Thought I'd give a little spin-off of the Civility thread.
(my personal views; take it or leave it, it's all fine.)
Not knowing what you don't know is one of the biggest dangers of the college admission journey. The object is to identify the unknown unknowns and convert them to known unknowns - in an attempt to make better decisions.
The board is very adept at alerting posters to both the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns. Also, the board has a way of flushing out a poster's knowledge base - because it's best to understand the motives, rationale and reasoning of a poster so YOU can assign whatever weight YOU deem appropriate. (As with many areas in life, adding experience and knowledge can expose unknown variables and put a decision on sounder, more rational footing; conversely ignoring experience and advice makes the underpinnings of a decision less based on knowledge and more based on intuition/gut.)
College admission - especially for athletes - is a jigsaw puzzle. Lots of moving pieces, lots to remember, lots to forget, lots to ignore. But above all, the pieces all interact and changing one changes more.
I am not picking on 2020, who is clearly involved, dedicated, and enjoying those long car rides (btw, those rides were the best and worst of times), but he wrote something and I thought I'd use an example in our life of an unknown unknown which turned into a known unknown in the college admission process dealing with financial aid. (A 25% athletic scholarship to a 60k school still leaves a huge shortfall.)
"I get that some people pay advisors etc. Personally I just don't get that. And I am sure that could provide fodder for an entire thread. I would never pay anyone a dime for advice on how to go through a recruiting journey."
First, I understand that sentiment; I've been burned by too many "experts" taking our money over the years who were not experts (mechanics, coaches, interior designers, etc.). But, it's important to know that that is the poster's personal philosophy.
Second, that sentiment would have cost my family over 125k in college expenses.
How? By understanding the college financial aid system - though advice and knowledge of those who had come before.
We were regular readers of College Confidential (analogous to this board) and thought we had a decent handle on the admission process, but the colleges we were contemplating were non-scholarship (either academic or athletic) and expensive. The calculators for these schools showed we would be full pay - but we are owners of a small family business has ebbs and flows in its income - some years we were flush, others not so much.
CI vets urged finding a college financial consultant (we had never heard of such a thing, and my initial reaction was skepticism). So, we hired a financial college consultant for a few hours and learned that we could take our lemon (inconsistent cash flow and reinvestment) and turn it into lemonade by using legal, well-understood biz decisions. One kicker - those needed to be completed by the end of son's junior year ('cause that's the tax year the FA award is based upon) but which needed to be planned a year earlier (so, during soph year). Sure, we would have figured it out - in son's senior year - too late to take any action. As a direct result, our base year income gave us FA (grants) - all because an Internet board had members who continued to post even after their kids had made it to college and enjoyed doling out advice (and insults for the naive - of which I was one) which could be taken (or ignored) at the reader's option.
College admissions - particularly for athletes - is a messy process; to believe you have a handle on all the intracacies is folly - and the person who pays for this folly is the one we all seek to help.
