Connie asks:
I'm curious where you guys get your admissions information…Are admissions officers willing to speak with you? Or do you visit the campuses yourself? It seems like there would be a lot of colleges to keep up with and I'm wondering if/how you guys manage to do it."
We get our information from a lot of different sources. We do talk to admissions officers, but we try to keep in mind that it's really not their job to help us understand admissions better. And we do visit campuses to see for ourselves what they're like before we recommend them to our students.
Still, there's no way you could learn everything you need to know by just doing those two things. So in no particular order, here are some of the sources from which we regularly get admissions information.
1. Our Collegewise training program.
Every counselor we hire goes through out 40-hour training program that includes a day-long final exam at the end. And we update that training each time we do it.
2. Books
There are several great books that can teach you a lot about how admissions works.
3. Conferences
We attend local and national conferences. This is one of the best ways to stay up-to-date with major changes in admissions–those kinds of things are always discussed at length at these conferences.
4. Press and blogs
Another great way to keep up with the latest in college admissions is to set Google news alerts so you'll automatically be notified when the press covers admissions-related news.. We also read several good blogs regularly.
5. Each other
One of the nice advantages for us is that we have four offices in four different states. So if one of our Californian students is interested in University of Rhode Island (where not a lot of CA kids apply), we can call one of our counselors on the East Coast and they'll tell us what kind of student is a good fit for that school.
There are lots of other places to get good information (and the best counselors always seem willing to seek that information out). But those are the five sources we rely on the most. Thanks for your question, Connie.
If you've got a question of your own, email us at blog [at] collegewise [dot] com.