Your Path to College is Not One Size Fits All

0:00:00.2 S1: How do we know that we’re picking the right college, if my student doesn’t go to the right school, does that mean that they’re going to fail of everything that they do, are they not going to meet their right partner, are we going to end up having to move them and is this going to be incredibly expensive. What do we do? If you’ve had any questions like these, you are not alone, a lot of the families that I work with are confused, they’re not sure where to start, and they are looking for steps to take so that they can become assured and confident and ready for the college journey. So what we’re going to do today is we’re going to talk through some of the different paths that your student can take and make sure that you know exactly what to do to get started. Stay tuned.

0:00:50.5 S1: Hey there, I’m Courtney and I’m the founder of confused to college ready. With over 15 years experience as a mental health therapist turned school counselor, I am bringing my experience and expertise to help you navigate the college search experience. My goal is to serve students and their families and unlock the secrets to college searching, stay to.

0:01:16.7 S1: Alright, thank you so much for joining us today. And what I would love to remind you, as I do with most shows, is that we are on Facebook, we have a group, if you go to confused a College Ready dot com for group, you will find our Facebook group, and please don’t forget that we have… We would love for you to leave us a review, and I also am available to have coaching calls, and then we will be opening a course soon for all of our families, so super excited for all of the things that are coming. If this has been helpful for you, please please don’t hesitate to share it with others to be able to help them. So let’s go ahead and dive in. How many of you remember the shirts? They were kind of a Packard material. They were called popcorn shirts or crinoids, they were Packard. And when you first look at them, they were about the size of a doll shirt, and they are labeled to be one size-fits all, and that you could put it on and stretch it out and it was going to fit you no matter what…

0:02:33.4 S1: Well, one-size-fits-all is not always the case. Those shirts were beautiful on people who had a body shape where they could be very beautiful in people, my body shape, the way that… It was not a good fit for me. So while the people who made the shirts, the stores that sold them while one size fits all could be true in some instances, that was not the case for me, and a lot of the times, we have that exact same thing that happens as students are looking at college that it’s a one-size-fits all. My friends are going to this X, Y, Z College, and so I should be looking at that too. Or there are these elite colleges, and I have a specific episode that is devoted entirely to that you don’t have to attend an elite college, so I’ll link that in the show notes, but if you are interested in that… Please know that that’s a great episode. All about why you don’t have to attend an elite college to be successful, there are a lot of different paths, and so we’re going to talk through some of that in this episode as well as the next one, I’ve got a lot of things to cover.

0:03:42.7 S1: And then I want to make sure that we discuss and help you understand, and so we’ll be going into some pretty specific details, so how do you know as a parent and how do students know that they are going to the right school? Well, let’s talk through what some of the options are, so we’ve talked about careers, we’ve talked about not having to attend that, a leader, prestigious school. Let’s talk about what some of the options are as far as colleges, and then really dig in a little bit, and I know that there are the questions of, Well, is it… Am I going to not be successful if I don’t go to X, Y, Z school, students can still be successful. You’re going to find the right path for your individual student or for you as the student, and there’s not one size that’s going to fit all… For what students are looking for, the first thing is, some students are going to go directly into a four-year college, they are looking into a particular program, they might be very assured of what they want to do, they know that they’re looking at that Bachelor’s degree and they are going to apply directly to a four-year college, and that can be a great option for students that know where they’re going, they know what they’re looking at, they have the statistics with GPA, grades, class rank, test scores and other things to meet the entrance requirements at those four-year schools, another option that some four-year schools have is that they’re looking at a bridge program, so that’s for some type of transitional program, so students that are in this boat might be provisionally accepted or conditionally accepted to that four-year school, and they might live near campus of that particular school, but the classes that they’re going to be taking are going to be with a local technical or community college, so students have to be able to complete those courses, they have to be able to successfully show that they are going to work through the rigor of their college classes that they are going to be able to be successful, and then that condition or provisional acceptance would turn into that they are a full-time student of that school, so most of the time the students, they’re still saying that, Hey, yes, I attend…

0:06:20.8 S1: This particular university, and they are not saying that they’re a Bridge student, that’s not something that you would have to tell people that… Some students say, Well, I don’t want to tell people that I’m going to this one, to this non-four-year school, so the Bridge Program can help with that if someone is concerned about what they would say or they want to be able to make sure that they have… And in for a specific school, the other route… And so all of these that we’re talking about so far, this is if someone is interested in getting a Bachelor’s degree, so I want to… I should have said that first, but this is for someone who’s interested in a bachelor’s degree specifically, so the next component or the next option would be if a student transfers, so let’s say that maybe a student’s grades are not quite high enough for them to be admitted into a four-year school, or they don’t know what they want to do, or they want to save some money so that they are not spending quite so much, and they attend a local community college, and so then you can complete that two-year degree, that associate’s degree.

