Breaking the Small Business Code

Special Admissions = Athletic Free Pass?

      “Special admits” or “Special Admissions” is a phrase that describes a program that admits students that don’t meet regular admissions requirements. It allows colleges to overlook the standard measurements and look at the "whole student".  Most families assume it is for situations like one I had where a handicapped (blind) student didn't get the typical SAT scores for his #1 college choice (try doing math in your head) but he had great grades and attitude and was admitted to an elite ivy. But his story is the rare exception!

     Special Admit has become an athletic recruiting tool!

      The Indianapolis Star did a survey this year and found some eye-popping numbers on who actually gets special admits. Nearly EVERY player on the University of California at Berkeley football team (95% of freshmen) were special admits compared to 2% for the rest of the incoming students. But UCB is not alone, other results include:

· 76% of the freshman football class at Indiana University at Bloomington is made up of special admits but are only 2 percent of regular freshman.

· Texas A&M University is 94% versus 8%

· University of Oklahoma is 81% versus 2%

      So what does this mean for the typical college-bound family? IF your student has a gift like athletics, a college that values that gift may admit your student despite their academic scores. BUT the big risk is whether or not your student can KEEP UP with the rest of the students who are academically superior. It’s not getting in but graduating that counts!

     I have met with lots of families who are fixated on using their student's skills (usually but not always sports) to get into a college that they would not normally qualify for based on GPA and/or  test scores on the SAT or ACT.  I explain that having a desirable skill does not qualify them to compete in the real place for college success => the classroom!  Unless their student is a "blue chip athlete" and planning to make the sport their life-long profession, EDUCATION should be the focus.

    This is why the NCAA has been tightening the GPA average for teams and graduation rates for teams.  (And that opens up another blog topic - how colleges are tempted to "shade" the grades and class choice for premier athletes.) 

    So what is the bottom line?  If you have a student-athlete, please focus on a good college EDUCATION and IF sports can help with admissions AT the college that fits their career potential and their academic skills, go for it!  But don't put your student into a college that they simply cannot handle. 

    My recommendation is to look at the GPA and admissions test scores from the previous year's freshman class at the colleges on your list.  Here is what I want you to SERIOUSLY consider:

      If your student's scores are not AT LEAST at the lower end of the mid-pack, I strongly recommend you do not accept admissions on special admit. Remember, colleges grade on the curve and you are competing with the people sitting next to you in class. Who sits next to you in class can be determined by the college's admissions history.  For example, 50% of freshman at Stanford in 2007 had SAT scores on math and verbal between 1340 and 1550 out of 1600!  That means the C and B students had AT LEAST 1340!  If you were lower than 1340 you are potentially a low C to D student.  And 25% of the freshman class had PERFECT SAT scores!!

         Remember, the goal is a tool kit for life, not simply 4-years of sports glory.  I think it is better to use a special admit for colleges that stretch your athlete but does NOT put them in the lower 25% of traditional students!

       

RESOURCING - The Ugly Scholarship Truth NO ONE TELLS!

ORIGINAL DATE: 08/30/2008 11:58:19 AM

     I just got a Tweet from someone who works at a student loan company that also operates a "scholarship" site (Twitter me at LindaPTaylor).  Good news is this company is open about the connection between the two sites! Sadly, most sites are nothing but fronts for lenders or marketing companies and they don't tell the searchers who register what will happen to their registration information. (Feel free to go to www.LindaPTaylor.com and send me an eMail through my "Contact Me" page and I'll share who these good and bad guys are!)

     Bad news is the information provided by even the good guy site is NOT complete!  It has good content but neglects to share the dirty little secret of "resourcing". This is also known as "Outside Scholarship Policy" at most colleges.

The site talks about focusing on finding and applying for at least 1 scholarship a week (and recommends 1 per day - ouch). They also recommend several YouTube videos that perpetuate the tall tale that "millions" in scholarships go unclaimed every year.  They demonstrate the excitement of a student "finding" a perfect scholarship to apply for (but not winning!). But they DON'T tell you anything about this student and his potential to be resourced right out of that money at the colleges on his list!

     The key to this is to understand you are not supposed to receive more money than you "need" for college.  Most college-bound families know the equation COA - EFC = need which determines how much aid a student needs for a college.  The REAL equation is COA - EFC - OUTSIDE RESOURCES = aid!

