther than IDEA. IEP plans are usually associated with special education or exceptional education. Basically, the IEP is the paperwork that directs special education for an individual student and describes what the services look like for them as well as some other things. In a broader sense the terms IEP, special education, and exceptional education mean very nearly the same thing.

There is a lot that can happen within an IEP plan. Of course, there is a very wide array of disabilities and thus the support a student might need at school due to their disability can vary greatly. All the disabilities an IEP plan might cover fall into one of 13 categories. In order of how common they are, those categories are specific learning disability, speech or language impairment, other health impaired (such as ADHD), autism, intellectual disability, emotional disturbance, developmental delay, multiple disabilities, hearing impairment, orthopedic impairment, visual impairment, traumatic brain injury, and deaf/blindness. 

As you can imagine, what a student might require is entirely dependent on their disability and its severity. There are some disabilities that are plain to see but most are not. It is important to understand that a parent cannot just walk into a school, say, “I want an IEP plan for my child”, and walk out with that in hand. It is always a parent’s right to request an evaluation for special education services from a school but those evaluations take time. That evaluation might move along faster for a student with an obvious disability, but the process can be lengthy for many students.

Actually, much of the goal of the evaluation for many students is to see if they can be supported at school without an IEP. This process is called MTSS which stands for multi-tiered systems of supports. In it, researched-based strategies are implemented to help struggling students and if those interventions prove effective, a school would like to continue those rather than provide an IEP. 

Further, there is not one individual who decides whether a student requires an IEP or what that IEP directs a school to do. IEP decisions are made by a whole team of people which always includes a parent but can also include teachers, counselors, school administrators, related service personnel like physical, occupational, and speech therapists, and even the student themself. These people meet and work in concert to identify what should go into an IEP that can best assist a student. The IEP is reviewed at least once a year to make adjustments as needed.

Schools will often initiate an evaluation themselves for students who they suspect might have a disability but, again, it is always the right of the parent to request an evaluation for a struggling student.

The Downside of Earning College Credit in High School

        When students reach high school, they are bombarded with ways to earn college credit. There are different modes of this acceleration including AP, IB, AICE, and Dual Enrollment. Within these, it is possible for students to earn many college credits, some students may even be able to wipe out two full years of college before they graduate high school. These programs are usually at no cost to students. Many parents clamor for opportunities for their children to take advantage of these programs–after all, college is expensive and who wouldn’t want to get as much college out of the way that they didn’t have to pay for? But, there is a fundamental problem with these opportunities.

Let's say a student does earn enough college credit while in high school to earn an AA degree. Then they graduate, leave home, and attend a university that is four hours away. Well, that university is going to treat that eighteen-year-old who has never been away from home before and has never been on a college campus as a college junior. A junior in a university setting has usually had two years to acquiesce to college life and the rigor and pace of a university classroom. They have had time to waiver on their intended major and make adjustments. (Statistically, most high school graduates change their major at some point after they enter college from the time when they applied during high school. However, a university junior is expected to be committed to their major and ready to excel in those major-specific classes. Very little grace is given to the over-achieving, newly graduated eighteen-year-old )

In my experience, most students face a steep learning curve when they head off to college. Even though your high school tells you they are teaching their courses at a college level, they are seldom a true replication of what happens in a university classroom. What's more, the adjustment to a new lifestyle, away from parents for the first time, is also challenging to a student. All of this can conspire to create a situation akin to throwing a new swimmer into the deep end of a pool and that can spell disaster.

I don’t mean to imply that no student should take advantage of opportunities to earn college credit in high school. After all, rigorous work in high school is the best thing to prepare students for college. However, I do think that preparation might be a more important goal for such work rather than the aggressive pursuit of as many college credits as possible in high school simply because they are free. The latter is seldom done with much concerted planning and even when it is, there is a very high probability the intended outcome of that plan (a major) is likely to change. Perhaps what is the most compelling here is one of the best kept secrets in the high-school-to-college-transition universe: At least ten states and many individual institutions impose a surcharge on tuition when students reach an excessive number of credit hours that usually include what they earned in high school. So, those savings upfront may well cost you on the back end.

Paying Taxes on Scholarships

  They say no good deed goes unpunished and students who do very well and earn lots of scholarships might have to take this adage to heart. That’s because the scholarships those students earn could be taxed by the IRS as income.

            There are some caveats to this though and it’s important to note that not all of the scholarships a student receives will be taxed. The IRS does not tax scholarships for degree-seeking students as long as the money is used for tuition and/or required fees, books, supplies, and equipment. Further, it’s worth pointing out that this definition is different and a little bit more restrictive than what we consider “qualified educational expenses” when we are discussing 529 plans. 529 funds can be used for things like housing, meals, and transportation. Those would all fall outside of the scope of tax-free expenses when it comes to scholarships and taxes.

            So, really, you could argue that paying taxes on scholarships is a good problem to have. It is only going to happen if a student earns more scholarship money than their tuition and other required expenses. So, let’s imagine a student is attending a school and is facing a $8,000 tuition bill for the semester. Let’s also imagine they received a total of $10,000 in scholarships. The first $8,000 of those scholarships will be tax free as they wipe out the tuition. The remaining $2000 will count as income for the student and will be taxed. However, what is leftover after the taxes can be used by the student for housing expenses, or perhaps anything they want. The difference in the $2000 and taxes paid on it is going to be more money than the student would have had if they hadn’t earned all those scholarships in the first place. As a friend once told me, “anytime you pay income taxes, you made money.”

