Resources for Families

As a parent, you have a vital role to play in ensuring that the college admissions process reinforces important values and motivates your children to undertake activities that will allow them and others to thrive as adults. The discussion guide below is intended to help parents and their children ensure that the college admissions process is meaningful and constructive.

The college admissions process is a major rite of passage and a formative experience in which students receive powerful messages from adults—including parents, guidance counselors and admissions officers—about what these adults and society value. As a parent, you have a vital role to play in ensuring that this process reinforces important values and motivates your children to undertake meaningful activities that will better enable them to contribute to others and thrive as an adult. The college admissions process can also be a wonderful opportunity to get to know your children in a deeper way—to understand their hopes, worries, values, dreams—and what will help them thrive in college. Below are concrete steps that we as parents can take to make the college admissions process meaningful and constructive for our children.