0:07:35.9 S1: Have enough credits to be considered a transfer student, and then students are able to look at transferring to that for your school, so that’s another path to college, and then we also have certification programs where a student can look going directly to a two-year school or directly into that certification program. And they’re going to be able to move forward. So those are just a brief recap of things that we have discussed before, and what I want you to think about is, as you are touring schools, as you are looking at what’s going to be the right fit, does a student need to go to a four-year school or they be able to get the same education, the same training and certification in a much more economic way if they attended a two-year school, so there are several different options with these paths to college. So when we’re looking at all of these things, all of these options for students, many of them end up that they are learning just as much about what they don’t want is about what they do want when they are looking into their options for schools, so we’ve talked before, and again, I’ll link these in the show notes, but we’ve talked before about where students want to go, where they want to attend, and being able to go on some of those college visits, and so you’re learning as much about what you don’t want is what you do want…

0:09:10.0 S1: And it’s the same thing as you’re looking at that path to college, so we see students that are… Sometimes students think and parents think we have to go to this absolute, this best top school for our particular major or area of interest, if you’re a student or if you as the student aren’t sure about what you want to do, or there might be some students, they just say, You know what, I’m done with school, I need to take some time off. And I had one particular student that I can remember and she struggled and she was not interested, she wanted to get the diploma and her mom, her mom and dad really said, You know you need to have this experience, we’re not going to… You need to go have the experience of being on campus and doing all of the things that other students your age are doing, and we don’t want you to miss out, well, that can end up quickly leading to academic probation, to loss of scholarships, to other things, if a student is not even entirely kicked out just based on their grades, there is… When I was in my freshman year of college, we went to a meeting, and I started out at a four-year school, and so we went to a meeting in the big basketball arena that we had, and they brought in all of the freshman together and they said…

0:10:44.7 S1: Class of… And it was for our particular class, this is… I want you to take a look around. This is the first time and the last time that every single one of you will be sitting together in this arena, and he talked about… The President talked about how some students were going to end up transferring to a different school, some students were going to end up being on academic probation and they weren’t able to return, some students were going to finish early, that they were going to move through their programs really quickly and then other students were going to move through the programs more slowly and it was going to take them longer than the four years to graduate, so they knew at that point in time, the President, as he was talking to us, that not everyone, that it wasn’t a… That not everyone was going to finish or complete, and so that particular school, again, going back to it wasn’t a one-size-fits all the experience that our students have… We want you to feel successful, we want you to feel like you have everything that you need in order to go into your classes, to be able to meet people, to be able to have the experience.

0:12:02.0 S1: Yes, we certainly want all of those things, but we also want to make sure that it’s something where you’re going to feel successful and that you’re going to be prepared, and so some students end up that they have this ideal… This is the perfect school that I want to go to, they don’t end up getting into it, but guess what, by the time they get to that school, that was… That is the fit. They end up, even if it’s not their first choice, they end up absolutely loving it. So a lot of what I do as I am working with individual clients, as I am working through our coaching program, as I am working through the course that we are going to be offering, I’m going to combine a lot of this and we’re going to talk through how do you know what that right path is for your individual student, a lot of people work really hard, and we want to make sure that every person, no matter what their fit is, that they are going to be confident with it, and that you all have exactly what you need to be able to make some of those decisions and those choices, so what we’re going to do next time we will talk more about wait lists, we’ll talk more about transferring, we’re going to talk more about what it looks like and how your grades can make a difference and really go into more detail on some of these things, but I wanted to make sure that everyone knows that there is not a specific perfect path for any one person, we really want to be able to find the right path for each person and to find that perfect fit.

0:13:44.9 S1: I hope this has been helpful. If you have any interest in working with me and being able to talk through some of these pieces, I absolutely would love to have a clarity session to help you in your student with figuring out, maybe it’s looking at your college search, maybe it’s looking at some of the specifics as you move into applications, I am here to be able to serve you and get some clarity on what your next steps are going to be, also, if this has been helpful, please don’t forget to share it and leave us a review because hopefully it will help someone else. And until next time, I look forward to serving you and your student take care.

0:14:27.9 S1: Thank you so much for listening to our podcast, please subscribe so you don’t miss any future episodes, you can find us on Instagram and Facebook a confused to ready and download our free guide on how to start or expand your college search. A confused to ready dot com. How to start?