Here’s a quick quiz for you. Let’s say that you’re applying to five colleges using the Common Application. Each college requires one main personal statement along with two additional supplemental essays. And let’s say you’re also applying to one college on the Coalition Application, one college on the University of California application, one college on the ApplyTexas application, and one college that uses its own school-specific application. How many essays will you need to write in all?

While high school seniors are worried about what college they’re going to get into, the primary concern of many parents of seniors is how on earth they’re going to pay that college.  It’s no surprise, then, that parents are anxious to get the financial aid process rolling and are wondering when to get started with aid applications.  The short answer to the question, “When should I apply for financial aid?,” is “soon,” but the below points should provide a little additional clarification on application timing:

It is a busy time of year in the world of college applications with early application decisions rolling in and most regular decision deadlines just around the corner. On the latest episode of Getting In: A College Coach Conversation, host Elizabeth Heaton welcomed College Coach expert Zaragoza Guerra to talk about how students and families can approach the final push to application deadlines and to offer tips for having a New Year’s eve free of college applications.

In the latest episode of Getting In: A College Coach Conversation, Beth Heaton was back in the hosting chair for our School’s In! Application Workshop, and also devoted time to answering your questions on both college finance and admission.

Last week, on Getting In: a College Coach Conversation, host Sally Ganga and guests Kara Courtois and Kathy Ruby discussed the ins and outs of submitting standardized test scores to colleges, took an in-depth look at the essay questions for two popular institutions—University of Michigan and University of Wisconsin, Madison—and talked about the various deadlines for financial aid.

With all of the media attention recently about President Obama’s executive order requiring the use of prior-prior year income and the changes it will bring to the financial aid application timeline, we thought this would be a good time to step back and present what the college finance timeline should look like for this year’s seniors. It hasn’t changed!

For students entering college in the fall of 2016, here’s what you should do and when:

Starting now:

“Charlie” called me yesterday in a panic.  With college application deadlines rapidly approaching, he was suddenly overwhelmed by the amount of work he still had to do on essays and the applications themselves. When we had met two months earlier to discuss his college list, those deadlines seemed so far away, giving Charlie the sense that he had all the time in the world; after all, how hard could it be to fill out information about himself and write a few essays?

“I know you told me to get drafts of my essays to you right after we met, but I just didn’t take it that seriously in the summertime,” he said sheepishly.  Now, with a heavy school schedule and a fall sport, Charlie is pressed to make time for his applications.  Together, we fleshed out a college application timeline for him to follow, leading up to his earliest deadline of November 1^st.

“HANGING back and allowing children to make mistakes is one of the greatest challenges of parenting.” This is perhaps one of the best points made in a recent NY Times article, Raising Successful Children, and couldn’t be more poignant than in the fall of your child’s senior year.

There’s a lot more at stake (or so it feels) in today’s world of college admissions. This makes it all the easier for parents to want to step in, sometimes at the expense of allowing a child to learn from the process itself. So how do you avoid overstepping the bounds?  Read our Top 5 Parental Tips on Managing the Application Process for a start:

In an effort to beat back the demographic headwinds now working against them, some colleges and universities are coming up with ever more clever ways to maintain their “uber-selective” titles.  They’re using every weapon within their recruitment and selectivity arsenal — from demographics to yield to just plain making it easy to apply — to improve their relative rank.

As colleges and universities conspire against one another for prestige, how do students avoid becoming collateral damage, victims of the college application arms race?  If you want to dodge the proverbial thin envelope, consider these three simple rules of engagement:

Can students be blamed for thinking they have to apply to 100 colleges just to get admitted somewhere?  Think about it. The population of high school graduates was supposed to have peaked in 2008, but colleges and universities are still finding creative ways to round up new applicants. As a result, admit rates are being driven down to staggering levels.  A few examples:

• After reinstating Early Action, and despite a slight decline in applications, Harvard College lowered its admit rate to 5.9 percent this year:  18 percent for Early Action, and 3.8 percent for Regular Action.
• The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s applicant pool increased 23 percent after it joined the Common Application this year.  And last year, the University of Michigan and Columbia University in New York saw similar increases of 25 percent and 32 percent respectively when they joined the Common App.