College and cash may sometimes not be a perfect mix to think about, but that doesn’t have to be the case because we’ve got it covered for you! In today’s episode, Dr. Jordan interviews college financial advisor, John Boruk, about the ins and outs of college costs, affordability, and how to help your daughter to attend her dream college. From FAFSA hacks to scholarship secrets, we’ll break down the complex world of college finances in an easy-to-understand way. But it’s not just about the money! We’ll also explore how to find the perfect college fit – academically, socially, and financially. Don’t let college dreams turn into financial nightmares! Join John Boruk in this insightful conversation.
How to reach guest John Boruk:
Website: www.smartcollegeadvisor.com
Email: John@ collegefundingsolutions.org
Links to previous related podcasts by Dr. Jordan:
Why And How You Go To College Is More Important Than Where You Go
Best Ways To Support Your Daughter Through The College Application Process With Dr. Pamela Ellis
Is college necessary for a successful life?
—
Listen to the episode here
How To Afford Your Daughter’s Dream College
I stop by and have a topic that usually has to do with girls in some way, shape, or form. Sometimes I have guests. I decided to do a guest because this topic is something that I don’t know much about, even though I’ve had three kids go through college. We’re going to talk about the financial aspects of college. How do you figure that stuff out? If you are the parent of a child now who is 3 or 5, you’re thinking, “This episode doesn’t apply to me.” I think that’s not true. My guest is going to talk about the short-term, early-stage college planning, but mostly the late-stage college planning, and all this is going to be information that you should be aware of no matter how old your kids are. I want to welcome you to our show, John Boruk.
He’s basically a college advisor. He’s going to tell us in a minute about his path to get to where he is. His educational background was in Journalism. He went to Texas Tech University and he studied Russian and International Economics in Russia, which is interesting. He had a 25-year career in sports broadcast journalism during which he received 11 Emmy awards, 3 Edward R. Murrow Awards, and then he shifted gears, I think, around that time, and he started working with families and students who were looking at college and helping them with the financial aspects. First of all, welcome to the show.
Thank you. I appreciate you having me on.
Second of all, quickly tell us your path, how you zigzagged to what you’re doing now.
As you alluded to, I went to Texas Tech University. I majored in Journalism and History. My first job out of college was in Missouri. I know that you’re based in St. Louis. My first job was in Joplin, and then two years after that, I went to Springfield, Missouri. I spent 4 or 5 years in Missouri before I continued on to Nashville, Detroit, Michigan, and then my stop here outside in Philadelphia. I was very passionate about sports. I played baseball in college and I was very passionate about sportscasting. I came up through the ESPN era of SportsCenter, and I wanted to narrate highlights, but I think when I got involved, what pushed my butt and what motivated me was the storytelling aspect, getting out, telling people’s stories, formulating a story, and putting that in visual form for people to rally behind and to feel the emotional warmth that comes from when you take somebody’s story and you tell it on air.
I did that for 25 years. I have three kids of my own. My oldest is a daughter, and when she became a freshman, I did a deep dive into the whole college process. I think I talked about real quickly, a lot has changed so much from the time that I was in college and when we were going through the process that everything that you thought that you knew before has completely changed now, especially on the financial side. I’ve been in charge of the family’s finances and making sure that we’re in a good place to make sure that our kids have a college education. What I found out more than anything was how the system operates, and what you need to know if you don’t know this stuff almost prior to high school, you’re in for a real shock because they don’t tell you this thing.
The unfortunate thing is that from the high school counselor side, they simply don’t know this information. They’re overwhelmed. What I say about our high school counselors, and they do fantastic jobs, don’t get me wrong, but they’re overworked and they’re underpaid, and they simply don’t have the time nor the resources to go through and walk each kid and family through the college preparation steps. That’s number one. 2) When it comes to the financial side, when I do have families come up to me and say, “Why didn’t anybody tell me about all this?” “You’re not going to get it from high school,” as I talked about. The colleges don’t want to know this information because they don’t want to discount the cost of school any more than they want to.
The admissions coupled with the financial side, they have a very strict department that they’ve got it almost regulated down to a science where they know within a five-minute interview, let’s say with a family, within a couple of thousand dollars, how much each family is going to pay to go to that particular college. It’s unlike any system that I think we have in place. What I tell families is, “Imagine you have five families that go into a grocery store, and they all pull out the same groceries, the same brands, the same groceries, but when they go to pay for it, all five families pay a different price. You could sit there and say, “That doesn’t seem fair,” but that’s how the system works and that’s the system that we have in place here in the United States in the higher education system. It starts at the government level when you fill out the FAFSA form, and it works right down to the admission side.
