COLLEGE ADMISSIONS MASTERCLASS Week 2 Video 1- How NOT To Choose A College

All right, so welcome back. Week two, you've made it pretty far. Last week, I know, was a lot of work. I know it was a lot of mental exercise, a lot of mental anxious times to try to think about where you want to go, where you are, and ultimately how you want to be presented to the world. But that exercise, although difficult and hard and time consuming and maybe led to a lot of sleepless nights, is going to set you up for success down the road. Okay? Just trust me on that. In this week, this week, we're going to talk about what colleges you should identify. Right before we talked about who you are. Now we're going to try to identify colleges that match up to who you are. You see how I did that? Not the other way around. Too often people think about what college they want to go to, and then they try to contort themselves to try to fit what they believe that college wants. Order to get accepted. Don't do that. Do it the way I'm telling you to. It'll make your life so much easier and you'll be happier at the end of the day and you'll get along with your parents better. Just trust me, okay? Okay. So what we're going to talk about in this first video week number two, we're going to talk about the wrong reasons to consider a college. Okay? We're going to kick out those reasons first so you don't fall into the traps that too many people fall into. And the story I'm going to tell you is how I fell into one of those traps from a very young ye age. And I have a picture of it. I was wearing a Yale sweatshirt. Yale University is where I wanted to go. Why? I don't know. I had never been north of Kentucky in my life, but I thought Connecticut would have been fun. So Yale is where I ultimately thought that's where I should go to school. To the point where that's where I told people even before I could drive, that that's where I was going to go to college because that's where I wanted to go. And I think at some level it's because I like the name of it. I like the significance it supposedly portrayed to the world that Yale was a good name. And for a lot of people, they thought that it was a level of significance. And I responded to that by thinking that's where I should go. So I started visiting the different colleges, as a lot of you have in the last summer or will in summers in the future, and you step foot onto the campuses and you Try to think whether or not you're going to ultimately go to school there. And when I visited Yale, it was during the reading days, and it was also the rainy days. It was raining. It was horrible. It was miserable. Students were miserable because they were studying for exams. It was not the best visit. The tour guide was rude. Everything I saw about the campus did not match the dream that I had many times about what Yale was like. And this is pre Internet, so there weren't a whole lot of pictures out there. Yes, I'm that old. So my view of Yale was shattered. This isn't possibly where I can go to college. People are rude there. And it's raining. And I read in the school newspaper that the night before we arrived there, a graduate student was killed on campus. I cannot go to school here. My mother was no longer a fan of Yale. You're going to die there. And what came out later was actually, it was a horrible love affair between a professor and a grad student, and the professor killed the grad student. But that didn't come out. At that moment, all I knew was Yale is where it rains. People are rude and people die. That's not where I wanted to go. The following day, we worked our way down the coast, and we ended up at the University of Pennsylvania. And this was the day in which they were inaugurating their new president. So the quad was full of free food. People were cheering. There were bands playing. There were cheerleaders there. And as I walked in, people are putting their arms around me and welcomed me to the campus. The tour guide walked us around campus, and everywhere we went, people were smiling and the sun was shining and no one died. So I went to Penn. The mistake I fell into, of course, is that I judged a campus based on one day. That a snapshot became my view of the movie of what a campus was like at that school and what that school was about. It's a trap that a lot of people fall into as I go through these tours of different colleges around the country. A whirlwind tour. We're going to go to nine colleges in eight days, and it's going to bring us together as a family. And by the end of it, someone's not getting along with somebody else. It's not the best way to pick out a college. Okay, so what I'm going to talk about now through this video and upcoming videos, is how to best do that. The first thing you should not do is, is not weigh in the sweatshirt. I talked about the Yale sweatshirt for me, it was a significance, right? It's the significance that it gave me as seen by my family and my friend's family, like he's going to Yale. Don't fall into the trap of chasing the US News and World Report. For a lot of students, their top 10 colleges that they apply to are the top 10 in US news and world Report with no understanding of what those colleges are like, what the interests of those colleges are, and how they can best fit into those colleges. So your college list should not match up to the U.S. news & World Report simply because it's ranked in the U.S. news & World Report. The other trap that people fall into is that they do what mom and dad tell them to. And mom and dads, we love and we're taught to listen to