Getting into college without help. Is this a good thing?

A recent article in the New York Times tells the story of a young man from Pennsylvania who had no help and yet got into George Washington University. The focus of the article is on how wonderful it was that this young man was able to get into a college without help. I will be the first to admit that many students are able to find a good college without using professional help. However, the real question is whether the college is a good college for that student.

In reading through this story several items jump out at me. First is the list of schools to which this young man applied. He applied to Columbia, Delaware, Skidmore, Boston University and George Washington. All fine schools but all very different colleges. We have colleges in the middle of New York City to rural colleges. Large universities and small colleges. Extremely competitive to much less competitive. And the feel of each of these colleges is going to be very different from each other. These are colleges that do not normally compete for students with the other colleges on the list. Maybe there was some factor that made each of these colleges make sense for this young man but it appears to be a random list of colleges whose only similarity is that they are all on the East coast.

The second thing that struck me was the apparent lack of understanding of how financial aid works. The colleges this young man applied to range from one that provides 100% of need to one which only provides 79% of need. And many of these colleges have limited merit awards. With a middle income parent he did not have a financial safety college and may be paying more to attend college than he would otherwise need to if he had investigated the financial aspects of attending college.

Was this a good list of colleges for this young man? Possibly. But I suspect that this is really a story about a typical student who had inadequate guidance and ended up applying to various colleges without investigating who he has and what he wanted from a college. Without doing such self reflection a student ends up at a college that may be adequate for their wants and desires but won’t be the best fit.

I don’t see this story as a triumph of the little guy against those who had professional help. Rather, I think this story further illustrates the failure of most students to understand what it takes to find an appropriate college for each student. Do all students need professional help? No. But if they don’t have such help they must take the time to understand the process of finding the right college and the basics of financial aid. Otherwise, they face the very real possibility of finding the wrong college for their needs and paying too much for college.