            Most scholarship money is going to flow through a student’s college or university. If they earn a state scholarship, maybe one from the school, and perhaps others from somewhere else, all of that will end up going through the financial aid office. The people there should do all the math for you, pay your tuition, and calculate any excess scholarships you’ll need to pay taxes on. When a student earns more money than they owe a college, the college will typically issue the student a check for the difference and 1098-T that is used to report the excess scholarships to the IRS. In instances where the student earns a scholarship that doesn’t flow through a university, as is the case with many “local scholarships” that might originate from an area civic club, foundation, group, etc., the money won’t be reflected in the 1098-T they receive from the school. In those cases, students would likely be responsible for self-reporting those scholarships to the IRS.

How Many Is Too Many Times to Take the SAT

  I was discussing the SAT recently with one of my students and she told me that she didn’t want to take the SAT too many times because she believed that would “look bad” to colleges. This is a rumor I hear from time to time, and I always work to set the record straight as I did with this student.

I’ve heard several versions of this. If you take the test too many times, colleges will average your score. Taking too many tests makes you look desperate. Colleges will penalize you if you take it over X amount of times. I’ve heard them all, but I’ve never had any indication from any college that they care at all how many times a student takes the SAT or ACT. I believe those rumors simply aren’t true. Admission test frequency doesn’t matter, but there are some points to consider that just make sense when deciding how many times to test.

When colleges receive multiple test scores they do one of two things. They either find the highest overall score, even it wasn’t the most recent, and make their decision based on that. Or they combine a student’s best sub-scores from multiple tests to produce what we call a “super score”. Not every school super scores and whether or not they do is a matter of institutional policy that varies from one school to the next.

In both cases, there is an advantage to taking a test more than once. You can’t super score a single test, and a college can’t choose your best score to evaluate you with if there is only one test. What’s more, students who sit for multiple tests almost always improve their scores eventually from their initial attempt. There is pretty clear data that indicates taking the test more than once is beneficial.

However, that data only reflects that benefit to a point. Students do plateau and seem to hit a ceiling at some point. Also, the tests require a fee ($68 for the SAT and as much as $88 for the ACT). They usually begin at 8 am on a Saturday, and it’s just not really what most would call a fun experience. So, there is just kind of a number that’s probably too many, though that can be different from one person to the next. 

I generally recommend that a student take their first college admissions test in the fall of their junior year. Follow that with another in the winter or spring, and another in the summer at the end of the 11th grade. A student might be able to roll with what they have at that point, but if there is a specific target they are trying to reach like a cutoff for a scholarship, or into a middle range of accepted scores at a given school, they can test one or two more times early in the fall of senior year. They might employ this strategy for the SAT and ACT or use those early tests to figure out which one they like more and focus on that test as they try to increase their score. So, that might be as many five attempts at one test, and not including a couple of attempts at the other. Anything more than that, and you’re probably at a point that kind of seems excessive to me. But who cares? Not the colleges, for sure. 

Teach Your Teen the Mundane

            It is back-to-school time, and that means parents have lots of paperwork to fill out for their students. Or do they? A teacher-colleague of mine told me a story this week of how one student in her class asked what “MI” meant in the box between “first name” and “last name” on a form the student was given to fill out. I have to assume that this student probably has not filled out a lot of forms at school, or doctor’s office, or government offices, or whatever. That’s kind of a mundane adult task, but it’s one parents would do well to let their teens practice.

I’m a parent too and I probably do way too much for my kids. It’s so much easier and faster for me to just do something rather than ask them to do it (and then ask again, because they didn’t do it the first time), have to answer a thousand questions (like what “MI” stands for), or risk messing up the task. Most parents do things for their teens because it’s just the easy way to get the job done. Sometimes you’ve got to let your teen try (and maybe fail) at these mundane adult tasks though. After all, wouldn’t you really rather they ask you what “MI” stands for when they are 16, than ask some receptionist at the dentist when they are 20?

There are a million of these things you can let your teen do…return an item at the store, order an Uber, address an envelope, shop for a better car insurance rate, change the air conditioning filter, make a dinner reservation, tip the bellhop at a hotel, write a check, buy a mutual fund, renew their car registration, change a light bulb, DocuSign something, figure out where those ants keep coming from, order cold cuts, check the balance on a gift card, book a flight, get the mustard stain out, vote…I can do this all day, readers. 

We all figured out how to do this stuff at some point. Your child can probably figure it out on their own if they have to, but that experience will probably be smoother for them if you make them do it under your guidance. After all, isn’t that kind of why parents are so prone to do things for their kids in the first place? You want things done well and done right for them. Intentionally teaching them and giving them opportunities to practice these things with your help will mean they are done well and done right when your children has to do them by themselves when you’re not around.

It’s important to wait until your child is age-appropriate to do these things. It’s only awkward if you make your 7-year-old call to make their own dentist appointment. There will be time for that in their teen years. The next time you’re about to do one of these simple things, take the extra few minutes to let your teen try it and show them how. It can be a valuable lifelong lesson for them.