     So after you know that your scholarships will be absorbed by this equation, the next question is what part of the aid package the college will apply the scholarship to! UPenn promises it applies to loans and work-study first.  Others, apply it first to federal and state grants. But the nasty ones apply it to their free money.

     I met with a family last night who will be needy at every school on their senior son's list. I showed them the probable structure of financial aid at these schools including loans and free money but noted that regardless of the school their son finally chooses, they will end up paying at least their EFC of $14,000. So the talk immediately turned to finding scholarships for that $14,000.  I then explained the practice of resourcing at the schools.

     I showed the family 2008-2009 financial aid offers I had from several schools including Stanford, Columbia and Northwestern that clearly show the outside scholarships were "absorbed" or resourced by these colleges leaving the family's EFC totally intact. So for needy students at most colleges, outside scholarships don't do ANYTHING to help pay the family's direct costs!

     I explained that most scholarships are co-addressed and the colleges have policies to absorb or resource all such scholarships.  So in the case of a needy family, finding outside scholarships is usually a waste of time!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Unless you are receiving no free money at all from a college, scholarships are not the salvation most families have been led to believe.

      When I think of all the time wasted by hard-working families trying to find scholarships, registering at sites that sell their information to lenders or other marketers, and knowing what happens to them emotionally when they have the money snatched out of their hands --- I could scream!

       The RIGHT way to pay for college is to learn to play the game THE RIGHT WAY!  Learn to fnd scholarships the SMART way.  Don't buy into these myths and half-truths.  Find a source you can trust like the College Leadership Foundation.    

       I feel so strongly about this whole SCHOLARSHIP RESOURCING issue that I am GIVING AWAY by complete Insider Secrets to finding scholarships (worth $149) when a family joins the nonprofit Foundation's ecoaching program! You get everything I have including the eBook, video of the 1-hour workshop, PowerPoints, and bonus materials.  I make NOTHING from the sale because I have had it with meeting with families who had thousands of scholarship dollars snatched from their pockets by resourcing!

   

If you have been "RESOURCED", PLEASE let me know! I want to share real life stories with other scholarship seekers.

Scholarships that Don't Help

ORIGINAL DATE: 08/22/2008 10:49:05 AM

I recently wrote an article on Scholarship resourcing for the College Leadership Foundation's eNews (sent at no cost, so go to www.CLFeCoach.org/eNews to subscribe now).  What was cool was an eNews subscriber sent me an eMail through my website www.LindaPTaylor.com to let me know that resourcing was not always a sure thing which I had inferred in the article.

Here are 3 quick things to set up the story.  First, most scholarships are "co-addressed" which means they are awarded to the student but sent direct to the college on behalf of the winner.  Next, "resourcing" is when a college applies the scholarship money to the financial aid being given to the student - both free money and loans. Lastly, colleges have complete freedom to apply the scholarship any way they wish to aid and expenses as well as let you "keep" the money.

Apparently the subscriber's son had received several co-addressed scholarships.  The college he had selected did NOT resource the scholarships and had actually allowed him to add the scholarships to the aid he was receiving.  This meant the scholarships actually reduced the costs not being met by the college's aid package! This was UNUSUAL but became very understandable when you looked at the scholarship totals, the student and the college.

First, the total amount of the scholarships was modest and absorbing them would not really have changed the total free money he was getting from the college.  So there was not much incentive to absorb the money. Second, this student was highly desirable and allowing him to "keep" his scholarships was a good idea both tactically and politically to make their college more "attractive".  But the most important thing was this college is ranked in the fourth tier by US News & World Report.  That means they are not considered a popular or well-known college.  By not resourcing the scholarships they stood "out" from the other colleges that did both!

So does this change my position that most scholarship searches are a waste of time financially?  No, not really. As I say in my "77 Secrets to Winning Scholarships" system, you should search for scholarships SMART! Decide whether or not the money you would get is worth the effort it will take for the schools on your list. You need to know whether or not the colleges on your list will resource your scholarships based on their  policy posted in their catalog.  You need to know what your family's Expected Family Contribution (EFC) will be at the target colleges on your list so you can estimate the amount of free money you'll get. And you need to know whether or not the work to get them is worth the money and the flood of marketing materials you will get when you register on-line for most scholarships.

