Interview: Jean Burk, College Prep Genius (Pt. 2)

Jean Burke College Preparation

Recently on Career Glider we interviewed Jean Burk of College Prep Genius. She’s a writer, speaker, and the creator of the College Prep Genius program, which teaches students how to succeed on the SAT—and not only get offers from better universities, but also unlock access to scholarships that make college affordable. We spoke to her about a range of subjects including college, careers, and standardized testing. Here’s the second part of that interview.

CG: It’s obvious from what people have to say about you on your website that what you do has helped a lot of people over the years. Are there any stories in particular that stand out?

JB: I have a lot of stories—one is the story of a guy named Buddy. He went to a private school and he took the SAT two or three times, he did horribly, and his counselor unfortunately pretty much told him that he was dumb and that he would never get into college, and don’t take the SAT again because you’re going to fail it again, basically. His mom happened to hear me speak here locally in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and I was talking about how you can ace the test, and you can take it as many times as you want, colleges don’t care, they just take your highest scores, so she put him into my class, and he raised his SAT 600 points, he got $230,000 to go to Brown University, and he the first kid from their school to go to an Ivy League school.

Then his brother took my class, and he got several full rides to several different Ivy Leagues as well, so he was the second person from their school in forty years to go to an Ivy League school. Now the third son, who’s in junior high school now, took my class, and he’s the number one recruit for Stanford for his sport. And Buddy went on to realize that there was a method for taking these tests, because a 4.0 [GPA] at one high school is not the same as a 4.0 at another high school, every school calculates their scores differently, so the only fair way a college can compare—let’s say—a public school kid in Texas versus a private school kid in California versus a home school kid in Florida, is the SAT, because it levels the playing field. So after figuring that out, Buddy went on to get free med school. So now he’s pretty much finished up his residency—it’s been several years—and his father Joe calls me every now and then and says things like: I owe you three quarters of a million dollars. That is what your program has meant to my family, it changed our lives forever.

You hear these stories of people who have been told things, like, “You’ll never go to college” or, “You’re just dumb,” and you can say, “No, you’re not dumb, you can do this.” And I do try to encourage my kids in the classroom, I say, every one of you [can] ace this test, I’m giving you the tools, and you just need to use those tools. Just to see lives turned around, that’s rewarding for me.

CG: Turning to scholarship money, which is a big theme of yours—you’ve talked about how it often goes unclaimed. Can you speak a little about why that is?

JB: A lot of it has to do with [the fact] people don’t know there’s $24 billion in scholarships out there. People don’t know about some really cool things that you can do to get scholarship money—for example, if you’re searching online for scholarships, there’s actually some keywords you can use that people don’t know, instead of saying ‘scholarships’ you can use words like ‘endowment’ or ‘donor’ or ‘fund’, some big words that can pull up a bunch of scholarships that you’ve never heard of, there’s also a really cool thing at the library called the Book of Associations, where you can actually go to the reference desk at the library, and it lists numerous companies with all these scholarship offers that people don’t even know about. And so I think it’s just a lack of knowledge. I have a [resource] called “The Secrets of Scholarship Search”—a bunch of little-known scholarship websites. You know about Fastweb and the main ones that are out there, but there’s so many out there. Another thing people don’t realize, when people apply for scholarships, they apply for the big ones, the $5k and the $10k ones. But there’s a lot of $200 ones, the $250 and $300 ones, that nobody applies for, and if you were to apply for those you’d probably have an amazing chance of getting them. So there’s a lot of things that you can do that make a huge difference –if you can set aside time weekly and apply for ten $200 scholarships, if you’ve got $2,000 every week [you’re applying for] that can really add up over time.

CG: Our last question is about the future of education. What do you think is likely to change over the next few years, and what’s not likely to change?

JB: I think people are going to find that even a college degree may not be enough, I think they may find that postgraduate school is probably going to be something a lot of people are going to be leaning more toward, and right now less than 1% of students go on to get a postgrad degree. So I think that more and more jobs are probably going to require more of a degree instead of less of a degree, just because of competition, because of the education system in general, so probably we should start thinking even beyond college.

I did the math, and about 40% of kids actually go to college, of those 40% about 30% graduate, so it comes down to about 18% that are getting a college degree, and I think we need to wake up. I’ve now been to China six times and I just got back from Thailand, what’s happening is, because America has 17 of the top 20 colleges, we are drawing people from all around the world, and even if you think of Asia, of India or Africa, as being poor places, there’s about 25% of them in each country, which is still over a couple hundred million people, that do have money to send their kids to college. They have an amazing work ethic over there, that’s why they’re calling me to go over there to teach them how to take the test. They’re going to come over and for lack of a better word take our jobs, and I say that loosely because if they do the work, they deserve it. And I think our kids in America need to wake up, and realize that you’re not going to have a place in college or you’re not going to have that career if you don’t change your attitude of: Education’s not important or, [that] you’re ultimately going to have a free pass just because you’re American. I don’t think that’s going to happen. They’re not taking it for granted [in other countries]. So we need to stop dumbing down our kids, and we need to start showing them that they need to be taking rigorous courses, and life’s not just going to hand them whatever they want.

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