Michelle Kretzschmar 
It’s getting near the end of the year and like most bloggers, I’m taking stock of the year to see what has been successful, popular, and what I might want to reconsider for the coming year. In the interest of killing two birds with one stone (my need to look at the analytics while coming up with another post), I’m listing the most popular 50-50 Highlights list posts below.
Anyone interested in playing college baseball needs to head over to College Baseball Profiles and read their latest College Coaches Survey. The focus is on New England colleges but it’s worth reading for some much needed insight in college baseball recruiting. Today I want to focus on one conclusion of the report-high school baseball still matters.
As the cost of college has sky-rocketed, students are accumulating more and more debt. You hear horror stories of student graduating with over $100,000, $150,000, or $200,000 in college debt just for an undergraduate education. And with tuition at some schools exceeding $60,000 a year, you have to wonder if that high student debt is simply the cost of attending college today?
The ACT test has four sections, English, Math, Reading, and Science, each scored on a scare of 1 to 36. The ACT also calculates a composite score which is an average of all four test. The single composite score is generally used when discussing ACT scores. However, the total of all four scores, 144, is used by organizations such as the NCAA.
When you think about research at colleges and universities, you probably picture people in white lab coats measuring something or blackboards whiteboards covered with endless equations. These are the places you go to really understand how things work in the math and sciences.
I don’t know why, but whenever I bring up comparing graduation rates when considering colleges, I get a fairly hostile reaction–at least in online forums. It’s almost as if I suggested using a school’s football rankings as a way to pick the school. So what is wrong with looking at college graduation rates?
I’ve mentioned before that not all 50-50 schools are affordable or generous with financial aid. Recently, I’ve started looking at Parent Loans for Undergraduate Students (PLUS) loans. As the name indicates, these loans are usually not taken out by the student but by parents on the student’s behalf. This means that they aren’t generally counted in the student debt statistics because it’s not the student’s debt but the parent’s. And the fact the parents can borrow up to the total cost of attendance each year can make them very dangerous loans.
When looking at this recruiting timeline, keep in mind this is geared for baseball players. In many ways, your senior high school baseball season will not count. The majority of coaches (not all) will have already filled their recruit classes for the following year (your college freshman year). Depending on the division and conference (think “power 5”) they may have already filled the slots for the year after that (your college sophomore year) and only have a few left for the following year. Yes, college baseball coaches are taking verbal commitments from high school sophomores.
The following are suggested tips for preparing for the college admissions interview. These are all general recommendations. If you have specific information that applies to a specific college, then certainly go with it. I really don’t think there is one answer for all situations so of course these are suggestions and not rules written in stone. They are based on the experiences with my son and wading through countless websites and college admission books.
