FAFSA: The short video that makes it easy

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Fun Approach To The Most Common Student Loan

Click on anyone of these sites for my FUN video on Stafford loans. Just 2 minutes in length.

Please forward this email to friends, family, and co-workers who have students in high school.

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Still Wait-Listed? Go For The Gold!

For years colleges have been saying that there's no money left to give out in student aid by the time a student is taken off a wait-list. You wouldn't know it this year. And a recent notice indicated that there are plenty of colleges who haven't filled all their seats because accepted students didn't send in their required deposits. This presents a huge headache for the colleges, and it's your opportunity to make their headache bigger.

One of my students was awarded $5,000 in grants from his # 1 college, but his # 2 college, which wait-listed him, called him after the dreaded May 1 deposit deadline to say they had awarded him $20,000 in grants if he would come. That represented a total difference of $60,000 over 4 years. Read: $60,000 of less debt for the student after graduation.

If you have a college that still has your student on a wait-list, I suggest you rethink your financial aid strategy in the following steps:

(1) Have your student call the wait-list school and express how much s/he still wants to attend that college. Colleges like to hear the "love" over the phone to help them decide who's getting off the wait-list first. For the student to call is a big plus (okay...if you don't like the wait-listed school, you're engaged in a lie; if you do like it, you're engaged in a strategy).

(2) If the college notifies you that your student's been taken off the wait-list, be sure to ask for their financial aid package. If it doesn't exceed the amount of your # 1 college, notify them in writing that "another college" offered a larger package, as if to suggest that your student would still like to attend, but reality's face looks like 20 miles of bad road. If they ask for a copy of the other school's offer, send it happily. If they come back with an offer that now exceeds the # 1 college's offer, do this:

(3) use the wait-listed college's new offer to ask for more money from your # 1 choice. Tell # 1 that you may have to break their heart because you received a larger offer elsewhere and that, after all, a larger debt is not something you regard as part of your "award" for working hard, being committed, and achieving all through high school.

(4) You can keep this ping-pong game going until September. How long you want to keep it going is up to you. It's your money that's at stake, and the colleges will take every dime if you let them. Don't give in, and don't give up until your gut tells you that you've gone as far as you're going to go.

Huge Tip: No college will ever rescind an offer due to a student's persistent requests for more money. It would be a catastrophic public relations nightmare for the college to do so, and I have a $1,000 cash reward offer for any student who can produce any letter that says such a thing.

Go ahead...call the college that wait-listed your student. There could be a pile of money waiting for you from 2 schools.

Is This The Dumbest Generation?

In a fascinating article on Boston.com this past Sunday, there was an 8-point article to demonstrate a theme in a new book, The Dumbest Generation, by Mark Bauerlein, a teacher at Emory University. Instead of writing about it, I thought you ought to read the article verbatim.

1. They make excellent "Jaywalking'' targets
Bauerlein writes: "The ignorance is hard to believe ... It isn't enough to say that these young people are uninterested in world realities. They are actively cut off from them. ... They are encased in more immediate realities that shut out conditions beyond -- friends, work, clothes, cars, pop music, sitcoms, Facebook.''

2. They don't read books -- and don't want to, either
"It's a new attitude, this brazen disregard of books and reading. Earlier generations resented homework assignments, of course, and only a small segment of each dove into the intellectual currents of the time, but no generation trumpeted aliteracy ... as a valid behavior of their peers.''

3. They can't spell
Lack of capitalization and IM codes dominate online writing. Without spellcheck, folks are toast.

4. They get ridiculed for original thought, good writing
"On MySpace, if you write clearly and compose coherent paragraphs with informed observations on history and current events, 'buddies' will make fun of you,'' Bauerlein says. Wikipedia writing is clean and factual, but colorless and judgment-free. Often the most clever students, with flashes of disorganized brilliance on MySpace, switch to dull Wiki-writing formats for school papers, he says. "If we could combine the style and imagination of MySpace with the content of Wikipedia, we might get good stuff."

5. Grand Theft Auto IV, etc.
The stats tell the story here. First week's sales: $500 million. The sales of GTA dwarf movie premieres, CD sales, or, Bauerlein notes, book sales. All that video use, Bauerlein says, has hurt in the classroom, too. Thousands of Massachusetts public school graduates are ending up in remedial reading and writing classes in college, according to a Globe story.

6. They don't store the information
"For digital immigrants, people who are 40 years old who spent their college time in the library acquiring information, the Internet is really a miraculous source of knowledge,'' Bauerlein says. "Digital natives, however, go to the Internet not to store knowledge in their minds, but to retrieve material and pass it along. The Internet is just a delivery system.''

7. Because their teachers don't tell them so
Or because their parents don't check their bedrooms at midnight to halt the instant messaging..."Kids are drowning in teen stuff delivered 24/7 by the tools, and adult realities can't penetrate," Bauerlein says. Another factor: "It's the era of child-centered classrooms and self-esteem grading.''

8. Because they're young
Do you remember how stupid you were when you were a teen-ager? Or all that you didn't know -- and thought you did? And the skills you gained by holding back on foolish comments? Oh, the now-old guy [now an old rock star] in this picture? He once wrote: "I was so much older then/I'm younger than that now.''
____________

With contempt for matters academic in general, and a total lack of interest in American history in particular, this generation presents us with a disturbing national security problem: we cannot depend on them to defend what they don't know.

