Smart Plan For College

OMG. Went to the free "information" session. It's 90 minutes if half truths designed to work you up into a fear frenzy so that she can come and save you.

Let me be clear. This 90 minutes contained ZERO useful information. If you are worried about college costs and helping you child get into college this will further enhance your worries and fears. That is what it is designed to do.

All she is selling is piece if mind so you can say you got "expert" help. But you can do the same or better yourself reading poor yahoo news articles, let alone doing some research. Spend your 90 minutes doing some research rather than spending time here.

Making it worse is now I need to spend time explaining to my family why it was wrong and a waste of time.

While both my wife and I are college graduates, the college application game has changed over the ensuing years. Our older son made numerous "mistakes," and ended up paying rack rate at an out-of-state state school from which it took him 7 years to graduate. I contracted with Keller College Services (SmartPlanForCollege) when my younger son was a second semester sophomore. Keller help him stay on track from month to month, and guided him to a school that he is both very happy at and that offered him $116,000 in non-need-based scholarship money, covering roughly 40% of his 4-yr. College costs. While it's still primarily your child's responsibility to execute the SmartPlanForCollege program, if he or she sticks with it the program will more than pay for itself.

My husband and I attended the free class at my son's high school. Like another reviewer, I have to agree -- there was some "scary" information in the presentation. But I found it to be true information and the part that a lot of the schools were leaving out.

We did decide to obtain services. In the level of services we chose, our son got help with creating his applications. He is not a natural writer, but at the end of several rewrites, thanks to the feedback he received, the essay was ten times better and it was HIS writing and HIS voice which was so important.

When we signed up for services, everything was clearly spelled out in terms of how to schedule sessions with Jean, what was included and not included in the level of services we had chosen. In fact we deliberately chose a "higher" level of service to ensure we got the answers when we needed them. The only time we experienced a delay in getting a session was when we tried to schedule a session at the last minute because we forgot. While we couldn't get a 45 minute session, we were able to get a 15 minute session fairly quickly -- like within 3 days of the request.

We did receive way too much marketing email in the beginning but when we contacted the Client Care team about it, they took care of it.

Overall, the advice we received about the colleges, how to boost our son's profile, and assistance with the financial aid forms was sound. We did experience some minor customer service issues with the support staff, but once we brought them to Jean's attention, they were corrected.

When it came time to file for financial aid, this was where the services were so helpful. We filed our paperwork in January using our previous year's tax return, and then updated with our actual information when we completed our taxes later in March. Which is totally allowed and made sense. I would've never done that on my own and would have likely missed the financial aid deadlines otherwise.

Our son was accepted to his top choice college and received a healthy scholarship that is making the cost of his private college close to what the public university would charge us. We felt that was a great deal.

My cousin asked why we just didn't figure it out for ourselves. And honestly, sure, I could have. But quite frankly I didn't have the time to read countless books, research stuff etc.