In the first part of Why People Waste Their College Campus Visits, I discussed how students and families don’t make the most of college visits because they don’t understand there are different types of campus visits and don’t prepare appropriately. I covered some common issues regarding campus visits and listed one of three types of campus visits. This post lists the remaining types of visits and what to do if you can’t visit.
When people talk about college visits, it’s usually to give advice about questions to ask and places to visit while you’re on campus. There’s also the issue of how much importance to place on the official campus tour and student guide. No one stops to ask what “kind” of college visit is intended. Yes, there are different kinds of visits. There are actually three different types of visits.
The following is a guest post by Randy Levin. Randy has one focus–helping students with their college application essays. You can see a sample of his presentation here.
Senior year will be here faster than another Lindsey Lohan arrest. It’s your last year in high school forever (Sad? I should be a motivational speaker). Whether you have over-scheduled yourself or “Senioritis” set in mid-way through Junior year, the college application process can be stressful for you and your family.
(Updated for 2020) If you’re serious about playing college athletics, you need to understand how and when college coaches can start contacting you (officially) and when you can contact them. I remember sitting in the bleachers in April and listening to one parent’s angst that the baseball coach from a particular college hadn’t called them yet. The fact was that this was April of the player’s junior year–according to the NCAA recruiting periods and contact rules at the coach couldn’t call him until July.
Last week I watched my son played at his college’s annual Blue and White game. It’s just an intra-squad scrimmage at the end of their Fall practices followed by a family cook-out. It was cold but it was great to spend the weekend with him. He gave us a tour of HIS campus which is definitely a different campus as sophomore than it was as a “prospie.”
(This post has been updated with data available December of 2019.) All things being equal, why not play for a college that spends more money on its softball program? Of course, all things are rarely equal and money doesn’t guarantee a winning record. But who knows, maybe while scrolling through the schools, looking to see which ones are higher or lower than you expected, you might come across a school you hadn’t previously considered. I wouldn’t use it to reduce your choices, unless all things being equal, but it just might expand your horizons. The table below shows the average college softball expenses from 2013 to 2017 for D1 softball programs.
If you’re interested in playing your sport for one of the Ivy League schools, you need to understand the Academic Index. I’m assuming that you already know that the Ivy League does not provide athletic scholarships and that you’re hoping to use your athletic abilities to help you get admitted. After all, recruited athletes have approximately a 30 percentage point advantage in being admitted compared to non-athletes with no legacy status. And a recent analysis of data from Harvard showed that “Athletes with the highest or second-highest academic rating on an internal Harvard admissions scale have an acceptance rate of 83 percent—compared to 16 percent for non-athletes.”
(You can see an updated evaluation of the College Navigator here.) The College Navigator website is part of the National Center for Education Statistics. They are responsible for collecting all kinds of education related data including that in the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). The College Navigator is just the user-friendly way of accessing the IPEDS data. If you don’t like the user-friendly approach, you can access the data directly through the IPEDS Data Center.
This is one area where parents can sigh with relief because things haven’t changed that much since they were in high school. While colleges are expecting high school students to have taken more classes and with more of them having been AP level and participate in extracurricular activities to demonstrate depth, they aren’t asking for letters of recommendation from Nobel Prize winners, or at the very least, your state’s senator. High school teachers are still the accepted goto for letters of recommendation for college.