Give me a dedicated American history teacher and I'll give you an army division.

Helpful Information On Student Loans

In spite of all the confusing information about student loans, I've found nothing better than this source: basic recommendations for shopping for a loan

What My Favorite College Student Proved

I am honored to know a young man, whose first name is Mark, who was once a student of mine. He succeeded in reinforcing one of those valuable but not-so-self-evident truths: understand and appreciate who and what you are, and live it even if it means going against the best expectations of others.

Mark's story is one of gentle defiance. Without detailing a history, let's fast-forward to the summer between his sophomore and junior year of college 2 years ago.

Never one to wait for opportunity to knock, Mark would take opportunities where the most talented among us would shrink in self-doubt or in fear of failure. He accepted an internship in what is regarded as one of the highest profile institutions in the world, headquartered in Washington, DC. In his first week, he impressed his superiors enough to realize that they wanted him to stay awhile. But he was Joe College, and Mark was going to do things on his own time.

After he returned to the same job last summer, Mark was approached with the carrot of coming back after graduation. True to form and defying all conventional logic, he declined their offer. It's one that any Ivy League grad would take in a heart-beat. Even I was stunned. When I pressed him for an explanation, his defiance was registered in words I paraphrase: "I need to see the world through my eyes, not through anyone's else's."

With his parents having to endure the occasional adolescent spasms of protest and resistence, they came to accept and admire a son who, like his talented brother before him, were taught that self-reliance is regarded as a necessary ingredient for success. But his defiance this time seemed to be going a bit too far: his current resume is more substantial than any of his college classmates and is perhaps more appealing than that of any recent Harvard grad. But unexpectedly he's not turning his back completely on what he earlier regarded as just another element of life's journey he didn't have to take seriously.

That's because Mark will be heading to a new college where there's no tuiton, no books, no classes, and no parents to question him about anything. It's actually a college that will come to him instead of him going to it. Pretty extraordinary place filled with all kinds of surprises. It's a place most of us are familiar with, it's called the University of Reality, and it's in his face big time.
For the very first time he told me, "I've got bills to pay." You know, the kind that comes from the demands of his new universe-ity. Recognition of this reality deserves a PhD in Duh. His parents are thrilled that he finally "gets it."

Defiance for defiance sake is not this young man's style. He defies with respect for who he is and has always been: someone with a strong and positive attitude who doesn't quit in the face of all odds because of a simple belief - you can have what you want when you want it if you simply recognize and accept the value of your own talents.

And he's proved to his summer employer, but more importantly to himself, that success doesn't depend on where you went to college or what your pedigree is.

And he did it, not as a graduate of Harvard, Princeton, or Yale, but as a student at UMass Dartmouth, where he will graduate from today.

What he does from this point on, his mother has assured me, will be of some concern for her. But his admiring father waits with a child-like excitement and anticipation on what he does next.

Mark has chosen his life, not to be a period, but an exclamation point! Which is why I am so proud to call him...my son.

Why Do Parents Break Their Children's Hearts?

I witness this sad story every year at this time.

An 18-year-old received a $25,000 scholarship from his dream school. The dream has been in his blood ever since he first heard his parents tell him he can go to any college if he applies himself. The mother points to the hard-working father as the boy's example, what the father has achieved to buy the American Dream for his family, and the son is firmly convinced. With focus and hard work, you can do it too.

Unintentionally the well-meaning parents left out a truth that is now destroying their child's long-nurtured dream: they never told their son that they cannot afford to pay the difference between the scholarship amount and the school's obscene $48,000-a-year pricetag.

But the scholarship, so thinks the student, confirms everything he was told. So why is he learning that he cannot attend? The disconnect is unbearable. The student feels cheated. And sadly his heart is broken. Right there to help pick up the pieces are his parents who may not have been honest enough from the start, or their egos chose to ignore the truth that they couldn't pay, or they simply didn't understand that the springboard to success NEVER NEVER NEVER depends on going to a typically over-priced brand-name college.

This brand name nonsense is nothing more than an insidious trap that's being set for the achiever by well-meaning parents, encouraging teachers, and admiring friends. Ironically, most of these same people, who are doing well with their own lives, never graduated from a "name" school. Duh. Another disconnect.

Now this achiever learns the hard meaning of "bait and switch": achieve this to get that, and when you achieve it, you can't have it. Life isn't fair - yeah, that too.

Is there a solution, and where does it come from? The solution is a simple honesty from the parents. "The chances are good," a parent should say, "that we won't be able to afford the college you think you want to attend. With over 4,000 colleges in America, there's certainly one we can afford, and one where you'll get the tools and training you need if you take full advantage of what that school has to offer."

Warning: Because students are highly influenced by their friends, their parents will continue to send all the wrong messages to their kids, and you'll have to contend - as parents are burdened to do - with constantly having to prove your point to counter what your child is hearing. But will they listen?...

Start early. As soon as the subject of college comes up. Always have the cost as a component in any conversation and decision that will be made later so no surprises are experienced in early April of the senior year.

One parent told me, "Having a broken heart at this age is crazy!"

What's also crazy is ignoring - or pretending not to notice - the real costs of college. Acknowledging this truth, while also acknowledging that a brand name school is NEVER NEVER NEVER necessary for success, will make decision time a whole lot easier.

Lesson: When it comes to choosing colleges, it's okay to say, "NEVER!"