Counselor offers advice for those headed to college

Lots of students head
to school without a plan

College affordability has become a state and national political issue.

John Horman, a counselor in the student services office at Onalaska High School, believes a little planning can help, as can a realistic look at what a chosen profession might be worth, financially, down the road, when it’s time to pay back college loans.

“It’s important for students to think about their return on investment,” Horman said. “They’re looking at going into a specific career, program or area, and they’re only going to make a certain amount of money in that career, they want to look at how much it’s going to cost them to be trained in that program and does that work out in the end.”

Much of what Horman does when counseling students is getting them to think about long-term goals, rather than just going to college for the sake of going to college. That approach, he says, can increase the cost of schooling quickly. 

“Do they have a career thought in mind at all?” Horman asked. “Can they narrow down their career ideas? Because it’s helpful to be able to complete a program study as quickly as possible.”

Another thing Horman suggests is simply planning ahead.

“If they’re planning on doing all their exploration of careers when they get to the college level,” Horman advises, “they can spend a lot of time changing their mind, over and over and over again and that adds a lot of time to the amount of time they spend in college.”

And time, says Horman, is money. Money that is, more often than not, borrowed and has to be repaid, which is why politicians are arguing over college affordability in the first place.