One of the places families can start is with what you call their base year. Tell my readers what you mean by the student’s base year.
The Student’s Base Year
When you fill out the FAFSA form, and that is in the fall of your child’s senior year, they want to know financial information pertaining to your base year. This is the information that you need to know because a student’s base year is two years prior to the year they graduate. Let’s say you have incoming seniors coming up, their graduation year is 2025 for next year. Their base year is 2023. The government, colleges, and universities are collecting the financial information from 2023. The year has already passed, but until you file your FAFSA form, you have no idea that they’re going to be asking for that information in a method that’s very similar to your tax returns.
When you file your taxes, it’s not necessarily how you file your taxes that makes a difference. It’s the work that you do in the year prior because if you don’t sit there and keep receipts or you don’t track miles, and if you’re 1099, all of the work and the process that you do in collecting the information for your taxes, the same thing goes for the FAFSA and your base year. What you want to do is you want to make sure that you position yourself to lower your student aid index because that’s the most important number that you’re going to need to know as a family when your kid goes to college. “What is my student aid index number?” That goes back to that base year because that’s the number that’s going to determine how high or low it is, and we want that number to be as low as possible.
How do colleges assess the student aid index?
The student aid index is the most important number when it comes to paying for college. There are two categories of that. There are accessible assets and non-accessible assets. Accessible assets would be stocks, mutual funds, CDs, any bank accounts, and anything that’s not a 401(k) or an IRA in terms of your retirement accounts. Those would fall under non-accessible accounts. 401(k)s, IRAs, cash value, life insurance, annuities, those items would be considered non-accessible. If you have cash under a mattress that’s been sitting there, that would be accessible, any hard cash. The way to think about it is anything that’s not earmarked for retirement typically is an accessible asset that you need to report on your FAFSA form and to the government.
If you own a business, it gets a little bit more complicated. I won’t go into all of that because I know I’m not talking to probably a lot of business owners out there, but the rules constantly change. The rules behind the FAFSA form have changed significantly. Fewer questions, a little bit more confusing, but what you want to know is when it pertains to that student aid index, we want to keep that number down. If there’s a way to shift some of the possessions that you have, whether you have some accounts from accessible assets to non-accessible, you want to do that in an effort to save money.
By making those strategic financial moves, it can help you save thousands of dollars on the price that you’re going to pay for your child to go to college. It’s very important. I’ll give you an example per se, while I talk about 401(k) and IRAs, while the money that’s sitting in those accounts doesn’t count against you, the contributions that you make to a 401(k) or an IRA within your base year or the year after do count against you. It’s little things like that you need to know to make sure that you are keeping your student aid index number down. It’s making those strategic financial decisions and putting them into place a couple of years before you get to the point where, “Now my child is making the college visits, we’re applying for colleges, and then we’re getting those award letters back.”
At the risk of sounding cynical, I wonder if the system makes it this complicated for a reason, it’s hard for parents to figure all that out on their own. In fact, you’re saying it’s hard for high school counselors to figure it out, and that’s their job, much less a parent who hasn’t been through the process themselves, who weren’t a college grad and all that. It puts everybody at a disadvantage, but I think especially people who have less experience.
Approaching College Funding
Let’s face it. I don’t know of anything that the federal government does that simplifies anything. Look, when they write up a bill, it’s 1600 pages, but it’s not just college funding your taxes. Look at the tax laws that are on the books. None of this is ever simple, but I think they’re always looking for a way, and they’re always trying to catch up to make sure that I truly believe that while their heart may be in the right place, at times, some of the laws and some of the things regulating, the money and the financial side of college don’t always work out in favor of middle-class families. What’s important is that, look, a lot of these colleges and universities have multimillion and in many cases, billion-dollar endowments.
As families, it is our responsibility and why I have a real great passion for this to try to tap into those endowments because the colleges and universities have the type of money that they can help through their scholarships, grants, tuition waivers, or whatever you want to call it, that they can help the student. That’s the way that they look at it. What I tell families is that you have to look at this process as a business. The number one mistake I think families make is they don’t take emotion out of the equation. When you don’t take emotion out of the equation, you make decisions based on emotions instead of being levelheaded.
If you buy a car, you’re not going to rush onto the lot and say, “That’s the car that I want.” You’re going to go to 4 or 5 different car lots, make a well-informed decision, find the car that fits your needs as well as your wants, and then do the negotiation back and forth with the car salesman. It’s not that much different when it comes to college. We encourage families to look at 6 to 8 colleges to know if they apply to six to eight colleges, that you’re going to be comfortable going to one of those 6 to 8 schools. Then we can do Apple’s comparison and make sure that you’re getting the best deal possible.
