One of the wry sayings my father taught me when I was growing up is that “pressure is just support from above.” This was decades before popular lingo included terms like “helicopter” or “snowplow” to describe, ahhhh, let’s call them vigorous styles of parenting.
It’s something to keep in mind as you try to help your child through the college application process. This week, we at Getting In World HQ are endorsing a gently hands-on strategy to help your senior with the items that are largely out of their control but still their responsibility.
The main ones are: when the teachers actually send their recommendations, when the high school delivers transcripts to the relevant schools and when the standardized test scores reach the colleges.
“Students need to verify that their supplemental materials – standardized test scores,
letters of recommendation and transcripts – are sent to each college/university that
requires these items,” says Claire Babbs, a community manager at the U.S. News company CollegeAdvisor. “Generally, all of these materials are sent through external sources.”
Enter the mighty college checklist.
Schools generally let you check the status of your application online, showing you which parts are done and which still need doing.
Now, that’s only useful if you followed our previous advice to get things in before the deadline so that you have time to remedy any deficiencies. The daughter of a friend of mine realized she was missing a teacher recommendation – the day before an application was due. That touched off a scramble to figure out where the breakdown occurred. The teacher ultimately squeaked the letter in on time, but that was a bad 24 hours for the applicant.
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“Most colleges and universities provide a two-week grace period after application deadlines for supplemental materials to be sent in,” notes Babbs. “Once a student submits their application, they should monitor their email for information on how to create an account on the college’s applicant portal page. The applicant portal will list all required materials and whether or not they have been received by the institution.”
Babbs recommends that applicants aim to send in the student-authored parts of the application at least one to two weeks ahead of the due date so they can have smooth access to the applicant portal as well as time to troubleshoot if necessary.
For standardized tests, Babbs suggests taking them by August of senior year at the latest to avoid problems with getting them to schools, since they can take two to four weeks to process. However, if the deadline is close, there are generally “rush reporting” services available for an extra fee (but no guarantee of the arrival time).
For recommenders, she says, “check in with them early and often to remind them of your specific application deadlines.” She also urges students to verify their email addresses and work phone numbers to make sure those are input correctly.
For transcripts, she points out that it’s important to know the high school’s process for sending them, which can range from paying an upfront fee to a two-week turnaround time to a snail-mail-only policy.
As a parent, you probably don’t want to be obsessively checking college portals through late November and December. But you can certainly ask your kiddo what’s left to be done and for which school. Maybe you can convince them to sit down with you to look online at the status of their application. If you followed our advice in a previous column and sketched out a schedule for finishing applications, that’ll inject a little rigor into the workflow.
One reason it’s important to check: Your child may be virtually certain that they have completed their application but are actually missing something (often something small but without which they won’t technically have applied).
One other thing: You may find conflicting information. The teachers say they have uploaded the recommendation, but the school checklist still lists those in the “to do” category.
If that happens – and I can feel your teenager tensing up from all the way over here – they may have to (gasp!) make a phone call to the admissions office to ask whether the letters have landed but have not yet been recorded as such.
Oh, and if the online checklist says your child’s application is complete, have them take a screenshot for their records.
Maybe we can add “screenshot parenting” to the lexicon?
Olivier Knox is the son of college professors and worked in admissions as a student at his dream school. He has a 100% success rate guiding the next generation of applicants into their first-choice colleges (sample size: one son). Reach Olivier at oknox@usnews.com.
