Excerpt: ‘What Colleges Don’t Tell You’

Parental encouragement and enthusiasm have never been found to stifle kids’ motivation or to slow them down. Students who have been encouraged by their parents in the application process or in other competitive endeavors never seem to be at any greater loss for motivation later in life. Among the most visible examples are televised teenage tennis stars and Olympic athletes. TV cameras  increasingly show exuberant parents in the stands. In turn, the winners are increasingly thanking their parents publicly for support that ranges from building ski board apparatus in the backyard to chauffeuring an athlete to practices hundreds of miles away, to uprooting the family to be near the world’s top instructor, to financing expensive equipment and lessons.

To start your child thinking about colleges, show him a sample college application or take him on a college tour as far in advance as possible — 11th grade, 10th grade, or younger — to motivate him. Make special note of the part of the application that asks for lists of activities and awards. Talk about how you expect to help your kid fill those blanks with the remaining time left before he goes off to college. Will you root for your daughter at swim meets? Will you accompany your son on Hollywood auditions? Will you pay for an archeological dig? Will you welcome an exchange student into your home? Will you drive the family to an isolated field at 3 a.m. to witness an aurora borealis? Plan ahead as much as you can.

Significant achievements require lots of family legwork and lots of outside support and encouragement. Mozart could not have composed such beautiful music if his parents had not invested in a piano and arranged his performance schedule. Shirley Temple could not have reached stardom at such a young age, if family members did not help prepare her for auditions. Olympic athletes require investment in sports equipment and plenty of costly training, scheduling and chauffeuring.

The best resumes don’t happen — they’re carefully planned. When should you start planning? Now. As soon as you realize the value of planning. Plan with your child. She should be the decision maker in choosing a direction—but you, the parent, should suss out the opportunities. You’re the chief scout. Find that audition, science class, rocketry camp or architecture competition. Inspire multiple interests, and expose your child to multiple fields. The younger the child is when you start, the greater the resume, and the more opportunities that will become available.

In helping to select activities, you might do so with specific colleges in mind. For example, if your son shows a strong interest in architecture and might want to be the shoo-in at architecture school, contact colleges that offer that subject to find out what experiences they value in their applicants. Have your son pursue some of those activities in the summer leading up to senior year at a minimum — preferably in prior summers as well. Sometimes some of these activities have their own prerequisites (design, drawing, or engineering courses) that must be filled summers earlier. By letting your child explore multiple interests and experiences during the summers leading up to college, he or she will develop a better understanding of how to find the best school and what colleges like to call “the perfect match.”

NBC VIDEO How to get into top schools Aug. 15: The "Today" show's Ann Curry talks with Rachel Korn, a former admissions officer and author of "How to Survive Getting  into College." Today Show Books

The Best College and the Perfect Match
Which is better: Harvard or Stanford? Princeton or Yale? Virginia or Berkeley? MIT or Caltech? Bates or Bowdoin? Wash. U. or Hopkins? These are questions that parents often ask. Some are satisfied to base their decisions on the annual ratings in U.S. News and World Reports. But for savvier parents, I stress that what is considered perfect for one child is not necessarily the best for another. Colleges really do differ, and smart families visit campuses to get a sense of the diverse campus cultures.

Secret 3: Don’t be fooled by a low faculty-to-student ratio, for example, on a campus where students are not supposed to speak to faculty members except during very limited office hours. Some of the most prestigious colleges have appealingly low ratios, but all undergraduate classes may still be taught by graduate students. That famous professor that your daughter looked forward to studying government with might not be interested in discussions with a mere undergraduate. That Nobel Prize winner whom your son wanted to bounce ideas off, might be on the road on a speaking tour the entire semester, every semester. If faculty-to-student ratio is not the best way to determine a perfect match, how is the best match determined? Colleges have their own criteria in judging applicants.

Excerpted from “What Colleges Don't Tell You (and Other Parents Don't Want You to Know)” by Elizabeth Wissner-Gross. Copyright © 2006, Elizabeth Wissner-Gross. All rights reserved. Published by Penguin Group (USA). No part of this excerpt can be used without permission of the publisher.

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