John Boruk owns a company called The Smart College Advisor. He helps families and he helps young people to find the best college fit and also helps them to be able to afford it. I’m saying this because I think a lot of families feel like they have no leverage, like the college has all the power, all the leverage, and they have to take what they get, but would it be fair to say that colleges need to fill the seats and they’re more open to, I don’t know if negotiating is the right term.
That’s a good word. They do have leverage. The thing is that schools look at students as investments. That’s the best way I can say it. Just think that our federal government looks at us as nothing more than taxpayers with a social security number, colleges and universities look at your child as an investment, and as an investment, who’s going to give us the best return on that investment? Typically, the kids that get into the schools that they apply to. The thing that families don’t realize is that they do have leverage. What we’re seeing now since 2010, is there’s been a 10% decline in college enrollment. You’re looking at schools that are having trouble filling the seats, not necessarily the tier one, the elite schools. In fact, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Dartmouth, Columbia, and those types of schools, Cal Berkeley, are not seeing an increase.
What you’re seeing are those tier 3 and 3 colleges and universities that maybe aren’t getting the cream of the crop but are getting the next best group. They’re the ones having trouble filling the seats, which is one of the criteria, one of the aspects that we look at when it comes to some of the analytics called the yield. I know families get caught up in the admissions rate in terms of how many kids apply to how many kids get in. What we take a look at is the yield. The yield is how many kids are admitted to the school as opposed to how many get in. You can imagine Harvard and Yale have a high yield, and it makes sense.
Harvard gives you a letter and says, “We want your kid to come here.” You’re going to go there if you can afford it. Most kids find a way. Here’s a good example. Since you’re there in the St. Louis area, Washington University, about many years ago, their yield was small in the 20%. When you have a school that has a low yield, what does that tell you? It tells you they’re having trouble filling the seats. When you’re competing with the Harvards, Yales, Columbias and stuff, what do you have to do when your yield is 20%?
You’ve got to discount the cost of admission. You have to bring the price down to make it more attractive to those types of students. Washington University is a very good school, a tier 1 school with high academic standards. When we have schools that we see have that type of yield, we tell families, “Give these schools a look because they value your students.” They do have a good endowment, and we think that we can get more money than what we would get with some of these other schools because they do need your students more than you probably need them.
We told our kids when they were growing up that mom and dad had saved for their college and we would be willing to pay for a state school. We said, “We don’t want you to go to a state school. We want you to go wherever you want to go, but we’ll have saved enough where you can get your room and board tuition to a state school. If you want to go somewhere else, go for it, but you’ll have to figure out the rest.” Our daughter went to a state school, she wanted to be a teacher, and it’s a good teacher school in Missouri. Our first son drew a circle on the map around the Midwest. He said, “I want to go somewhere outside of that circle.” he ended up in Texas. He went to TCU in Fort Worth, Texas.
I grew up about ten minutes from there.
He got some scholarship, our contribution, and worked all four years. At the end of his first or second year, they, of course, raised the tuition. He didn’t have that. He had the goal, the courage, or he had whatever you want to call it, to go up to the financial aid office on his own and say, “I’ve got 4.0. I like this place. I want to go for four years. I need more money.” They gave him more money twice. I think you mentioned that on your website stuff, that a lot of times families or young people have the ability to sometimes get more than they started with.
What I tell families is, “Don’t scratch a school off your list because of what we call the sticker price.” A lot of private schools come in around $80,000. Here in the Philadelphia area, you have Villanova and Drexel in the $75,000 to $80,000 rate. Don’t ever scratch a school off because of the advertised price. Let’s go through the process. Let’s see what the school will offer. Let’s compare apples to apples. Remember how much you pay is based on two criteria. 1) Your child’s academic record and 2) Your family’s financial portfolio, that SAI number that we were talking about earlier. Those two things, but let’s go through the process because oftentimes, believe it or not, and this is hard for families to wrap their hands around, is that the price of a private school will be cheaper than one of your state colleges because of a number of reasons.
How much you pay is based on your child's academic record and family's financial portfolio. Share on X1) They don’t have as high of an enrollment as some of these public schools that we’re talking about. At Penn State, here you’re looking at 50,000 students, and they have a much larger endowment that they can play with. They have a lot more money that they can play with when they see a student, maybe your son who had a 4.0, they’re much more willing to give that student more money to get him to be part of their system, knowing and believing that once he graduates, he’s going to contribute back to the community, which is very key, contribute back to their school and get it back to their endowment.
