A Parents' Guide to the College Search

Why it ought to be an enjoyable year

There are some 3,500 colleges and universities in the United States, and by the time you leave your son or daughter at new student orientation, you may feel that you've seen every one of them - or at least received mail from most of them!

We hope that by sharing a college's perspective, we can shed some light on the search process and help you understand it better. We hope these "educated insights" will help you approach the process in the most positive and productive way.

The college search process ought to be a positive, educational experience in itself, not just something to be "survived." At this point - the bridge between high school and college, adolescence and young adulthood - students have a remarkable range of options in front of them, and it's a shame when the excitement of this situation becomes anxiety.

While there's no sure-fire way to eliminate anxiety, we believe proper planning, combined with a realistic and appropriate attitude, can go a long way toward minimizing anxiety.

And that's a laudable goal in itself.

Getting Started

The college search needn't be that overwhelming - not if you start early, plan ahead, and take things one step at a time.

No question, you're facing a big change in your family's life. So how do you find a compass? How do you begin to sort through all the information and begin to make some choices that will make sense for you and your child?

There are a couple of first steps. One is to take a self-inventory. You and your child should ask yourselves realistic, sometimes tough, person-centered questions about interests, skills, values, and aspirations. Soon it will be appropriate to begin thinking about externally-oriented issues like college size, location, and cost. And it's okay to admit that trepidation and uncertainty exist, even among "veteran" families.

Alongside the self-inventory is the gathering of objective information about colleges themselves - the kind of details that will help you narrow that list from 3,500 to perhaps a handful. This can be daunting. One of the overwhelming aspects of the college search is that there's so much information available. Sometimes it's hard to distinguish between what is and what isn't valuable.

One of the resources that too often is not used properly is your school counseling office. Nearly everything you need to start doing some preliminary sorting is here - an experienced college counseling staff, publications from colleges, guidebooks of all kinds, and electronic databases.

Along with the experiences of friends - students and adults - your own child's "instincts" are also resources to draw on. These anecdotal resources should not drive the search process, but you should feel free to start the preliminary list of colleges with some sentimental favorites.

As a goal begins to come into focus, sometimes working backward from that goal makes great sense. If your goal is to get to a small, liberal arts college in the Northeast, for example, start with a group of schools and work backward, applying increasingly personal, student-oriented questions to make distinctions and winnow the list.

Let the student lead

It's important that the student take the lead in thinking critically to get down to the short list. Ultimately a student who's been spoonfed is the one who's going to be disappointed in college when he or she discovers that other people's interests and values drove the college search.

One of your best strategies is to ask questions, keep your eyes open, and evaluate information and impressions. In the end, it's a question and answer process between family and college, parent and child.

Determining the fit between student and college depends on how you want to define the outcome of your child's college education. If you want to define it vocationally, you might look purely at statistics. To the extent that cost will be a factor, you will need to research tuition prices and/or financial aid policies. And if you want to define it as an academic, intellectual, personal, and cultural experience - and you are attuned to those values and clues that give you insights into a college's "character" - then your child's college years will be all the richer for that.

No such thing as a perfect fit

Happily, for most students there is no one perfect fit. In fact, against the backdrop of so many fine options, your child certainly has the talent and flexibility to succeed at a number of colleges. Strange as it may sound now, some of the students who turn out the happiest, in fact, are the ones who thought they had lost the "admissions sweepstakes" at the end of their senior year. Hence the old college counseling truism: the vast majority of students are at their first-choice college by Halloween of their first year.

Even though your child could be happy at a number of colleges, practically, you still have to focus the search. Rankings, objective data, and reputation are necessary-but-not-sufficient to judge the correctness of the fit between the individual and institution.

In short, it's time to hit the road.

Make those visits

Visiting a college is really the only way you're going to get a sense of the reality or the personality of the place - its strengths, its surprises, its life in and outside the classroom. From the time you first walk on campus, you will start picking up messages, from the quality of the facilities to the friendliness of the students to the physical care of the campus grounds.

A prospective student ought to ask, "Can I see myself here?" Look at the students; look at the announcements on the bulletin boards; feel comfortable asking questions about any issue, from housing and campus safety to graduate school placement. Try to get a handle on the tone of the campus, what the students care about and pay attention to ... and help your child compare that with their needs and "comfort zone."

The same goes for an interview. Treat it as a conversation, not an inquisition. Who does well in an interview? A relaxed student armed with good questions and ready to speak articulately about his or her interests and aspirations.

Will you get straight answers to your questions? In the overwhelming number of cases, yes. Sure, we're recruiters - sales people - but we're also counselors. We want to enroll students who are going to be happy at our college. Maybe that's one reason we're an admissions office, not a rejection office. An over-arching goal of ours is that the college search process be a positive educational experience in itself, whether you attend Union College or not.

The "heart" quotient

A lot of people do a great job with the analytical part of the search, but they leave out the heart component, if you will. They are transfer students in the making!

When students are asked how they came to choose Union, they almost always cite the "smart," cognitive factors, such as academic program, size, and post-graduate placement.

That's fine. But we always discover that, as they narrowed it down, the answers come much more from the heart and describe how they felt when they first visited campus, or how much they liked the students and professors they met. If someone doesn't have a reasonable measure of that "heart" quotient, then college's general educational value, as a total experience, is going to be lessened.

How we choose

At a certain point this whole process becomes more of an art than a science for you.

It's the same for us.

We have a parallel, shared process and goal. You are choosing a college, we are selecting students, and our goal - the best "match" - is the same.

Just like you, we begin by looking at the objective criteria (grades, quality of courses, and test scores) to see if there is an initial fit between your son or daughter and our college.

And like your college search, assembling a class is not a purely objective process. We want to bring together some 500 young men and women who have enough in common so that they're going to be good roommates, study partners, and friends, and support each other as they take the "prudent risks" that are an important part of the educational experience. We also want enough differences so they're going to educate each other in some subtle ways. That's the richness of a residential, undergraduate place like ours.

Being a selective college means we have a large enough applicant pool to select the students we think will be appropriate for our institution. It's important for parents to understand that at selective colleges the process is going to be just that - selective. And it is important to acknowledge that selective judgments based upon subjective evaluations are, to some extent by definition, going to be "unfair." Coming to terms with that reality, early on, will help put any disappointments, if they come, into perspective later on.

A good rule of thumb

From the start of the process, you should keep this thought in mind:

What is a realistic pool for my child?

Most counselors are going to recommend that you have four schools that look likely, have a reach or two (based on the objective data), and have a sure bet or two. That rule of thumb has been around all these decades because it's based on experience and realism.

A positive experience

We hope that some of these comments help you approach the college search process from a positive, productive perspective. College counselors - admissions officers, recruiters, and guidance personnel - believe that it ought to be an enjoyable, educational experience, one guided by concerns for what's best for the student at this pivotal point between late adolescence and young adulthood.

Assaying one's options at this time of life ought to be exciting and fun - at least most of the time. It's true that choosing a college is a serious business, but that does not mean one must be deadly serious about it.

Best wishes and good luck.