College Admissions Together is more than a practical how to get into college book, though it does explain key aspects of today’s college admissions process for both parents and students. It is also a guide to healthy family relationships during the college admissions process. This invaluable book looks at the often stressful process of finding the right college for your child not as an ordeal but as an opportunity to bond as a family and to give your child safe passage to adulthood as he or she determines which colleges are the best fit.
In College Admissions Together, educational consultant Steve Goodman and family psychologist Andrea Leiman help parents recognize that what makes the college admissions process a potential danger zone for families is the combination of the teen’s growing independence and the parent’s need to help him or her make critical decisions for the future. They answer difficult questions like how to stay involved in the process while allowing your child to make more choices. They help you put the college admissions process into the context of your child’s passage to adulthood and understand what he or she is feeling and facing as your child makes the decision of where to go next.
Using Goodman and Leiman’s advice, tips, and exercises, the college admissions process will lead to a greater appreciation of each other and mutually rewarding family relationships that last a lifetime. College Admissions Together serves families, counselors, teachers, and others as an essential resource during a stressful time in most families’ lives.
Steven Roy Goodman, MS, JD, is an international authority on college and graduate school admissions. Over the past eighteen years, he has designed admissions strategies for more than 1,500 applicants to colleges, graduate programs, and business, law, and medical schools. Steve Goodman has spoken at the White House, the 92nd Street Y, and the World Bank and has been cited in many national and regional media outlets including the annual college editions of the Atlantic and U.S. News and World Report, as well as on ABC, CNN, and even TV Asahi in Japan. Steve lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and daughter.
Table of Contents
Foreword ix Preface xi Acknowledgments xiii Introduction xv A Safe Passage to Adulthood 1 Shifts in Family Control 19 Peer and Social Pressure 35 Objectively Assessing Your Child 51 Establishing Realistic Expectations 67 Fear of Failure 85 Enhancing Your Family's Communication 93 Family Member Responsibilities 105 Teamwork Every Step of the Way 117 Making a Match 127 Key Aspects of College Applications 141 The Long Wait for Decisions 149 Making a Wise Choice 155 Moving On: The Big Transition 165 Index 175 About the Authors 181
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Steven Goodman and Andrea Leiman have designed a manual that takes the subject of college admissions beyond academics and into the realm of transactional psychology¿further, in fact, into the realm of culture. Of course the college experience is one with many larger parallels: a high-ticket family financial investment, a rite of passage, and, as this book details, a major decision-making nexus between generations. Over the course of 14 sequenced chapters, the ¿landscape¿ of the college admissions process is unfolded and surveyed, its rises and dips outlined in stages from early planning to adjustment to college life. The decision matrix faced by the family reflects the fact that college operates as the key choice in young adulthood. And probably no other high-ticket investment can claim so many shareholders and involves so many subroutines and routings. Reading through these guidelines, with accounts of the pressures to perform, developmental issues, with the stress, anger, fear, uncertainty, and the sheer ego forces unleashed by this quest for independence, respect, and success, one wonders how anyone survives. But the authors have documented the college admissions process as an emotional and social journey, not the straight-line trajectory to the student¿s colleges of choice. College admission is a ¿danger zone¿ poised at the intersection of several key domains of life: the transition from teen to adulthood, the run-up to the student¿s build-out to independence, the end of active parenting, issues of family roles and values, class expectations, the prospects for achievement¿all aspects of launching the aspirational self into the world. The demands for good decision making are pressing on a powerful juncture: one where traditional students are still teens with shifting emotional responses (one outcome of the teen brain¿s as yet incompletely formed thinking processes), the simultaneous need for dependence and control, as well as anxious parents who are reliving their own traumas and triumphs through their children. Especially stressful, and therefore the focus of in-depth discussion, is college as a breaking out of the child role and building out into the first stages of adult life and thinking. This launch beyond the family orbit is fraught with dozens of decisions which are the shared domain of parents, siblings, grandparents, friends, as well as the student him / herself. Because both writers work with the family dynamics of this decision (Leiman is a family psychologist and Goodman is a leading admissions expert) together they bring analytical tools into the picture for immediate application. Examples include self-assessments as well as questions for mutual discussion that assess opinions and approaches to topics from goals and aspirations to peer pressure, academic interests and ability, conflict resolution style, decision making responsibility, and comfort level with teen independence, to envisioning the future at school, and for parents, a midlife assessment. Just citing ¿important conversations¿ that should take place--from college living arrangements to behaviors and attitudes key to beginning adulthood¿is a leading asset of this volume.
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