Archive July 2, 2019

Why is Nomad Starting the TCK College Club?

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To help you get quality college counseling at an affordable price.

If you’re a subscriber, you may have already heard that Nomad is introducing group college counseling this August. If you’re interested, send me an email at lauren@nomad.com or sign up here for updates!

Nomad works FOR the expat and Foreign Service community, and this College Club is designed to help make college counseling accessible to all American TCK families. I’ve developed the TCK college club in response to customer requests for:

Accessibility: One of the goals of Nomad Educational Services is to make professional college counseling available to all expat families around the world, especially those who are at schools without a strong US-focused counseling program, or for whom a mid-high school move has disrupted their college planning process. Many of my current clients are enrolled at British, French, local, or schools where college counseling is focused exclusively on sending students to specific “brand name” universities to improve the school’s marketing to prospective families. 

US-equivalent experience: TCKs deserve the strong college preparation support they’d get back in the states: to find universities that fit them financially, academically and socially, and to get support developing strong, revealing, application profiles that will demonstrate their interest and fit for the schools on their college list. 

Affordability: For many expat families, however, the cost of individual college coaching is a barrier. In the mainland US, independent college coaches charge an average of $6-8000 over the 2 year period before college enrollment. While students who are advised by an independent counselor are more likely to be offered stronger financial aid packages, be less likely to transfer and be more confident in their choices, that cost is higher than most families are ready to pay. 

My Solution: In order to fulfill my goal of making college consulting accessible to all Foreign Service families who need it, I’m introducing the TCK College Club, a 10 month group counseling program designed for Juniors with Foreign Service connections. 

The program will include: 

  • Personality and academic profiles developed by YouScience
  • College planning and application software from Concourse
  • Regular assignments and personalized feedback An integrated, asynchronous online classroom
  • Monthly 2 hour live online-classroom sessions for discussion, hands-on research, and application development.
  • Parent meeting series covering all of the hot topics in college admissions today. 

Students who participate in the TCK College Club will develop a criteria-based list of best-fit colleges and universities in the US or abroad, and feel confident that they’ve got what they need to move on to filling out their applications. 

Ready to join? Send me an email at lauren@nomad.com. Or, sign up here for updates on this and other Nomad offerings.

College Controversies this Month

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May was an unusually busy month in College Admissions news. Two major events related to the College Board created a flurry of emails in my inbox.

The first is one you’ve probably heard about: the new “Adversity Score.” The College Board would prefer you call it by it’s official name, the “Environmental Context Dashboard (ECD),” and touts this as one way for universities to see past the effect socioeconomic status has on standardized test scores. Amusingly, other departments at the College Board have been arguing for years that there is no measurable effect of socioeconomic privilege on test scores.

I tend to take a somewhat optimistic view of the ECD and hope that it really do what the PR people at the College Board claim it will do, i.e. help more underrepresented and first generation students get into the colleges that will help them develop their potential. Additionally, most universities already had some internal form of the ECD based on past applicants’ data and publicly available data. Regardless of your outlook on the ECD, it’s unlikely to affect students coming into the US from international schools.

The second major College Board-related news was related to the May 2019 SAT test administered internationally. The results on that test were so universally unexpected that tens of thousands of international test takers signed petitions to ask the College Board to revisit the scaling of that test. For many students who are looking toward Fall 2020 enrollment, this was their best chance to take the SAT and use it to create a target list of schools that meet their needs. The next time the test will be offered internationally will be in October 2019, rather down to the wire for many students counting on EA and ED applications.

So, what happened to make test-takers so upset? Essentially, too many people did too well. When the average number of errors is low, the scaled points deducted for wrong answers is more significant. For most SATs, if you miss one math question, you’re going to get either 790 or 800 on that section. If you miss two, you’ll get a 780 or 790. However, on the May 2019 international administration, if you missed one, you scored 780, and if you missed 2, you scored 760. Thus, even if your accuracy was higher than ever, your scaled result might have been lower than ever. Of the approximately 30 test results of students I know personally, only 2 were happy with the results of the May test, and the rest were pretty angry about how the scores came out. Nearly all of them plan to retake in October.

Amazingly, on the May US domestic test, news came out this morning that the College Board actually found a scoring error and gave ADDITIONAL points to those who had answered a specific question correctly, widening the gap even more between international and domestic testers in May.

This doesn’t mean a international student should take a trip to the US just to take the SAT, this same kind of skewed difficulty level might happen on the domestic test next time. It should remind you that the SAT, ACT and other standardized tests are not true measures of your capabilities, and can barely even claim to be standardized in a way that can meaningfully discriminate between testers. If you are interested in learning more about the problems with testing, and the colleges and universities that have come out against the use of test results in college admissions (including a list of test-optional universities), check out http://www.fairtest.org/