Piggybacking off what I was saying, they have more money to play with. I’ll give you a good example. I had a family that says that they applied to private and public schools, and they were accepted by all of them. This child wanted to go to the University of Chicago, which is the most expensive school in the country. The family said, “We can’t afford it unless we can get in by the in-state price of what we would pay at Penn State,” which was maybe $38,000 or $40,000. They said, “We’ll do it.” Now they’re going to the University of Chicago at the same price that they would’ve paid to go to an in-state college here in Pennsylvania, which is… what’s the worst that they can say? No, or they’ll come close, but go through the process.
We help them with that. We’ll help guide them through the process. It’s one of the things that we do. We tell you how to appeal an award letter, which is merely a request for more money. In the case of your son, we also have aptitude and personality because we want our kids to graduate within 4 or 4.5 years. Our average is 4.5 years as opposed to the national average, which is now 5.5 years. One of the reasons to do that is we want to make sure we’re finding the college that is the ideal fit and the perfect case with your son. He wanted to go outside the Midwest. That was important to him.
We’d like to take all those things into consideration, big school, small school, you want to be close to home, you want to be far from home, you want to be in a mountain-type setting, you want to be in a city setting. It’s finding those schools that would be a good fit because if you want to do this process the right way, I talk about the financial side. We tackle three core components. Academic, social, and financial. Financial is the big one, but all three of them are very important.
I wanted to ask one more question. Some of those colleges I see are now costing $40,000, $60,000, or $80,000. I see some young people who are going to study psychology, sociology, or something to be a social worker, which is great, but then their risks are coming out of college with a huge mound of debt. They’re taking their whole life to pay off. How do you advise young people about that? I know you’re trying to help them get deals and all that. There is some reality of sometimes it’s expensive.
Advising Young People
This is why I like to get kids who are coming in as freshmen in high school because here’s part of the problem, and I know that we were talking about it earlier. This is why colleges want to get you on a path while your high school guidance counselor wants to put you on a path to, “What do you want to do?” I was referring back to that aptitude test that we do. We want to find out what their abilities are, what their interests are, what their values are, and then separate because I love to play golf, but I don’t have any real natural ability. Playing golf is more of a hobby. It’s key to separate what’s a good hobby, what’s an interest, something that they like to do as opposed to something that they’re passionate about that makes for a good career choice.
I was recently working with somebody who loved art and they liked to draw, and they were good with taking and using that art. We started this process when they were freshmen. As they became juniors and seniors, we started to realize that they didn’t want to be an art teacher, which didn’t make sense for what they wanted to do, but they were able to take that passion for art and then use it to be an Architecture major in college. What we help do is not only realize what they like to do but eliminate a lot of the things that don’t make sense or things that they don’t like to do. As you know, high school kids have a tendency to change their minds. One year, they like this, and another year, they like something else.
They don’t know, and it’s hard as parents because you’re not fully functioning until you’re in your mid-twenties. We need to help them and help guide them through the process to figure out what makes sense for them and then put them on a career path. “Are they going to make money from this? Is this going to be a career that, if they have to take out a bunch of loans, they’re going to be able to pay off those loans instead of saying five years out of college and they’re having trouble getting a job?” That’s not what anyone wants. That’s not why you pay or you see a college with an $80,000 sticker price because you’ve gone four years in a college and you don’t have a plan. You don’t have a career path that you can follow.
That’s one of the real key things. Is it a passion that more in line with a hobby and something you do on the side, or is this a passion that you can create, carve, and formulate into a career that is something that you can do for the next 20 or 25 years? I tell my kids and the kids that we work with, “I’m not going to say that money’s not important. It is important, but the worst thing that you can do in life is to do something that you dread doing just for a paycheck.” Sportscasting is what I wanted to do. I didn’t know what my second act of life was going to be until I found this. This has become my new passion in life, but sometimes you don’t know it. Look at me, I’m an adult. You would think that I would know, but that’s why you have to go through the process. It helps to have somebody behind you to give you a nudge and to say, “Maybe this is a good idea, or maybe this isn’t a good idea.”
The worst thing you can do is to do something you dread doing just for a paycheck. Share on XHave you ever read the book Dark Horse?
No, but I’ve heard of it.
It’s interesting because one of the things he found when he studied a lot of very successful people, people who were dark horses, who people didn’t expect much, and then they end up exceeding expectations, became successful in all kinds of different fields. One of the things that he noticed in his research was that people who were successful, happy, and fulfilled when they were 50 or 60, they didn’t have a goal and put their noses at a grindstone and ground it out for 40 years, and then they were happy and fulfilled. He said, “Those people all found something that right from the start, fulfilled them.” That changed oftentimes. Yours changed over time. It’s not necessarily because things changed, but because you changed. We grow and our interests grow. Our passions may grow into something different.
