“I’ve seen a much greater number of students who say they don’t want to go to publics in Florida,” said Venkates Swaminathan, founder and CEO of LifeLaunchr, a college consulting company. “Students will say they don’t want to support that state and don’t feel safe there.”

Experts encourage students considering for-profit colleges to look critically at other factors that contribute to cost, too, like the amount of institutional aid available, how long it takes to earn a degree and the value of that degree.

“A great essay can help set you apart from all the others who might get in,” writes Venkates Swaminathan, Founder and CEO of LifeLaunchr, a college admissions coaching company. “And unlike your grade on a Calculus course, a great college essay isn’t an objective evaluation, it’s a subjective decision.”

Going to community college for the first two years of one’s higher education should not be viewed as inferior to attending a four-year university due to the price, flexibility, transitional period and employment opportunities.

"In general, we are advising students to go ahead with their plans to attend college. In some cases, however, we ask students to take additional courses at an online community college so they can use the time gained by not traveling to accelerate their education,” explains Venkates Swaminathan, founder and CEO of LifeLaunchr, a member of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

“Over the longer term, the college admissions process next year will be more complex, due to online tests, online schooling, and changes to requirements,” said Venkates Swaminathan, founder and CEO of LifeLaunchr, a member of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

“The idea that ‘this is a great SAT score for someone from your neighborhood, for someone of your background’ — it’s not fair to the students.'"

There are plenty of community college benefits, and attending one can be an advantage for students before they move on to a four-year university.

Swami explains the various kinds of checklists the Lifelaunchr team uses each and every day. "Checklists are crucial for college admissions, and we use a lot of them ... Using checklists avoids errors due to oversight and also makes sure we maximize a student’s outcomes."

"There are many factors college admissions officials consider in deciding whom to offer a seat to, and some of them are subjective. This is where the power of a great story comes into play."

My goals in 2020 are to maintain personal balance and positive attitude even as the business grows over 200% in the year. We have had a great 2019 and aim to improve significantly, but that is a challenge in terms of the amount of work involved. So I will rededicate myself to my practices: yoga, travel, and music: so that I can be at my best every day.

Career certificates — which offer proof that a candidate has specific skills in a technical field — can be immensely helpful in a student's job search.

Whether writing comes easily and naturally or if it is a dreaded, anxiety-inducing task, one thing is for sure — the college admission essay is one of the most important essays you’ll ever have to write.

"The first difficulty is that my background is not in education so I have had to learn the education space intensively by just diving in the deep end and learning everything I can about understanding how the college admissions process works and understanding what it is children and parents want out of the system and understanding how colleges think about it. And I tell people sometimes that my background as an engineer has served me very well because it has brought an analytical depth to the work we do and a deep knowledge of how statistics work."

FOR-PROFIT, FOUR-YEAR colleges advertise sticker prices that are, on average, somewhere between those of public and private nonprofit colleges. But experts encourage students considering for-profit colleges to look critically at other factors that contribute to cost, too, like the amount of institutional aid available, how long it takes to earn a degree and the value of that degree.

Venkates Swaminathan, founder and CEO of LifeLaunchr, a member of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, perfectly sums up the reasoning behind the increasing preference for students to attend community, state, and online colleges over prestigious universities.

It’s a question any person involved in college applications gets asked a lot. Whether you’re applying to a selective private university or a state school, how much difference does a great college admission essay make? And what really makes for a great essay?

“There is a common misconception that scholarships are awarded only based on academic or athletic merit,” says Venkates Swaminathan, founder and CEO of college admissions coaching site Lifelaunchr. “All it takes is a simple web search to find hundreds of unique and interesting scholarships, available to all types of students and just waiting for applicants.”

To assist you in finding such a resource, I suggest you seek out an educational consultant who can meet your basic criteria.

We are not just about helping students with college, but about helping them figure out where they are going with their lives. It’s a much more profound idea, and teens and parents both love it.

Many parents have a hard time when their kids are about to go to college. LifeLaunchr was created to help students and families find their best-choice college and get in, and to navigate the confusing, opaque college admission process with less stress.

“This is a significant improvement that eases concerns about the transparency of the process,” said Venkates Swaminathan, who is based in San Francisco.

With the top applicants from every high school applying to the best schools in the country, it's important to have an edge in your college application. In our 2019 edition, check out ten of our newest Harvard application essays and profiles from students who made it in.

The idea for LifeLaunchr was born out of the experience Swami had as his daughter went through the college admissions process. Finding the right colleges to apply to, working through the requirements, and getting everything in order to apply to college was time-consuming and confusing.

College admissions testing was long viewed as a great equalizer. All students could aim for a maximum 36 on the ACT or 1600 on the SAT, no matter where they grew up or went to school. Their scores functioned as a currency of merit for a nation that aspired to meritocracy. Now, even the College Board, owner of the SAT, acknowledges that testing alone is no equalizer in a society with profound inequities of opportunity. But the testing organization’s latest response to that dilemma — the creation of a numerical rating of adversity for each student’s high school and neighborhood — has generated fierce debate.