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Academic Planning and Financial Aid: Following a Proven Plan for College Prep

Posted on Oct 24, 2011 - 09:00 AM | College Prep | Comments (0)

There are plenty of organizations and private counselors willing to help you prepare for college. Americans spent $2.5 billion dollars last year on tutors alone.

Unfortunately, not all of that money was spent wisely.

So what should you look for when hiring a college prep expert or private guidance counselor?

You want a program that can cover all your needs. Too many programs only cover one or two, like just the SATs, or just financial aid. Look for a complete college prep program:

Academic Preparation

Do they have the tools to meet your educational and professional goals, like:

SAT and ACT prep materials and practice tests that work at your level?
Vocabulary builders?
Personality tests to help you understand what college majors and professional careers you want?
College and career research, tools that help you examine quickly and efficiently thousands of colleges and hundreds of careers?

Financial Aid

Once you’re well underway with your academic goals and college prep courses, do they help you financially by:

Providing solid and well-researched financial aid advice?
College cost estimates
A list of top financial aid colleges that will meet most, if not all, of your financial aid need?
Do they help you work toward getting merit-based and need-based aid?

These are just a few of the many services a complete college-prep program should offer. But a quick look around the web will show that you many offer six-week courses, or three-month courses, and the like. Which leads us to perhaps the biggest question you should ask yourself – “Will they still be with me when it’s time to go to college? What good is a six-week program if I’m a Sophomore and college is 2-3 years away?”

College prep should be one-stop shopping, as long as it offers you all of the tools you need for college, plus guidance in properly using them so. And it should be there for 5 years, guaranteeing that as you're gearing up for college, it's still meeting your academic and financial goals.

You definitely need to prepare for college academically, but you also need ways to minimize your costs. After all, what’s the point of going to college if you can’t afford to pay for it?

RSC's founder is adamant that we do as much for our students as possible. That’s how he’s managed to prepare for college for 20 years, and why we can say that RSC has a proven program.

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