College admission success is not measured at acceptance time. Rather, it is measured at college graduation. If you and your child have chosen the right school and study path, then he or she will be on the way to fruitful employment or acceptance from a top graduate school program. If your family has chosen incorrectly, then your child will join the crowd of recent college graduates who are on the fringe. Nearly 50% of 22-27 year olds with bachelor’s degrees are working in jobs that do not require a college diploma according to the latest update (January 2016) from the Department of Labor. They are earning underwhelming salaries and not likely experiencing the satisfaction of meaningful work. Your family cannot operate without a career plan.

There are three primary factors that stand in the way of a successful match of college and study path. First, most students do not understand themselves with enough depth. They do not have a clear and honest picture of their interests, skills, habits, weaknesses, and personal traits. Grades and extra-curricular activities are a small part of the variables to be measured. Students must know their curiosities, their ability to manage their time, plan, and make decisions. A student who knows how she handles distractions and temptations, how long it takes her to read a chapter in a college textbook or complete a five-page essay assignment, how her college major connects to her career plan, and what it takes to keep herself feeling good and productive can say that she has a good understanding of herself.

Second, students do not have appropriate understanding of major options, study paths, and career plans. Most children today are familiar with just a small sliver of the hundreds of careers that might suit their interests and skills. Rare is the college applicant who has looked intently at the four-year major plans and general education requirements at their prospective colleges. Students need not commit to a career in their first year of college, but they must have an understanding of career options and major plans A, B, and C.

Most students do not know the difference between the major disciplines on offer at colleges and universities. There is tremendous variety in both the educational style and curriculum in the social sciences, STEM fields, arts and humanities, and pre-professional tracks. How might your child fit in each of these major blocks of study, given each curriculum and associated set of needed skills?

Can your child say with certainty that he or she has clarity about exactly what is required to achieve a cumulative GPA of 3.3 or better in college? That is the minimum performance level expected if he or she wants to get into top graduate school programs. Does your son or daughter know what is expected by hiring managers in his or her prospective career, when applying for a first real job?

Finally, most students are uninformed about the character of the offerings at the colleges they are applying to or how each of the 4 major pools of colleges (public research, private research, teaching university, pre-professional or arts school) are different. The learning, social, and extra-curricular experience at a public research university like UT-Austin, UCLA, or Texas Tech is exceedingly different in character than the experience on offer at a teaching university like Trinity (TX), Oberlin, or Claremont McKenna. SMU, Rice, and NYU and other private research universities have very little in common with professional and arts schools like Embry-Riddle Aeronautical and Savannah College of Arts and Design.

How will your child respond to classrooms with 500 fellow students in introductory and general education courses at a school like Texas A&M? Will your child prefer the intimacy of knowing the vast majority of his or her fellow classmates and professors, as would happen at Southwestern University in Georgetown, TX? Will your child fall through the cracks of a large private research university of 15,000 or more students like Syracuse or USC? Can your child deal with the fast pace of an urban campus like Boston University or George Washington?

Some parents will throw up their hands at the prospect of completing this kind of research and having direct and honest conversations with their child about the student’s habits, talents, and personality. Parents are too busy with the work of managing their daily lives and those of their children.

Most adolescents will shrug off your questions and concerns as parent nagging or unnecessary work and worry. If this is true in your household, then you require expert and compassionate outside assistance.

Nevertheless, it is important for every parent to know what is to be done to properly evaluate your child and his or her plan for study and a future career. Thus we have enclosed our recipe for doing such work in this month’s newsletter. If you want to ensure that your child will have rewarding and meaningful work or a solid shot at top graduate school programs upon college graduation, then you will complete the arduous task ahead. If you should run into roadblocks or have questions about where to go from here, then feel free to reach out to our office. We do this kind of work everyday.