Thank you so much for having me! It’s always a treat for me to return to Carnegie, where I was a teacher for nine years.

Please spend just a few minutes taking my parent survey. I’ll leave it open for a few weeks, and then I’ll publish a summary of the results in November.

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Here’s an outline of what I covered in the talk. Comments and questions are welcome and encouraged. Click here to contact me.

1. Please pass this along to your student: check your email! Lots of really important information from colleges will come in the form of email. You need to stay on top of that. I’ve heard high school counselors complain that students make their job more difficult by not keeping up with email—and remember, their job is to help you. I’ve heard college administrators complain that it’s hard for them to do their job communicating with and recruiting students when students won’t check their email. Colleges can usually tell when you’ve opened an email, and they can certainly tell when you’ve clicked on a link within an email they send. It’s really hard to convince a school you’re interested if you won’t open the emails they send. This may be a factor in admissions, and it’s definitely a factor when it comes to wait lists.

   If the problem is that you’re overwhelmed with emails and can’t keep up, then there are organizational strategies that may help. If the problem is that you just don’t like email and prefer texts or other forms, then you have to look past that, at least until you’re accepted to college.

2. Due dates for seniors. It’s hard to talk about this, because they are different for everybody. It’s really important that students and parents—separately—look up this information online. I normally encourage parents to let students do the work of applying, but it can be helpful to both students and parents for the parents to spend some time making sure they know a) what schools the student is applying to and b) what the different deadlines are.

   In general, though, expect that early deadlines—Early Decision, Early Action, Priority, VIP, scholarship consideration and similar programs—will be in November and regular deadlines will be in early January. But that’s only general—check the websites and check your email.

3. The FAFSA opened up October 1 for seniors. Everybody should submit a FAFSA, even if you’re not expecting to qualify for financial aid. For one, you may qualify for more aid than you think. Also, many schools will want the FAFSA to consider you for merit aid as well as need-based aid. For some selective schools, your ability to pay may be a factor in admission. If so, then it makes everything easier to actually document that you’re able to pay. Some schools may also ask you to submit the CSS Profile.

4. Keeping with the theme of “nuts and bolts of college applications,” I want to encourage all families to talk to their students about finances and affordability in a detailed, nuts-and-bolts way. The three most common things I hear parents tell their children can be counter-productive.

   —“Don’t worry about it. We’ve got it covered.” Unless you’ve clearly been living a wealthy life for some time, your child is still going to worry about it. What do their parents mean when they say it’s covered? Are there piles of money they don’t know about? Are the parents going to take out huge loans, and should they feel bad about that? How expensive is too expensive for “don’t worry about it”? Does that mean they can afford any college? And if not, which ones?

   —“We can’t afford anything, so you’ve got to get a full scholarship.” Again, unless you’ve clearly been living in poverty, then more details are going to be necessary. If your Expected Family Contribution from colleges turns out to be one or two thousand dollars per year, does that mean the student can’t afford to go to college? Should they feel responsible—and perhaps guilty—for every dollar that gets spent on college? Should they not even bother applying? Students need more information to work with.

   —“We fall into that window where we make too much money to qualify for financial aid, but not enough money to pay for college.” Every parent I’ve dealt with who said this has sent their kid to college. I have yet to come across the student who didn’t go to college because their parents made too much money. Maybe they got more financial aid than they were expecting. Maybe they took out more loans than they wanted. Maybe their student went to an in-state public college instead of the private college that was their first choice. There are all sorts of ways around this window. Tell your children why you think you’re in that window, being as specific as possible. And talk through which compromises and sacrifices you are and aren’t willing to make.

   There are a few things families can do together—the sooner the better—to make the very stressful situation of paying for college a little less stressful. Families can talk about what their range of “affordable” is. They can talk in very literal terms about how they plan to pay for college: savings, loans, work, scholarships, all of it.