6 Low-Pressure Tips for Helping Your Child Decide Where to Apply to College
If you’re helping your child decide where to apply to college, it can seem like the process is going well as long as you’re not arguing about it. However, it takes more than avoiding conflict with one another to make the best choices. The following tips will help you and your child clarify what matters to each of you and keep your emotions in check as you collaborate on the college application process.
1. Talk about how you’ve previously dealt with decisions as a family.
When you’ve had to make a decision that affects multiple family members, did you communicate about it throughout the process, wait until things boiled over to address it, or sidestep conversation about it altogether?
Did you try to reach a consensus by finding ways to benefit everyone involved, or did you get stuck in a standoff or a “my way or the highway” type of ending?
Discussing how you’ve approached tough decisions together in the past can help you recognize moments during the college application process when you need to take a break, get another family member to mediate, or seek help from someone with more expertise like a guidance counselor or financial aid officer.
Calibrate your expectations about one another’s roles in the college application process by discussing whether one or both of you will be:
- Identifying the initial list of schools your child will be considering.
- Gathering and deliberating over the information about those schools.
- Making the final decisions about where your child applies and then ultimately enrolls.
Sharing your reasoning for your answers can help you be more understanding and open to compromise. Take it further by identifying how much weight your views carry when addressing these points. For each decision, try to agree about whether you have a 50-50 say in it or if it’s appropriate to have a different balance.
3. Acknowledge how you’re framing the decision and what influences it.
The question you’re trying to answer in this situation may seem as simple as “Where should my child apply to college?” But to identify how you’re framing the decision, think about how you’d extend that sentence if you included the main goal you thought your child should accomplish by attending college. For example, you might really be thinking about where your child should apply to college in order to:
- Land a reliable job after graduation.
- Network with professors, job recruiters, and other students and their families.
- Explore their interests.
- Get prepared to run the family business.
- Avoid debt.