If you will be applying to college next year, you will very shortly be in the market for teacher recommendations, and you may be wondering what teachers you should ask for these recommendations. Should you always ask the teacher who gave you the best grade?

We all know the names: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc. The most selective colleges in the country are a challenge for even straight-A students to get into. If you’re aiming for admission to an Ivy League college, or college of similar selectivity, earning good grades is no longer enough. What, then, are the top colleges looking for? College Coach consultant and former University of Pennsylvania admissions officer, Elizabeth Heaton, tells us in this free webinar offered by our test prep partner, Revolution Prep. This program offers a sneak peek behind the curtain of an Ivy League admissions office, explains what’s important in the highly selective college admissions process, and offers tips for you to improve your chances of acceptance to a top school.

Watch Elizabeth’s webinar, “Insider’s Guide to Admissions at the Top 2% of Schools,” here.

As we make our way through the admission decision season, there is so much happy news to celebrate. Dreams are fulfilled, goals are achieved, all the hard work has finally paid off! But with this happy news there may also come some tough conversations about costs, debt, and compromise.

Many College Coach admissions advisors are also parents who have made it through the college selection process with their own teens. How did they survive? Through open communication and transparency with their children, not just in senior year, but early on. We hope their advice and insight is helpful to you, whether you’re currently debating financial aid offers for the fall, or just beginning the college conversation with your younger children.

If your child is headed off to college in the fall, you are probably worrying about a lot of things: What if he has a medical emergency while at school? What if he runs out of money? How will I know he is passing if I don’t see any of his school work?

There are documents pertaining to health, money, and college records that your child can sign to give you some peace of mind. Not all of these are required, but you may want to consider if you need them or not.

In the latest episode of Getting In: A College Coach Conversation, host Elizabeth Heaton and her guests offer up some valuable insight on choosing a college and answer both college admissions and finance questions from our listeners.

For many parents of middle schoolers, the transition to the often bigger high school can seem overwhelming. There are so many curriculum choices and students are often given more independence in their course selection. College applications require a student’s transcript to display grades since the ninth grade, so the choices they make now may have an impact on their later opportunities. Here are a few of our tips to help your child make a smooth and seamless transition to their next school:

For students applying to U.S. colleges and universities from abroad, it’s not only a challenge meeting the benchmarks defined by one’s own national curriculum—either secondary school leaving exams or applications to one’s own set of national universities—there’s the added work of deciphering how local successes translate over to USA admissions standards, a system with its own set of quirks. Will a set of classes taken abroad even fulfill the course requirements of a U.S. college? As with most answers: It depends.

A Guest Post by Lisa Bevill, Fortuna Admissions

Are there embarrassing pictures of you on Instagram? Or are you tagged in a Facebook photo from a best friend’s party that you wouldn’t show your mom? Maybe you took to Twitter once, in a fit of frustration, with a thinly veiled insult directed at a teacher. Or you’ve put off creating your LinkedIn profile.

The U.S. college admissions process can be perplexing to international and domestic students alike.  Why are some seemingly qualified applicants denied admission, while others with outwardly similar qualifications are accepted?  The answer lies in the fact that U.S. college admissions officers are not tasked with simply admitting individual students, but with shaping a diverse class that meets a variety of institutional needs.

It’s that time of year again, when high school freshmen, sophomores, and juniors select their courses for the next academic year. Many students and parents agonize over these choices.  In general, the more selective the college a student aims for, the more rigorous the courseload ought to be; however, a full complement of honors and/or AP courses simply isn’t realistic or sustainable for every student.