Speaker 1: Hello everyone, I'm Dr. Steven Mercer. I'm an independent educational consultant helping students and families apply to colleges that fit them, and I'm an instructor with the University of California, San Diego, Extended Learning College Counseling Certificate Program. I'm here today to give you specifically some advice to parents on how to support your student during the college application process. It's challenging sometimes for a family to watch their student go through a difficult rite of passage. There are a lot of steps to applying to college, and I have some simple ideas to keep in mind when thinking about the best ways to support your student. I think the first step in that is to ask yourself, what is the ultimate goal that you have for supporting your student in applying to college? In some ways, there's two different directions. It's a crossroads. Some families I work with say, well, the obvious answer is to get them into college, and that's it. If the end is to get them into college, then some families think that the ends justifies the means, and as a parent or family member, they're going to do everything they can, and it doesn't matter what it is to help them get into college. But as an educator and as a counselor, I think there's a different choice, and there's a lot of evidence to suggest that just focusing on getting into college is not the best course for a student in high school or a community college student aspiring to go off into a big step of college and into young adulthood, and hopefully off into a successful career as an adult. There is evidence to suggest that even the college application process, the steps that students take early, is part of the college education experience, and that it's not a means to an end, that it's an end in itself. Therefore, if that's how families feel about it, and I hope you do, then the ultimate goal should be to support your student and to walk that fine line between support, but also realizing that in many cases, students are adolescents, and this is an experience that they haven't tackled before, and it's a project, it's a big experience with a lot of big decisions involved, and so finding that right level of support is really important. I have a few small suggestions to keep in mind, that there are some positive, simple, and proactive ways that families can help support their students. The first is to invite collaboration, and I've used that word invite very purposefully, not to force collaboration, but to invite collaboration. What that could mean is it's sometimes a matter of the language that a family member uses. For example, I know that sometimes adolescents, high school students are a little shy about sharing information about what they're doing at school or how their school day went, and sometimes even how their college application process is going. As a family member, instead of insisting that the student sit down and do things with the student, it's to use language that gently suggests that you're willing to help, and maybe you could share the burden on some things. There are some parts of this process that are more complicated than others, and sometimes it suggests that a family member's involvement is the best course. Not throwing everything in the student's lap and expecting a young person who's inexperienced with a big rite of passage like this to do everything, but to divide and to come up with a plan of who's going to do what. Related to that, step number 2 or suggestion number 2 is to share information. Instead of, again, forcing your idea of when the student should do things, where they should apply, what they should write their applications on, is to share your observations. I know I look with a lot of families who, as parents, they have a lot of insight into the process. Maybe they went to college themselves, or if they haven't, maybe they've been doing research. Maybe they have friends and colleagues who have some good information about deadlines or techniques or scholarships that are available. A nice technique for a family member is to share that they've done some research and ask or also invite, again, the student to participate in looking at a group of colleges that the family member may have researched recently, or to share that you've researched some scholarships that might be available, and not just to simply e-mail them or text them to your student, but to invite them to sit down and take a look at them together. A third simple step, and this is something I mentioned before, is to serve as an operations or logistics manager. The parents can see themselves as part of the team, and that means that they're not the boss. They're not in charge of the college application process. Remember, we want the student to lead. It's their process. It's their rite of passage. They are going to college. To that end, we want the student to have the privilege of making the most important decisions, but also the responsibility to do that. But what I have found is there are steps along the way in the college application process that are complicated. Some of them involve money or making travel arrangements or decisions around applying for financial aid. The FAFSA or the financial aid form required by the federal government is pretty complicated. Families, parents, as opposed to the student, often have information about family finances and income, that it can help if you have clear roles as the family member to step in. Again, I also find that families, when you're able to visit colleges, whether it's a long, complicated trip that involves travel far away, or even a local journey to a local college that's just a short drive away, when family members get involved in sometimes scheduling those, making those arrangements, it can help out and take the pressure away from students who are burdened with school and applications and hopefully busy with essay writing eventually. So that's a really appropriate role to take. And finally, and perhaps one of the most difficult parts of this process that can help support the student is to have an honest conversation about money and college affordability. You know, it's true that many, many times students and families start to seriously consider the cost of college late in the process. And that sometimes throws real wrench in the process and interrupts where the student is applying. Maybe they're already accepted to colleges and they're starting to get their heart set on going to a particular college. And the family hasn't really had that honest conversation about how much do they think they can afford, what colleges realistically fall within those ranges. That's an important one. And, you know, the truth is, is students make a lot of assumptions about what the family can and can't afford. And sometimes they assume that the family can't afford anything. And sometimes it's the opposite. They assume that they can afford quite a bit. Having that hard, sometimes hard conversation about money early is really, really helpful. And it's something that the parent or family should initiate. So parents and family, please support your students. Those are my simple suggestions. Stay tuned for my next episode where I talk about how not to support your student and things to avoid. Thank you.