South Carolina families trying to plan for college now have access to a 112-page book telling them just about everything they might need to know.
The Alliance for Research on Higher Education — a collaborative involving colleges, state agencies, businesses, and philanthropies — boasts today in releasing the book, Planning for College: A Comprehensive Guide for SC Families, that it is “different from anything else you will read about preparing for college,” with 21 authors and 14 groups contributing.
But while national experts on state education are praising the book for its slickness and scope, at least a few are wondering if it might be overkill. Printing and distributing it will not be cheap, and the document might seem a bit overwhelming to the people who generally need such guidance the most — parents with little or no education beyond high school.
“It is an interesting and thoughtful experiment,” said Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. But, he said, “they really will have to wait and see who their audience is and whether this provides information they find helpful.”
South Carolina is hardly the first state to try to offer families guidance on planning for college. Among the states that have designed Web sites for such a purpose are Alabama, Colorado, Indiana, Kentucky, and South Dakota. Several states and university systems publish pamphlets and posters — sometimes in several languages — offering essential information.
Catherine E. Watt, director of the South Carolina alliance, said many of the other efforts offer parents only some of the information they will need, and she was concerned that a Web site would not be of much use to families that lack Internet access. She said the South Carolina Student Loan Corporation had offered to finance the book’s first printing, and other businesses were being approached to underwrite additional printings.
The alliance plans to send the authors of the book out to speak about college planning at events sponsored by churches and community groups. —Peter Schmidt