A REMINDER -  If you join the College Leadership Foundation's College eCoaching program which provides you with the best in neutral and unbiased college planning information, you get my ENTIRE COLLEGE SCHOLARSHIP SYSTEM as a free bonus!  That's everything - the book, the video of my 1-hour scholarship workshop, workshop PowerPoints, and lots of bonus items.  To learn more, go to www.CLFeCoach.org.

Scholarships As Marketing Tool

ORIGINAL DATE: 05/12/2008 06:41:43 AM

Scholarships.  The magic marketing word.  If you want lots of people to attend your seminar, read your article or now days - register at your website -- offer a scholarship. I have always been lukewarm about scholarships because I did the math and if every college student found the maximum available, it calculated out to about $900 per student.  Assuming that 10% found everything, it equated to an average of about $9,000.  And most of the money is ONLY for the first year.  With the cost of college being $18,000 to $50,000 per YEAR, that's not much of a dent. Per the scholarship aggregation site FastWeb, they have scholarships worth over $3 billion dollars.  Again the math is not so good.   If you dig around, you'll find that there are 38 million registered users of the site!  If every registrant found every dollar, you get $86 per registrant!  Assume 10% get everything and it jumps to $857 (whooppee)!  Not what I call good odds to find big bucks. Can scholarships help relieve the pressure on paying for college?  ABSOLUTELY!  But NOT to the extent people think. It is ONE part of the process.   So to maximize your odds and your total, go after them in a smart way. Sadly, the easy way is NOT the smart way.  Registering at a scholarship aggregation site like FastWeb is easy - too easy.  Anyone can register and the site does all the work  matching key words.  Sadly, this has devalued scholarships! Scholarships before the era of the Internet were different and seemed to have more meaning.   It took time and effort to dig out these scholarships.  It made them more impressive.

Today scholarships at sites like FastWeb are mostly marketing tools!  You have to give them tons of personal information which is then used for marketing and resale unless you opt-out.  And out of fear of missing a new scholarship, most don't opt-out!  for example, to get this year's CocaCola-Chuckee Cheese scholarship, you were asked to register for their "Club".  The opt-out was buried in the process but most students skipped it.  The $25,000 SINGLE scholarship offer generated 1.6 million new club members.  That put the odds of winning at 1 in 1.6 million!  I think there are better odds in MegaBucks lotto! And this is also an example of what I meant as "less impressive".  The "Target Community Service" award sounds much better than "Chuckee Cheese" on a resume and college application. The most prolific scholarship provider on FastWeb and other aggregation sites is "BrickFish" which is small $500 scholarships for endorsing consumer products for which Brickfish is paid a marketing/advertising fee! The total money available for scholarships always sounds impressive until you realize how many people you are competing against!  So focus on ALL the ways to find money - not just the easy way.  That's why I wrote my book and recorded my video on scholarships.  I want people to know all the ways and places to find the money they need.  There are good scholarships available but it takes more effort and a different approach than most people think. You can get my book and video AND a bonus athletic book all delivered "green" via the Internet by clicking on the products page of this site.  It's normally $29.95 and I guarantee results.  BUT if you join the College Leadership Foundation's College eCoaching Club for $14.95, I am giving their new members the entire system for FREE!  That's how much I believe in the eCoaching Club!  Go to www.CollegeLeadershipFoundation.org/InsiderSecrets to join now AND keep my system for free! Please feel free to ask questions in my contact me page or in comments to this blog. I know people are always looking for the latest information on college scholarships and college planning. I am glad to help where I can! -----

I APOLOGIZE!

ORIGINAL DATE: 04/27/2008 10:52:38 PM

It’s All My Fault And I’m Apologizing!

Here is a recent conversation I had with a mom I met at a birthday party for a mutual friend this past weekend in Orange County, CA.  After I introduced myself, she wanted to know more about what I did for a living.  Being passionate about my work, I spent about 5 minutes telling her how I help college-bound families with cash flow planning, tax capacity and minimizing debt – things she said she had never heard applied to college planning. I then asked her about her family. She told me that their daughter was graduating from UC Davis this summer after 5 years. She told me that her husband had had to postpone retiring because they had accumulated nearly $100,000 in PLUS Loans for the direct college costs as well about $18,000 they had borrowed from their home equity line of credit for the “incidentals” that kept popping up.  She had over $1,500 per month payments that were not tax-deductible. She was quiet for a minute and then asked me where I had been for the last 5 years! She was actually angry that she had never heard of people like me. I told her that fee-based college consulting is a very specialized occupation and sadly, very few “players” in the system really know how to help families in the right way.