I think it is hard for parents. It’s complicated to be eighteen with all these choices in front of you to know what to pick. I hope this is true. I advise young women who I counsel, “Relax. Whatever you’re going to start with now, it’s probably not going to be what you end with. It’s okay.” I always tell them to interview every adult they bump into and say, “How’d you get here? When you were my age, did you know you’d be doing this?” I tell them, “Ninety percent of the people you’re going to ask are going to say, ‘I didn’t have a clue.’” It’s okay. Start with passion about what fulfills you now, and then if it grows into something else, that’s okay. You’ll acquire the education and the experience you need in order to be able to do those new things.
It’s really simple. I say, “Don’t follow the money. Follow the passion, and the money will follow.” That’s how I navigated my 25-year broadcasting career. I’ll be honest, in 1993, thankfully, I started in the Midwest where prices were small, but I made $13,000. I wasn’t following the money. I followed my passion. I knew that I was going up the steps in order to achieve a certain level of excellence that I was striving for. I had a goal in mind and a purpose, and I was following that purpose. Money was something that helped me along the way until I got to where I needed to be.
I want students to focus on the things that drive them. Another thing is, when you’re in high school, it’s easy to want to coast. You feel like, “I took hard courses,” but what colleges want to see is they want to see that you continuously challenge yourself. Even when you become a senior, I guard against, “Don’t take the Intro to Cooking class or Principles of Pickleball or something like that,” to maintain your structure. Continue to challenge yourself in your core curriculum, because that’s what ultimately colleges think if you’re going to challenge yourself at the high school level, then we know that you’re going to challenge yourself when you come to our college or university.
If parents wanted to get ahold of you because they’re looking for some guidance as far as the whole college financial process, when should they start? What’s the process by which you serve them?
College Financial Process
I break it down into two parts. There’s early-stage college planning, and that’s when you start saving money for earmarking it for college. That usually happens when your child is born. It can happen before that. It can happen when they’re 2, 3, 4, 5, whatever the case. You start setting aside money for college. We focus on the late stage of college planning. I’m not going to go too much into 529s. If you started at 529, I get it. It’s not what I would consider a recommended product, believe it or not, because it goes back to being an accessible asset that’s counted against you. You’re like, “Why is this counted against you?” The government and colleges know that 529 money is going towards college. That’s why they count it against you. That’s why I’m not a big fan of the 529, but that’s where we help families along the way when it comes to preparing themselves, knowing, “Here’s what I need to have. How can I position myself so that I’m in a better situation to get more money from the colleges?”
That’s what we help working with. You can go to my website, SmartCollegeAdvisor.com. I work with a company called College Funding Solutions. They’ve been in this space for many years. We’ve assisted nearly 30,000 families during that time. We pay for data on schools you’re not going to find on the internet. We know essentially right down to a few thousand dollars what 95% of the colleges are, what you have to pay, not the sticker price, not the advertised price. You can do that and go to SmartCollegeAdvisor.com. You can email me at John@CollegeFundingSolutions.org.
Either way, I like to make myself accessible. I love to answer families’ questions and any questions they have. Not only do I consider myself an advisor, but I consider myself an advocate for families that are going through this because I’ve gone through it. I know what you’re faced with. What I hate to see is I know that every family has a pain point that keeps them up at night. I like to give them the ease to know that you don’t have to lose sleep over this. You need somebody to talk to. You can email me there. All that information is on the website. My email, there’s a contact page if you want to reach out.
Thank you so much for coming on the show and giving our parents a good look at what can be a complicated and overwhelming process for them. Having somebody who can guide and advise could be helpful.
I appreciate it so much. Thanks for having me. The podcast and what you’re doing, for girls out there and for daughters, I have one of my own, it’s a special needs daughter with a condition called Williams Syndrome. There are some challenges that are involved with that, but I think we all want the best. We all want our kids to excel in anything that we’ve ever done in life. That’s what I want for my children, and that’s why I like to help the families out there and why it’s given me such a great purpose in life.
We all want the best. We all want our kids to excel in anything we've ever done. Share on XThank you so much for being on the show. I appreciate all the information you gave our audience.
Thank you.
Important Links:
About John Boruk
I have collaborated with College Funding Solutions, Inc. to present high school students and their parents with a cost-efficient and streamlined approach to attaining excellent post-secondary education at the most favorable price.