Welcome! Many of our readers are trying to get an early start on the preparation for college from middle school.
As we have said before, we do not recommend sacrificing your middle school youth for college, but we do recommend being honest about the type of college you are thinking your children may apply to.
To put it another way, the sacrifice necessary to go to a non-selective college is very different than a highly-selective college. The return on investment (ROI) for parents putting their children through the ringer for a non-selective college is not very high.
But what you do in middle school DOES impact things moving forward. And often the impacted areas do not show up until its far too late.
Today we are going to go through three things that every parent should be concerned with to prepare them for college, no matter what type of college they attend.
Academic Preparation
This is the MOST important thing you can possibly do to prepare for college. It does not matter what college or programs you are applying to, this is the foundation of success for high school.
College academic success is a pyramid. It relies on the layer below it to achieve it.
The success in college is due to the success in high school.
The success in high school is due to the success in middle school.
If you break a piece, the entire object falls apart.
Academic preparation is not about having geometry in middle school. It is about making sure you have no obvious weaknesses or deficiencies going into high school.
Once you get to high school, the challenge becomes infinitely harder to identify, and you do not want a bad semester to derail your goals.
Athletics
This may not be as obvious but there are effectively two kinds of athletes:
Those that with proper preparation and time can play at a high level
Those that have natural advantages where they can easily play at the highest level fairly quickly.
If you are in the second category, congrats, you have won the genetic lottery and the rules are different for you.
But if you are in the first category (which the majority of us are), then you need time to prepare.
The stories of the walk-on to the football team as a senior who immediately dominate are fun, but they do not happen that often. Usually, people who play varsity soccer have been playing soccer for years. And the ones that get to go to college and play (even on scholarship) have been playing for even longer.
If your child has demonstrated aptitude with a sport, encourage them to continue playing. Even if it turns into nothing more than a healthy hobby, it is a good idea to be able to move forward with the effort for no other reason than what it could turn into.
You don’t want to be the family that started your kid in swimming as a junior and they lose the opportunity to play at the next level just because they did not play enough.
If you have not encouraged your son or daughter to play a sport, do so. Even recreational, it provides immense advantages.
Financial
There is no college preparation without financial preparation. You need to know what you can, cannot, and will not do for your child’s college future.
There is no judgment on what that is - but you need to be honest and transparent about it.
Have a maximum amount of money to invest? Say it.
Not willing to pay for private school? Say it.
Want them to stay home and commute? Be honest.
The earlier you are honest about things, the sooner the reality of what their college life will be sets in.
If you only will support public colleges and insist they live at home to cut cost, then your child knows that either they need to take out the loan for their own place or a dorm room or be prepared to commute to college every day.
It may be painful, it may even cause difficult conversations, but setting the expectation early is the only way to move things forward.