If you're a parent of a rising senior, you may be worried that you don't know everything you need to know to handle your child's college admissions and funding process on your own.
That's the way I felt when I went through the process with my oldest child.
I panicked and signed up with a pricey private college counselor, without doing enough reserach to really understand what she would do for us and if she was capable of it.
I learned my lesson, which was there are too many pieces to the college admissions and funding process and no ONE person has the skills to handle it all.
To solve this problem, I reached out to private college counselors I've gotten to know through the Paying For College 101 Facebook group and worked with them to create a new type of college counseling approach.
It's the best of both worlds - seasoned college counselors guiding you and your student for a year (because that's how long the full process takes), along with experts to help in specific areas like test prep, financial aid and scholarships.
FINDING WAYS TO SAVE $50,000 How will the CoLAB help you find ways to save $50,000 and prevent you from overspending?
The CoLAB combines college admissions and college funding!
To get the best results financially, academically, and socially, I've never understood why these two process were handled separately (or sometimes the funding piece is never addressed at all).
The most critial steps for finding ways to save on college tuition, making sure schools are affordable and deciding whether the investment is worth it, involves understanding ALL of the following: - how the financial aid system works
- what your expected family contribution is (EFC)
- what your net cost will be at individual colleges
- how your student's academic profile compares to the top 25% at a school
- which schools can be most generous based on your student's profile and your family's financial situation
- and your student's aptitudes, career interests and potential earnings
This should and can be done BEFORE you and your student finalize their college list of schools he/she will apply to.
The goal of the CoLAB is to provide families with a hybrid, cost effective approach to college planning.
The hyrbird approach is a combination of group coaching sessions combined with individualized reports, and unlimited access to Joanne and Michele (the CoLAB leaders) to answer personal questions, when needed.
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