The Best U College Admissions Consulting

  Many schools across the country are asking students to select their courses for the 2022-2023 academic year. If you are wondering how course selection impacts the college admissions process, read on for what you need to know about the classes your student picks – Does Course Selection Matter to College Admissions? In short, yes, very much. While high schools across the country and around the world have varied offerings and grading systems, one thing is consistent in college admissions: great attention will be paid to the courses an applicant has selected throughout their time in high school. Context is Everything The key thing to understand is that an admissions reviewer will always be reading a student’s transcript in the ‘context’ of the high school they attend. This is to say that the admissions officer will pay close attention to what coursework and programs are offered at a student’s high school and will want to understand what portion of those advanced offerings a student...

Letters of Recommendation are one of the few places in your college applications that someone who knows you well has the opportunity to bring your strengths, personal qualities and unique characteristics to life. So what do you need to know about teacher recommendations? Read on for our tips to making the most of this aspect of your application – How many letters should I have? Most colleges want letters of recommendation from one to two academic teachers and your school counselor . To be considered an ‘academic teacher’ – the teacher should have taught you at your high school in a core academic subject – usually considered to include: English/Language Arts, Math, Science, Social Studies, and World Languages. Some schools will accept an “other” letter which is a non-academic letter of recommendation. These can come from a teacher who has advised you in a club, taught you in the arts, or been a coach or mentor who knows you well. Not all colleges will accept these. Keep the number of r...

Some of the most common questions we hear from 10th and 11th grade students and their parents are “Which test should I take: the SAT or the ACT?” “Is one easier?” “Do the tests even matter anymore?” Read on for our recommendations about how to move forward with college entrance exam testing when we hear increasingly about “test optional” admissions – You have probably heard mentions in the news, through college admissions mailings, and your college visits over the last two years about colleges going ‘test optional.’ Most recently, the  California State University system, the largest public university system in the U.S., followed the University of California system in announcing that they would become ‘test blind.’  You can read a recent post about CA college admissions  here . While test optional policies offer student choice about submitting scores to be evaluated as part of the application, test blind policies remove test scores from consideration in any way in the appl...

Wondering what all the changes of the last two years mean for current 10th & 11th graders? Here’s what we at The Best U think you need to know: What’s the current status of test optional admissions? Some background: - Pre-pandemic admissions saw a long growing trend of colleges adopting test optional policies in recognition that standardized testing is a weak predictor of college success.  Large public universities, Ivies, and some of the most selective liberal arts colleges were the holdouts  on this long shift, led mainly by liberal arts institutions for well over two decades. - With massive pandemic disruption to the availability of SAT and ACT testing,  a new wave of colleges adopted test optional admissions policies. Most of these institutions retained their policies for at least the 2021-2022 application year , and a few have indicated extensions through 2023. The entire  University of California  System has indicated they will  not  return t...