College Consulting
demystifying the College Application Process
College Counseling and College Selection
Personal Statement Assistance
Supplementary (College-Specific) Essay Guidance
Support for extracurricular activities, recommendations, and financial aid
demystifying the College Application Process
College Counseling and College Selection
Personal Statement Assistance
Supplementary (College-Specific) Essay Guidance
Support for extracurricular activities, recommendations, and financial aid
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How We Help Our Students
If the new admissions landscape seems especially anxiety-provoking and confusing, you are not alone. Acceptance rates have narrowed, expectations have expanded, and selective colleges are relying on a new approach, which they somewhat confusingly call “holistic” admissions.
While the rest of the college admissions world uses antiquated models that may have worked 20 years ago, or even pre-COVID, The Krupnick Approach prepares you with methods that work in today’s admissions landscape. We guide students and parents through the three core elements of the college admissions process:
Requirements form the foundational infrastructure of the college prep process. These include good grades, solid test scores, and meaningfully rigorous college-prep courses. We help students with all of these parts of the process – from academic coursework to ACT/SAT prep – and have the best track record in the field in standardized test preparation.
Strategy is the bread and butter of what most people think of when they start “college counseling.” We do it a little differently. Strategy and Positioning starts with a plan and a systematic timeline with chronologically overlapping projects. It’s extremely useful to begin this process early, and there’s nothing wrong with completing some of these projects at the same time. You do not need perfect ACT/SAT scores before visiting colleges. You don’t need to know exactly what you want to study before making your list. In regular consultation sessions with students and parents, we help our families think through strategy-related questions:
Given my interests, what kinds of activities should I pursue – and how?
How should I think about summer programs?
Whom should I ask to write my college recommendations – and how do I ask them?
How should I think about the college essays – and what is the difference between the Personal Statement (Common App Main Essay) and each of the college-specific supplementary essays?
When I begin to design my list, how many colleges should I include – and how do I make distinctions between “safeties,” “targets,” and “reaches”?
What are my statistical odds at these different colleges–given my GPA and test scores?
When I begin to narrow down my list, how many colleges should I narrow it down to – and how do I make the most of my college visits at these schools?
How do I think about Early Decision, Early Action, and Early Decision II – and when should I ED vs. when should I not ED?
Discovery is about determining what you are interested in, where you want to apply, and what, essentially, you want to study. If Strategy and Positioning is about appealing to them (ie, the colleges), Discovery is about finding the right fit for you.
i) Extra-curricular Interest Discovery. We help you find, recognize, direct, and harness your interests – both inside and outside the classroom.
ii) College Discovery. We help you identify and narrow down your college lists into safeties, targets, and reaches. In doing so, we get to know your academic interests and help you find schools – and majors – where you will be happy and successful.
Program Design
1. After deciding on a program, students are matched with a consulting team, usually consisting of 1-2 specialists. Program hours are structured around a systematic student-centered timeline and action plan that is customized to fit strengths, weaknesses, and interests of the individual student applicant.
2. All parents and students, regardless of their chosen program, are provided with a program specification document, outlining details of their program. Each family will have full access to the following Krupnick Approach proprietary college resources:
The Krupnick Approach Database, including more than 500 real examples of successful personal statements and supplemental essays and more than 100 examples of unsuccessful essays (with commentary and feedback). Our database also includes research on individual colleges, timelines, and templates for college lists, activities, supplement essays, recommendations, and college admission probability modeling.
A Krupnick Approach personalized Drive folder, providing customized timelines, personalized application checklists, sample essays for students' safety, target, and reach schools, financial aid data and support files for parents, and probability modeling for all colleges with the best data and analytical tools available
Access to a responsive team of college consultants and college student ambassadors available to answer all questions that arise as students navigate the college application landscape.
3. Detailed progress reports are made available to students and parents on request. These reports summarize students’ progression through the college process–and allow all programs to be dynamically responsive to students’ distinctive and changing needs throughout the process.
Program Design
1. After deciding on a program, students are matched with a consulting team, usually consisting of 1-2 specialists. Program hours are structured around a systematic student-centered timeline and action plan that is customized to fit strengths, weaknesses, and interests of the individual student applicant.
2. All parents and students, regardless of their chosen program, are provided with a program specification document, outlining details of their program. Each family will have full access to the following Krupnick Approach proprietary college resources:
The Krupnick Approach Database, including more than 500 real examples of successful personal statements and supplemental essays and more than 100 examples of unsuccessful essays (with commentary and feedback). Our database also includes research on individual colleges, timelines, and templates for college lists, activities, supplement essays, recommendations, and college admission probability modeling.
A Krupnick Approach personalized Drive folder, providing customized timelines, personalized application checklists, sample essays for students' safety, target, and reach schools, financial aid data and support files for parents, and probability modeling for all colleges with the best data and analytical tools available
Access to a responsive team of college consultants and college student ambassadors available to answer all questions that arise as students navigate the college application landscape.
3. Detailed progress reports are made available to students and parents on request. These reports summarize students’ progression through the college process–and allow all programs to be dynamically responsive to students’ distinctive and changing needs throughout the process.
