College and Finances

Normally, when we are talking about college and finances the focus is on finding a college that will be a good Financial Fit for the student/ family. But, today we want to talk about a different aspect of college and finances - the college's financial stability.

As school counselors, we spend a lot of our time reading, listening to, and attending workshops about all different aspects of supporting students with their pursuit of college. One of the aspects that has been fascinating, strange, scary, and definitely not what we expected to be learning about is the fact that there are colleges who are really struggling financially. And that can potentially have a really big impact on students.

Now, we don't want to create panic among anyone as you are considering colleges, but it is something that students and families should be aware of and it is a great place to ask questions of colleges to learn more. The reality is that when a student selects a 4-year college, they assume that they will graduate from that college. But if the school is in financial distress and ends up having to close while you are in college (which is rare, but happens) then students are left scrambling to figure out how and where to finish their degree. (The good news, is that when this has happened, other colleges have stepped up and provided paths to help support the students in the path towards their future.)

Forbes released a report about the college financial grades that they assigned based upon the financial standing of the school. They looked at over 900 private, non-profit, colleges who have at least 500 students. It is a fascinating wealth of information. Here is a link to the story/ report.

As I was playing around in the data, I sorted to look at all of the Ohio colleges. 14 of the Ohio private colleges have a D grade on their financial stability. The good news, is that 15 have grades of A's or B's so more of Ohio's colleges are in good standing than those struggling.

Once again, we want to caution you that you shouldn't just automatically remove a college who appears to have a low grade from your consideration, but it is worth including their status as a part of your information gathering when you are meeting with the college reps. I hope you enjoy messing around and exploring the data that Forbes has captured.

AP/ IB Test Scores

As of today, all students who took AP or IB tests this spring can now access your test results on the AP/ IB websites. We know you studied hard and prepared well for the assessments so we hope you will be happy with the results you find!

Just a reminder, if you were a student who took AP English Language last year and are planning to take CC+ Comp or CC+ Literature this year, double check that your scores and the classes you had signed up for make sense. (So, for example, if you assumed you would get a 3 on the AP Lang test and so you didn't sign up for Comp 1, but you only scored a 2, you need to let us know so we can adjust your course requests to put you into Comp 1. Or, on the other hand, if you decided to put down Comp 1 in your course requests just to be safe and you scored a 3 or higher on the AP Lang test, you need to let us know so we can adjust your schedule as you don't need to repeat Comp 1 again.) You also need to be sure that you send those test results to CSCC so that they have the documentation needed for you to skip Comp 1.