them and take counsel from them, but sometimes their wishes are different than ours. That the mountain we talked about last time that they want us to climb is not the mountain we want to climb or should climb. And that you, the student, are the one who's going to have to live there Four years, four years of your life, that's going to be your home. So you must think about where you want to go. Listen to the advice and counsel of your mom and dad. But recognize that ultimately the decision, the decision on where to go really should be your decision with the help of guidance and counseling of the parents. And for the parents, I'd recommend recognizing that that's the reality, right? That it's the student who's going to have to live that life. And the best thing you can do for them is support them and try not to steer them in a direction where you think they should go. It's a big trap that a lot of families fall into the same thing with friends. A lot of friends will tell friends, oh, you should go to school here. Why? Because I'm going there. So you should go here. We'll dorm together and we're going to love it with no thought about whether or not the school is the right place for them. Same things with girlfriends and boyfriends. We hear about it a lot, right? We're going to go to the same school together. And by Christmas, they're broken up. And then you're stuck there. And then these people call me and we try to work on a transfer application. So don't do that. Don't fall into the trap of going where your friends are going simply because your friends are going there. Go to where you want to go. And if your friends are going there, it's a plus, right? But don't let that be the driving factor for you. The other thing that people fall into is they go to a college that a counselor recommends. And too often this counselor may not have knowledge outside of the local area. So the counselor's knowledge might be very, very limited. And she or he may not have knowledge of schools that are outside of the geographical area where you live in. So the counselor, although well meaning, simply doesn't have the time, money or resources to keep up with all the different colleges across the country. We're talking about 400 plus colleges. These are just the four year colleges, right? So just relying solely on the advice of your counselor on where you should go to school is a big trap that people fall into. But what people should recognize is that that's one more input for you, right? It's one more advice point. Just like your parents, just like your friends, just like alums, that all these people are offering up suggestions, but they should not be viewed as directives. And that counselors are there to counsel you, but recognize sometimes there's limitations, that each of these different points do not have a broad view of all the different college options that may be available for you and may not know you at the level that they need to know you in order to best advise you. So that's one problem that people fall into when it comes to counselors. And then the last one that people fall into, and it happens all the time, and I know it doesn't happen much with the legacy class, because we talk about this about every other week, is that people pick colleges based on the price tag. It's the biggest mistake you could ever make. So we talk about in our financial aid course that you guys all got and we talk about numerous times in our legacy class and that's how to afford college. The price tag is not what you're going to pay. Very, very few people pay that price tag. And that for a lot of our students, at the end of the day, the private college is going to be cheaper than the state school that's down the road. It's just the reality. And that message doesn't get out there enough. And that for those students who can put themselves forward in a way that allows colleges to view them as an asset to their school, money is going to flow to them even more. So do not pick a school based on the price tag you see on a college application or you see on the website, that price tag is something you need to disregard and you need to work through the numbers as we work through in the legacy class and our financial aid courses. It's not something we get into here, but something we dive into, quite into a lot of detail in our courses. But I want to highlight it right now because it's the one mistake people make all the time. I. I can't afford to go there, so I'm not going to go there. I'm going to go to the state school down the road that I absolutely hate, but I can afford to go there. That's the wrong approach. And what it does is it holds you back and it limits your career options and your college options based on a misperception about how much a college is going to cost. Don't let that happen to you. It happens to too many people. And then years later they find out, oh, I could have gone there and it would have been cheaper and my career options could have been greater. Don't let that happen to you. Don't foreclose the door upon a college based simply on the price tag. So at the end of the day, these are the things that you should not do. In the next video, we're going to talk about the things that you should do, the considerations that should be top of mind as you look at the colleges that are out there and try to identify the college that's best for you. So. So in the next video, go ahead and stop this one. We're going to move on to the next video where we're going to talk about the considerations that you should think about when choosing a college.