She informed me that all she ever saw was all about either selling her something (529s, books, insurance, even the colleges) or telling her to borrow (students, parents, home, private loans).   She looked for the "free ride", did the FAFSA, read a "free report" on the "9 Secrets" from an insurance salesman, and attended every college night and seminar she could!  They spent lots of time searching for scholarships and found about $3,200 all 4 years. I then made a MAJOR mistake. I did some quick mental calculations based on what she had told me and gave her a couple of ideas that would have cut her costs in half. But before I could share some things she could do now, she told me it was MY FAULT she had all that debt and walked away, clearly upset. I was stunned but after thinking about what she had told me, she was absolutely right to be mad!  She had never been given the information I had shared!  She had told me about all the places she had gone for information – the colleges, the high school, her financial planner, her tax professional, the internet – and got nothing that helped her!  I was just a handy target for her anger. Good news is she came back later in the evening and she will be meeting with me to see if there is anything we can do now. Her husband works in law enforcement and he can retire anytime but he is still working because of all their college debt. Good news is there are ideas we can use. Then I got an eMail from Chuck Moore – one of the masters of college financial planning!  He had had an almost identical situation with the head of Human Resources at a company where he had been referred! The person he was talking to had massive debt for two children who were out of college and was angry at him for failing to let people like her know they had options! Chuck said it had really made him stop short! He felt it was partially ALL our faults in the college planning field.  We were not getting our information out to enough people!  No one knew they had options! I hate to keep repeating myself, this confirms that the College Leadership Foundation and their revolutionary College eCoaching Club is the right thing for families NOW.  Families who join the Club will have choices and options based on KNOWLEDGE that is unbiased and immediately useful.  Visit www.CollegeLeadershipFoundation.org.

Scholarship Book and Video Giveaway

ORIGINAL DATE: 04/25/2008 05:09:07 PM

Sadly, the words  f r e e  will get a blog labeled dangerous or malicious in the wild world of the internet!  That's why you see so many creative ways of spelling it without spelling it like mine with spaces.  But I need to share something I have just done for the College Leadership Foundation! If you have been reading my blogs you know that I am currently on leave from my company College Funding Network as a loaned executive to the College Leadership Foundation.  I AM VERY PASSIONATE in my support for their College eCoaching Club and what it can do for college-bound families.  I think it is absolutely critical that college families get neutral and unbiased content to help them achieve their maximum in college success. And that's the mission of the Foundation and what you get when you join eCoaching. To encourage (okay, bribe) as many families as possible to try the Club, I am DONATING the complete "Insider Secrets to Scoring Scholarships" System to anyone who signs-up for just 1-month of College eCoaching Club membership.  The system includes my book, "77 Insider Secrets", a 50-minute video of the standing-room only class I did for the AAUW of Thousand Oaks, and thr Tuition Rx Guide to Athletic Scholarships -- over a $29.95 value (available through this website by clicking on the Products tab).  And for families who join now, I am giving it ALL away with the first month's tax-deductible $14.95 membership fee. If you don't like what you get from the Foundation, cancel the membership and keep my scholarship materials -- no questions asked!  Think of it this way -- You are either getting my system at no cost with a 2-month membership or you're getting a 2-month membership for buying my proven Insider Secrets to Scoring Scholarships.  Both are a win-win for you! For less than 50 cents a day, you get nearly $50 in college planning and scholarship information!  To learn more, go to www.CollegeLeadershipFoundation.org/InsiderSecrets.

Getting Athletic Scholarships

ORIGINAL DATE: 04/16/2008 09:20:31 AM

Do you have a high school senior that is devastated that he or she got a small scholarship at that expensive NCAA-Division I team you dreamed of all through high school.  The coach promised you the moon if you'd consider the team.  You walked away thinking you'd gotten the "free ride" of your dreams.  But instead you got a tiny, partial-tuition scholarship.  Or maybe they simply waived the out-of-state tuition at that famous Pac-10 school in the state next door.  What's going on?

