Where to apply? What to write? What’s due when?
The college process is full of questions, and the experience can be overwhelming for students and their families. Plan the Path specializes in expert guidance driven by your student’s specific interests, talents, and needs. And we manage the entire application process for you. We offer college counseling services to:
Traditional High School Students
Students with Learning Differences
Students in Therapeutic Programs
College Transfer Students
We are your advocates. Our goal is to make the college search and application submission processes as stress-free as possible and to help your family make the best decisions.
Traditional High School Students
We provide expert guidance on the most effective college admission strategies, navigating students and families through every step of the application process.
Each high school student has a unique aspiration for what they want to experience and accomplish in college. At Plan the Path, we work tirelessly to help our students select their “best fit” schools, submit the strongest possible applications, and gain admission to schools where they will thrive.
Our coaches and consultants have extensive knowledge of schools, programs, and admissions logistics. This deep expertise allows our team to provide strategic insight throughout the college search and application process.
Our team knows the college admissions landscape inside and out. We offer expert guidance on the most effective application strategies and provide incisive answers to all of your questions.
Marcia Kramer, MA, founded and directs Plan the Path and has worked as an educational consultant for over 20 years. Our team includes coaches and consultants with backgrounds in high school and college level teaching, guidance counseling, journalism, literature, social work, and psychology. We prioritize integrity and authenticity in all that we do.
Plan the Path is bolstered by a strong network of professional affiliations, keeping us informed of the latest trends and developments in college admissions. In addition, we make regular campus visits, and attend and present at conferences, webinars, and other forums. Through our active involvement with the community of independent admissions counselors, we are thoroughly steeped in the ever-changing dates, details, and decisions that the admissions process involves.
We love working with high school students. Each of them has their own unique vision for their college experience; we deeply enjoy getting to know them and their individual passions, preferred working styles, and personal strengths.
By listening to what they say (and what they don’t), we assess each student’s academic history, educational goals, and lifestyle considerations to identify the colleges ideally suited to their unique interests and requirements.
We make applying to college manageable and straightforward, guiding students and families through every step of this complex process. We help you manage the details of applying and navigate the steps you need to take to complete the process. Our speciality lies in understanding what each school is looking for and what strategy serves each student. How many schools should you apply to? How does financial aid work? Should you apply Early Decision I, Early Decision II, or Early Action? Should you take (or retake) the ACT, SAT, or both? How can you best approach the interview process? We confidently guide you through these questions, and more.
While we believe in the utmost potential of each student, we approach each application decision with the frankness our students deserve. We base our recommendations on historical trends and outcomes, as well as our own years of experience, and expert guidance from within the industry. Our goal is to help our students and families set optimistic but realistic expectations—and aspirations.
Over the course of several months, each student works one-on-one with a writing coach to brainstorm, develop, and polish the many essays that the college application process requires. Plan the Path coaches mentor students through the writing process, guiding them to create a powerful personal narrative and supplemental essays that capture their voice, character, and point of view. As a byproduct of our writing mentorship program, students gain a greater understanding of how to effectively brainstorm ideas, express their thoughts clearly and concisely, edit their own work, and develop their voice.
Outcomes
As our students and families will attest, our outcomes for over 15 years have been phenomenal. Plan the Path students are routinely admitted to multiple schools, including “reach” and “high reach” choices, and receive large offers of merit scholarships. And by trusting us to manage the details of this often-challenging process, students and their families can focus on enjoying the final year of high school together.
Students with Learning Differences
Plan the Path has specialized expertise in college admissions for students with learning differences. We excel at matching them with colleges that offer the appropriate educational resources.
Students who have struggled in school because of slow processing, dyslexia, executive functioning, non-verbal learning disability, and other learning challenges can attend and succeed in college, but they often need extra support to do so.
Plan the Path’s founder, Marcia Kramer, MA, specialized in this arena for many years, and our team shares her drive to advocate for students with different learning styles. We are highly attuned to their particular strengths and challenges, and we are committed to helping them select colleges where they will thrive.
We are deeply versed in the variety of education support services offered at public and private colleges of all sizes across the country. We provide authoritative insight into which resources at which schools will best serve individual students.
Many colleges and universities offer support services, but the scope and scale of these services vary widely. We know which schools (and which programs within schools) have the specific resources to ensure that students with learning differences achieve success in a mainstream environment.
We accommodate students’ different learning styles in our working relationship with them, as well as in our process of identifying colleges where they will thrive. We specialize in understanding a student’s unique needs and what type of support would be the most effective.
Outcomes
When students with learning differences attend schools with the appropriate resources, they can thrive. Plan the Path students have been accepted at schools equipped to support them as well as offer them significant merit scholarships. They have gone on to successful professional careers and competitive graduate programs.
Students in Therapeutic Programs
As a former therapeutic consultant, Plan the Path founder, Marcia Kramer, MA, has unmatched expertise in shepherding students from therapeutic programs to successful college experiences. Our entire team believes deeply in the importance of mental health and values the different paths students may have taken to find wellness.
For students who have spent time in therapeutic residential treatment, applying to college can be challenging. Admissions officers will have questions about transcripts, courses, grades, and academic rigor. Students who have attended wilderness programs or been in residential treatment may have interruptions in their educational history that they need to explain. All of these questions have valid and often powerful answers, and we specialize in helping students tell their story.
