College Financial Planning - Parental Guidance is Strongly Recommended
High school students have serious questions regarding college planning. They are turning to Google, and performing endless searches, where they are exposed to confusing and conflicting guidance.
What students rarely come across, be it through Google, college planners, or any other resource – is practicality and fiscal responsibility. Educate To Career is a non-profit, dedicated to helping families develop college plans that are affordable – and lead to real jobs.
- We have created a free program to answer the very questions that your child is possibly asking.
- The answers and guidance we provide through this program place a strong emphasis on developing cost effective college tracks, choosing academic majors that lead to real jobs, and avoidance of student debt.
Share this link with your kids.
High school students are querying Google with questions they have regarding college planning - running an average of 800,000 queries per day.. Using a process that Google refers to as ‘natural language’, we have distilled the thousands of variations of college planning questions down to 17 standardized questions (There are dozens of variations of 'Should I go to a private or public college'. We reduced the variations of that question down to the one that is most representative of the question).
We constructed responses to those questions using our actuarial records for student lenders. We've been performing actuarial analyses for lenders for well over a decade, enabling them to determine the risk profiles of the student loan applicants. Through analysis of millions of student borrowers, we have fact-based insights regarding the economic value of an extremely broad range of college plans, and the resulting outcomes. Long story short – we know what works and we know what does not work.
We applied that knowledge base to create the responses to students’ questions. Our interest for students is very simple: we want them to get through college with an education that leads to a real career. And we want them to have as little student debt as possible; preferably none.
How does the guidance from our program differ from what a student might see from a typical search query? We’ll explain by way of example: a student may type into Google ‘should I borrow money for college’. Google's results will present the user with a representation of student lenders, along with a student loan calculator, and a few articles about student debt. What our program will show the student is how to reduce their college costs so that they can avoid or minimize borrowing, along with the consequences of borrowing.
Also, we realize that there can be friction and awkward discussions between parents and their kids (we’ve been doing this for a long time). If you tell your kid that their college plan is too expensive and may not lead to a good job outcome, it may not be as impactful as when they see the same message from an entity that provides student lenders with exactly those forms of data. We don’t mind playing the role of ‘the bad guy’.
An 18 year old really does need someone who understands college costs and outcomes to be looking out for their financial interests. Here’s why - an 18 year old has little comprehension of $40,000 in debt. How could they? They think that if they make $50,000 in annual salary, a $40k debt should be pretty easy to pay off. But they’ve never paid taxes, and rent, healthcare and food. There’s a reason why it takes student borrowers 20 years to repay $40k. Also, many parents are stymied by the financial decisions related to college – and simply ‘give in’ – based on the hopes that everything will work out.
We want you to share the program with your kid. Please review it yourself as well. We think you’ll find their questions quite interesting.
This program is free, as is the majority of the programs and data we offer. Subscriptions to our premium data are $25 per month. Educate To Career is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. We are registered to provide college to career planning data for families. Share this link with your kids.