FAQs
Welcome! On occasion, we receive several questions or comments from parents, applicants, or counselors on similar topics that we decide to do a frequently asked question post to address them.
With that in mind, let’s dive in.
Do private schools keep track of the college outcomes of their students?
Yes, they do. And this data should be reasonably available to you. Not every school will keep the same information or data or have it available on demand, but they all will keep outcomes.
The most common pieces of information they will keep:
Colleges alumni attend
Colleges alumni were accepted to
Graduation rate at colleges
Professional jobs/locations
This is important because at the end of the day, alumni serve as important donation source for private schools. If you don’t have good data on what happens to your alumni after you graduate from a program, you can’t track them to ask them for donations or to highlight them for what they have accomplished.
Is spending on honor societies worth it outside of high school?
We received a lot of questions on our views on honor societies. To clear things up, here is our view:
High school honor societies are more check-list items than differentiators. That means you should be in them because it moves you forward, not because you think it will be the key differentiator in college admissions
Many high schools will pay the fees for their members who are inducted into the National Honor Society - if they do not, and you can afford it, pay the fee
Aside from these, do not pay for membership into online honor societies - if anyone can pay their way in, it is not worth the paper it is printed on
If you understand what an honor society will and will not do for you, then that should clarify that.
On the college and post-grad level, honor societies tend to work a little differently. While a full article is probably necessary, our view is that honor societies in college and grad school are all about building the network you need.
So if you are determining whether to join one and pay to be a member, ask yourself what opportunities you are hoping to get into. For example, if being in an honor society exposes you to national leadership that get you on professional board positions, then it is probably worth it.
If all you are doing is adding it to your resume, never to be heard from again, you should probably reconsider.
How do you know if a school considers legacy status in college admissions?
Usually, a school will simply put it on their website if they consider it. If they are not that forthcoming, you can find out in a variety of ways:
email someone in admissions and ask them if they consider legacy and if so, how
Ask on a college tour
Check their common data set to see if they consider legacy status
The only other way is to rely on someone who simply knows the college admissions process well (HINT HINT).
How does loan forgiveness work for parental loans vs. student loans?
This was one of the more common questions we received.
Loan forgiveness is usually about the borrower - meaning that the actions that require you to receive loan forgiveness typically apply to the person borrowing the money, not the one receiving the loan.
Let’s put it a different way - a teacher takes out a parent PLUS loan to send their daughter to college.
Because the teacher borrowed the money and works as a government employee, the teacher is eligible to enroll in a Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. It does not matter if their daughter is a rocket scientist because the daughter is not the one that actually took out the loan.
If a student loan were taken out though, the daughter would need to work in a public service field to be eligible for the same loan forgiveness.