Krupnick Approach featured in
Chicago Parent: A 4-Year Timeline for College Planning
COLLEGE PREP & APPLICATION TIMELINE
See What Our Students Say
COLLEGE PREP & APPLICATION TIMELINE
See What Our Students Say
We are a fully-integrated college prep and college acceptance program, eager and available to meet all students' and families' unique needs. We offer continuing support in:
College selection: probability modeling specific to the student and his or her school list
College applications: when, how, and why to start the various phases of the college application process
College essays: brainstorming, development, execution, and review of all application essays, including personal statements, supplementary essays, and college-specific, 'Why us?' essays
Interview prep, scholarship applications and essays, financial aid applications and planning
Executive functioning & organization: comprehensive preparation for independent college life
We are a fully-integrated college prep and college acceptance program, eager and available to meet all students' and families' unique needs. We offer continuing support in:
College selection: probability modeling specific to the student and his or her school list
College applications: when, how, and why to start the various phases of the college application process
College essays: brainstorming, development, execution, and review of all application essays, including personal statements, supplementary essays, and college-specific, 'Why us?' essays
Interview prep, scholarship applications and essays, financial aid applications and planning
Executive functioning & organization: comprehensive preparation for independent college life
How We Work With Students and Families on College Prep
How We Work With Students and Families on College Prep
College Prep FAQs
A: College prep and college consulting involves de-mystifying and organizing a complex process, removing stress from both students and parents, and lending our expertise to help you choose colleges where you’ll be successful and happy. In our fully-integrated college service, you can work with specialists who have expertise in each of the main areas of the college process: test prep, college selection, activities, recommendations, essays, and finanicial aid/scholarships.
With our life-course model, we encourage students to get started with college prep as soon and as early as possible. Quite simply, there are parts of your college application (like activities and recommendations) that benefit from long-term commitments, and when you’re building an interest nucleus, you’re at a great advantage if you start the adventure early.
Logistical FAQs
A: For your convenience, each of our tutors and consultants uses an automated scheduling system. This system allows students to choose from all remaining available time slots for that individual tutor. If students prefer, we can also schedule directly with students via email, text, or phone. When scheduling through our automated system, students will receive an email confirmation for each time reserved and a calendar event will automatically be created on the account they are signed in with. If the session is virtual, the link to join the Zoom meeting will be included in the calendar event and email confirmation, or the tutor will send you a unique join link before your scheduled session.
We highly encourage students to schedule their own sessions so that they appear on the student’s calendar. We find that students who take over the execution and management of their programs fare far better both in our program and in the inevitable chaos of college life and classworkwork. When using our automated system, parents can be added to the calendar events after the initial scheduling so that they know when students are scheduled to meet.
A: Students work out their schedules individually with each subject-specialist, depending on the student’s and the tutor’s schedule. Tutors do their best to be flexible, and each tutoring team will take into consideration any scheduling restrictions students might have.
A: College consulting sessions typically range from 30 minutes (for short planning to discussions) to 1.5 hours (for college essay sessions), with exceptions made for students with accommodations or other extenuating circumstances.
A: Like for test prep sessions, our college consulting students should expect a 1:1 ratio of session time to homework. If a student meets with a tutor for 1.5 hours per week, he or she should expect to complete about 1.5 hours of homework per week.
Depending on the content of our work, each week we assign a “project” that we expect students to complete for the next session. If we are working on activities or nucleus-building, that project might involve finding/joining new clubs or selecting summer programs. If we are working on college essays, that project might involve vignette construction, statement drafting, or supplement editing.
A: Students will be given full access to their personal folder and to the Krupnick Approach College Essay and Application folder, which hundreds of sample essays (from acceptend and not accepted students); recommendation/activity/ college list templates; timelines and checklists; college admission data, requirements, and probability analytics; and financial aid/scholarship opportunities.
In addition to the college database, our students also have full access to his/her own curated and fully customized personal folder. Students’ personal folders will be a homebase to organize all college-related files, such as transcripts, test scores, questionnaires, recommendation materials, activities lists, college lists, essays, etc.
A: Depending on their needs and interests, most students work with a core college advisor and multiple specialists. Advisors oversee the process from conception to completion, ensuring that deadlines are met, opportunities are optimized, and that families are getting the most out of their programs. Krupnick Approach college prep specialists include our essay experts, network of former admissions officers at top universities, student/faculty ambassadors, and financial aid/scholarship team. Specialists support students with week-to-week projects like activities lists, sunmer program application, college list and probability modeling, recommendation materials, personal statements, and supplements.
A: Students are expected to maintain a professional and punctual attitude towards their time with our subject-specialists. All sessions must be scheduled at least 24 hours in advance, and scheduled sessions must be canceled with at least 24 hours notice. Tutors will retain discretion to accommodate less than 24-hour notice, but reserve the right to charge the entirety of the reserved time to the student’s program totals.
College Admissions: Superscoring & Test Optional Status
Among the colleges to which our most recent students have been accepted:
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Latest Updates
College Planning Webinar Series
If the new college admissions landscape seems especially anxiety-provoking and confusing, you are not alone. Acceptance rates have narrowed,
How to think About College Applications
If you are like most people, the prospect of making a choice about where to spend the next four
College Super-Scoring, Test Optional Status & Admissions Data
Colleges and universities that “superscore” the ACT or SAT will consider each applicant’s highest individual subject score from all