Applying to College

College Planning Overview

College & Career Research Websites

First page of the PDF file: CollegeAdmissionsGuidefromNACAC2018

First page of the PDF file: compass_guide_to_admission_testing

Class of 2023 Resource Hub

  • JUNIOR/SENIOR MEETINGS
  • RESUMEs
  • REF FORMS
  • TIMELINES
  • ESSAYS
  • AND MORE!

Financial Aid and Scholarships

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Managing Admissions Stress

Washington Post: So You're Bummed Your Favorite College Said No...Read This

“So if your very bright, hard-working son or daughter has to ‘settle for’ Boston University because they were turned down by Harvard and MIT,” Becker says, “point out to them that they’ll have more top-5 percent math students at B.U. than at the other two universities combined. . . . The notion that attending a slightly less selective school means going to college somewhere that there won’t be lots of other students who match up well with you intellectually is simply not true.”

Less High School Stress

"Millions of American teenagers are chronically stressed out about their efforts to get into the most selective college possible. Ironically, most people who worry constantly about about maximizing their potential are making it more difficult to reach their full potential due to the harm to their mental and physical well-being that stems from this stress. The good news, though, is that chronic college admission stress is based upon false assumptions and can be eliminated without negatively impacting your future success or happiness. This website is designed to prove this to you by bringing together all of the evidence in one place for the first time...read more

Taming Admissions Anxiety- Harvard Graduate School of Education

"How to parent through the college process — navigating hopes and expectations (yours and theirs) and the minefield of status and achievement pressure...read more
 

Opinion | How to Survive the College Admissions Madness -The New York Times

"...for too many parents and their children, acceptance by an elite institution isn’t just another challenge, just another goal. A yes or no from Amherst or the University of Virginia or the University of Chicago is seen as the conclusive measure of a young person’s worth, an uncontestable harbinger of the accomplishments or disappointments to come. Winner or loser: This is when the judgment is made. This is the great, brutal culling.

What madness. And what nonsense.

FOR one thing, the admissions game is too flawed to be given so much credit. For another, the nature of a student’s college experience — the work that he or she puts into it, the self-examination that’s undertaken, the resourcefulness that’s honed — matters more than the name of the institution attended. In fact students at institutions with less hallowed names sometimes demand more of those places and of themselves. Freed from a focus on the packaging of their education, they get to the meat of it.

In any case, there’s only so much living and learning that take place inside a lecture hall, a science lab or a dormitory. Education happens across a spectrum of settings and in infinite ways, and college has no monopoly on the ingredients for professional achievement or a life well lived.

Midway through last year, I looked up the undergraduate alma maters of the chief executives of the top 10 corporations in the Fortune 500. These were the schools: the University of Arkansas; the University of Texas; the University of California, Davis; the University of Nebraska; Auburn; Texas A & M; the General Motors Institute (now called Kettering University); the University of Kansas; the University of Missouri, St. Louis; and Dartmouth College....read more