Monique Rinere - Countdown to College: The Essential Steps to Your Childs Successful Launch

This book is a wonderful resource for parents and their children to help them through the critical time from the end of high school through the beginning of college. It provides a thorough guide, keen insights, and practical advice for navigating this important transition.

Sanjeev R. Kulkarni, dean of the faculty, Princeton University

Finally, an excellent book about the college-entry process after admissions! This book is unique because it recognizes how both students and parents have to understand and confront together every detail of college finances, academics, social lifein short, the college experience as a whole. With remarkable detail, Rinere describes what parents need to do and how prospective students should prepare for college. Her lucid and accessible prose clarifies the process by drawing our attention to issues we might never have considered. Rinere uses powerful anecdotes to explain exactly how carefully we need to plan for our childrens futures. In short, she demystifies college for students and parents. This book should be read by every parent of a prospective college student, but it is also especially important for first-generation and disadvantaged families. Beautifully written, incredibly helpful, it will become widely read.

Karen Barkey, Haas Distinguished Chair of Religious Diversity, professor of sociology, UC Berkeley

Countdown to College is an excellent and practical guide for helping your child choose the best college for them and for getting the most out of the experience once they get there. It gives great advice to parents who want their child to have a successful transition to college life.

Suzy M. Nelson, Ph.D., vice president and dean for student life, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Countdown to College is a valuable and comprehensive guide for parents of college-bound students, whether first-timers or veterans. My youngest child started college just as I was reading it, and I found its advice both helpful and calming. The months between high school and college are a critical time, but with this book you can relax (a little) and breathe deeplyDr. Rinere gives you confidence that everything will be all right.

Marvin Krislov, president, Pace University

This is an indispensable guide for college parentsand school counselorsthat is by turns reassuring and utterly eye-opening. Dr. Rinere offers essential advice on how a family, working together, can successfully navigate the rocky stretch from Congratulations, youre in! to Welcome home for the holidays! College is intended to be an intellectual and personal adventure; Rinere is there to ensure that its also an immensely positive one.

Kerry Walk, president, Marymount Manhattan College

As the parent of a high school senior headed to college soon, youve made it through years of preparations for this moment. You have the acceptances and rejections in hand and merely have to send in a deposit to reserve your childs seat in a first-year class. Congratulations! This is a watershed moment in all of your lives.

This book distills what I have learned over years of caring for and advising college students and parents to help you make the college experience as rich as possible for yourself and your child. My goal is to help you be the proud parent of a young adult who stays in college and becomes a degree-wielding alum who is ready to create the next chapter of their lives, just as you engage in a process of creating yours.

As a dean at three Ivy League schools, I have had a front-row seat to the struggles of thousands of new students and their parents. Even at elite, highly selective institutions like Princeton, Harvard, and Columbia, where I worked, people struggle daily. Every new student grapples with making a successful transition to collegeto remain healthy, happy, grounded, and in school. And parents suffer, sometimes to an unbearable extent, with letting go and redefining their lives without the child. I cannot count the number of tear-filled conversations I have held with parents who said they found themselves shockingly upset, anxious, depressed, and even inconsolable during this period. It is essential, therefore, not only that you help your children create a conceptual bridge from where they are, a graduating high school senior, to where they want to be, a college alum, but also that you yourself take this as an invigorating opportunity to reinvent your life in new and intentional ways, whether it is your first or last child who is heading off to college.

Ive known parents who didnt listen to their child when he told them where he wanted to enroll, furtively lived on their sons floor for two years, or stayed so enmeshed with their college freshmans schoolwork that an academic dean had to warn them that what they did amounted to plagiarism and could result in a one-year suspension of their son. You dont want to be one of those parents. And you dont want your child to be one of these:

• The one in three freshmen who doesnt show up for sophomore year

• The more than 50 percent of students who dont complete a bachelors degree in six years

• The almost one-half of students who dont get a four-year degree in their lifetime

The United States is experiencing what can only be called a college dropout disaster. There are currently twenty million undergraduates enrolled in college. Out of every hundred students, only thirty-five are reaching the goal we hope for when a student is admittedthat is, they complete the degree and are employed in a position that requires it. Another twenty-eight have graduated but are not in a job that necessitates the degree they just worked so hard to get. And the rest dont have that proverbial sheepskin yet and are more than likely living under a mountain of debt.