College coach is the title given to a paid consultant who helps families plan for their children’s high school success. College coaches help teenagers make the decisions that will ensure their success in college or other post-secondary education.
Education experts, researchers, and state and national leaders have make it clear that any career path young people take after high school requires more education than it used to. The twenty-first century workplace requires higher skills in math, science, language arts, and other subject areas.
We spent some time with someone who knows all about planning for college. Lloyd Peterson is Vice President for Education at College Coach, an organization that offers guidance to families about their children’s high school years. Peterson was formerly a college admissions officer, so he knows what's required for college and community college admissions.
Q. What is your role at College Coach?
A. What my company does is provide admission and financial aid information and all the things that come along with them. I design all the workshops and all the criteria for counseling. What do we do with a junior who wants to go to the University of Michigan? What should we talk about?
Q. You give teenagers advice. What is the average age of the students you are helping?
A. The target audience is really grades nine to twelve, but we try to catch things on the admission side going into grade eleven and on the financial aid side coming out of grades six and seven.
Q. What are the most common topics students ask about?
A. The question we get from seven out of ten families is, Where do we begin? There are four thousand four-year colleges out there. In college-rich states like Michigan, for instance, there’s a college on every corner. So where do you begin whittling down those four thousand colleges to seven or eight, and what are the college admission requirements? Parents will say, “My kid doesn’t have straight As, but he’s a good B student, and he wants to go to college, so what’s the difference between Alma College and Michigan State University?
Q. What has changed the most in this process over the past fifteen or twenty years in deciding what college is right for me?
A. What’s changed the whole process since the late 1990s is technology. Today a kid can get online and look at twenty colleges in twenty minutes. But kids don’t know what to do with all that information. Students know about big ten schools, but when they have access to so much information, they say, “They all look great, Dad.”
The next issue you hear is "Boy, what are these colleges looking for to get admitted?" We hear war stories: A-average student gets rejected; student with great test scores gets rejected. What happened? Often the admissions office was not impressed with the easier courses that child took to rack up the high GPA. There’s too much “Let’s protect our GPA.” In 1978, if you racked up a high GPA taking easy courses, I didn’t like it, but it wasn't a huge problem. Now, the market is flooded. We’ve got more fourteen- to eighteen-year-old students today than in the history of the United States.
Q. So what should students do?
A. Today, the courses kids choose are a big deal. Expectations are that kids need to make sure they stretch themselves academically by taking honors courses in the subjects they most enjoy.
Life outside the classroom is a big deal. After school and on weekends, kids have to start doing something constructive. When I ask a student, “What’s your favorite activity?” the answer, “hanging out with my friends” is not a good one. Friday night, Saturday, Sunday afternoon, what are you doing? What are you going to bring to the freshman community? Are you gong to drum, paint, do volunteer work?
The activity doesn’t have to be tied to your high school. It could be ballet, Girl Scouts, martial arts. We don’t care what you fill in the blank with, just fill it in with something. The difference between the University of Michigan and most other colleges in the Midwest, for instance, is that the student at Michigan feels like there is nothing more important than his or her extracurricular activity. It could be growing sunflowers.
Q. What hasn’t changed?
A. What hasn’t changed is that you’ve got to continue to do your homework. Great advice for teenagers is that you absolutely must do your homework.
Q. What role do parents play in this whole process?
A. First of all, they ought to have a role and not just a financial role. This is an emotional thing, so the role ought to be advisory, providing guidance. A parent picking a college for a student is like a mom picking a girlfriend for her son. You can’t do it! At the end of the day, you’re not out on the date with that girl. So it’s more emotional than intellectual guidance. You can give your teenagers advice about the benefits of going to college, or you can tell your child, “It’s okay if you stay close to home,” for instance. But parents and students must realize that when you start borrowing money, the loan is in the student’s name. That’s what's changed these days.
Q. So often, it’s the kids with high grades and great test scores who are the focus of college conversations. What about the kids who get Bs or Cs?
A. Kids with Cs have far more opportunities than they think. There are colleges out there for you. There are jobs out there for you. Not everyone in this country got straight As. There are colleges to go to, and here is the biggest surprise: There are four-year colleges you can go to.