We have counseled students from over 40 programs, including wilderness programs, therapeutic boarding schools, and residential treatment centers. Our experience in the world of therapeutic consulting allows us to understand the specific needs of post-program students and how to strategically advise them about college.
Finding a list of “best fit” colleges is important for every student, but especially for students coming out of treatment. We are deeply familiar with the colleges that are receptive to students who have had a nontraditional high school experience. We can advise on the schools that value the greater life experience, self awareness, and maturity of post-therapeutic applicants, as well as those that can provide the emotional support required when moving from a highly structured program to a fully independent one.
Successfully communicating a student’s history, educational record, and possible disciplinary record is a significant task for post-therapeutic applicants. We offer expert insight on crafting the supplemental materials required of post-program students, as well as compassionate support through each step of the process.
Outcomes
Plan the Path provides a bridge between therapeutic environments and college. We’ve guided hundreds of students with therapeutic backgrounds to successful admissions at numerous schools. Our mission is to help them thrive in their college years and beyond.
College Transfer Students
For a wide variety of reasons, students may decide to leave one college and continue their studies at another. Sometimes they move from a two-year community college to a four-year school, or from one four-year school to another, or even from a four-year school to a community college. Moves happen all the time, but the process can be intimidating — especially when there’s limited time to make decisions and uncertainty about which school will be a better fit than the current institution.
There are three types of transfer students:
- Vertical transfers: from two-year college to four-year
- Lateral transfers: from one four-year college to another
- Reverse transfers: from four-year college to two-year
Plan the Path has successfully guided college students to, from, and between an array of degree-granting institutions. Whether making a vertical, lateral, or reverse move – and whether moving directly from one school to another or returning to college after a period of time — we understand the pressure students feel to make the “right” choice in selecting their next institution. We excel at presenting a strong array of options that consider transferable credits, compatible fields of study, student services, lifestyle considerations, and more. We love helping students take the next step in their journey within higher education — and setting them up for long-term success.
Vertical transfers
Students who began their college education at a two-year institution may opt to transfer to a four-year school to earn a bachelor’s degree.
We hold comprehensive knowledge of four-year schools across the country (and beyond). More specifically, we’re deeply familiar with which schools are most welcoming to transfers coming from two-year schools, as the presence of a dedicated transfer team with a specific orientation for students new to a four-year environment can make a big difference in helping transfers acclimate and thrive at the university level.
Students choose to begin their college career at two-year schools for a host of reasons – academic, personal, financial, logistical – and we tailor our suggestions of appropriate four-year schools with that history in mind. We consider the student’s high school experience and current transcript to direct them towards a successful transition to a four-year college.
Outcomes
Plan the Path students who begin their college journey at a two-year school and make the “leap” to a four-year institution consistently thrive in their new, bigger environments. We take great care to help them find the right fit – academically, socially, financially, and beyond – and our work together helps prepare them for university-level expectations. They routinely graduate on schedule with a bachelor’s degree and tremendous enthusiasm for the future.
Lateral transfers
Students attending one four-year institution may have a variety of reasons for wanting or needing to transfer to another four-year institution.
We maintain extensive and current knowledge about which schools are welcoming to transfer students and generous with credit evaluation.
We help students articulate precisely their reasons for making a lateral move, as a thorough understanding of why they seek to transfer is critical in identifying which new institutions will better suit their needs. Knowing which elements of the initial college experience — academic area of focus, student culture, location, level of rigor, financial investment (or a combination of these elements) — didn’t work allows us to guide students to complete their four-year degree at a school that can provide what they need and successfully launch them into their next phase of life.
Outcomes
We’re proud that our transfer students routinely receive multiple offers of admission. We help them make an acceptance decision by evaluating transfer credits as well as fit and financial investment. After the hard work of re-applying to college (often while in college), we love seeing our transfers thrive in their new environments.
Reverse transfers
For various reasons, a student may need to take a break from four-year college and enroll at a community college instead, either to pursue an associate’s degree or as a non-matriculating student.
Students “downshifting” to a two-year college often do so with the intention of returning to a four-year school in the future. We help these students assess which community colleges offer the programs that will allow them to stay on track with their academics and also provide the support they need to address their personal circumstances. And we do so with an eye to successfully re-applying to transfer-friendly four-year schools that allow for credit recovery down the road.
We help students reevaluate their status as full time students on track for a bachelor’s degree to see what path would serve them best. Have their academic interests changed, and a two-year school would help reorient them before returning to a four-year track? Have the demands of their current school proven too much, and they need an opportunity to slow down? Do their life circumstances and/or career aspirations not line up with attending a four-year school at this time? We offer students alternatives to their current institution and plan for a meaningful future, with or without a bachelor’s degree.
Outcomes
The majority of students we’ve helped transfer from a four-year to a two-year school ultimately return to a four-year school and earn a bachelor’s degree. We’re proud to share that we’ve guided students who’ve “dropped down” to community college to then attend schools including Columbia University, Boston University, New York University, multiple University of California schools, and more. Many have also gone on to pursue graduate or professional school.