I just talked with a football player who got a 20% tuition-only scholarship of $5,000 which means his parents still face a bill of $20,000  per year.  And because the student sacrificed grades and testing to his sport, he really can't qualify for anything more.  The player was one of the best in the league so . . . WHAT HAPPENED????? The family did everything they"thought" was the right thing. They are now thinking that the coach "lied", or the system is "rigged" or that other player got a "free ride" that should have gone to their kid.

Take a deep breath because as you'll learn in this blog, if this your student - you did nothing wrong!  Your student athlete did nothing wrong.

The athletic “free ride” for most students is a myth.  They simply didn't know what they should have done to control the results!

So for you high school juniors on the brink of being able to be recruited - read on!  You can learn a lot about taking control of your destiny and getting the money you want!

Virtually EVERYTHING that parents think they know about athletic scholarships is absolutely dead wrong. Families nationwide are working hard for something that "the "system" tells them exists. But NOT in the form they think!  So I want to clarify how NCAA scholarships REALLY works when it comes to paying for college!

The New York Times has reviewed 2003-4 N.C.A.A. data for the 138,216 athletes who received athletic aid in Division I and Division II schools and they then did interviews with college coaches to get THE REAL story about athletic scholarships.  If you understand how the system works, you are well on your way to getting the most athletic dollars you can to pay for college!!

MYTH # 1 – The number of Athletic Scholarships: In 2003-4, N.C.A.A. institutions gave athletic scholarships to just 2% of the 6.4 million athletes playing those same sports in high school four years earlier. Even in football or basketball - the two “glamour” or “revenue sports” - the average N.C.A.A. athletic scholarship is only $8,707.   While that sounds small, it means half the students get more, the rest get less.  For “nonrevenue sports” like baseball or track and field, the NCAA average is ~$2,000 per year. Based on percentages, the typical athletic sponsorship is about 15% of tuition! So if tuition is $20,000, your athlete can expect $3,000!

Why are the numbers so low?  This is because the coach gets 5 to 10 "full rides" to distribute over 15 to 30 students! So they need to decide how little they can give your student and still have them show up.  The coaches generally end up giving 1 or 2 full rides and the balance in partials of 5 to 15% and sometimes NOTHING!  You need to understand this process to take control of positioning your athlete to qualify for the most money.  The more desirable they are the more they may get.

NOTE - There are NO scholarships for athletics at the Ivy League schools! These schools provide money based only on need.  So if you know a student who got a scholarship and is going to play sports at one of these schools it may "look" like a sports scholarship but it isn't!

Myth # 2 – Helps Get You Into A Popular College: This myth says that even if you don’t get all the money you want, being an athlete MAY still give your student an advantage when applying to college. Good news is this myth does have credibility.  But being an athlete is best when combined with good grades and test scores. Unless your student is “blue chip” – Olympic or professional level – the colleges still needs good grades -- although maybe not as high as a non-athlete. The NCAA has set higher standards for grade point averages and graduation rates for teams. These new standards have reduced the chances that just being a good athlete will make up for being a poor student.

Myth # 3 – The Scholarship Lasts for Four Years: The commitment to their sport means students often take the minimum number of college course units because of the overwhelming number of hours spent in games, practice, travel and gym time to stay fit. This can mean 5 years to graduate. Plus it means stress and less "fun" at college. So it is now more and more common for second-year and third- year athletes to drop their sport and thus, lose their sports scholarships. AND THIS MEANS MOM AND DAD pick up the full cost of college! So make sure your student knows how to keep their balance between sports and college life. And decide to attend a college with the potential you may lose the scholarship.

Despite common references in news media reports, there is no such thing as a four-year scholarship. All NCAA athletic scholarships must be renewed every year and are not guaranteed. Nearly every scholarship can be canceled for almost any reason in any year. And if the athlete can’t or won't play, they lose the scholarships.  Just make sure you can afford the college without a sports scholarship.

If you are a parent of an athlete, let them ENJOY their sport without the pressure to get the "free ride" that doesn't exist for 99% of student athletes.  Decide right now that if your student gets athletic money, great!  But we recommend you still prepare to pay for college the “old fashioned” way – by lots of little steps called PLANNING.  If you don't know where to start, visit www.CollegeLeadershipFoundation.org to learn about their College eCoaching Club to maximize your chances of winning the student athlete admissions and scholarship game!