#176 Boosting Selective College Admissions and Affordability with Phil Black Transcript

THIS IS AN AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT… PLEASE FORGIVE THE TYPOS & GRAMMAR! xo-Lisa.

Lisa Marker Robbins  01:06

Are you concerned about the increasingly competitive college admission landscape and looking for strategies that could give your teen an edge at selective universities with acceptance rates at record lows and college costs reaching an astonishing $100,000 per year at some institutions, ROTC programs are becoming a powerful dual solution for families navigating the college bound journey in today’s hyper competitive admissions environment, finding ways to make your team’s application stand out while also Securing affordable pathways to excellent education can feel well overwhelming. That’s why I’m thrilled to welcome back to the show Phil Black, founder of serve well Academy. We’re going to discuss how recent changes in the college admission landscape are making ROTC programs more strategically valuable than ever before. Phil brings an extraordinary background as a Navy SEAL officer, Yale and Harvard graduate, and a father of four sons, three of whom have successfully pursued military education. Paths themselves. In our conversation, we’ll explore how ROTC scholarships can significantly boost your team’s chances of admission as selective universities, while addressing the financial concerns that keep many parents up at night, we’ll uncover why colleges might be more motivated to admit ROTC students, to make quotas and secure federal funding, creating a strategic advantage in the application process. You’ll learn what steps your team should take to build a competitive profile that appeals to both ROTC programs and selective colleges, whether you’re concerned about admission selectivity, college affordability or securing your teen’s post graduation career prospects, this episode will provide valuable insights into an option that could transform your family’s college planning strategy. I’m Lisa Marco Robbins, and I want to welcome you to College and Career Clarity a flourish coaching production. Let’s dive right in to a great conversation. Phil Black, welcome back to the show. It’s a pleasure to have you. It was great having you on the first time, and you always bring so much value.

 

Speaker 1  03:23

Thank you, Lisa, happy to be back, so we are diving

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  03:27

into it. Was your suggestion. You’re like, a lot has changed with ROTC, and we need to update our listeners so and we this wasn’t really like the main topic last time, but this time, it is before we get into ROTC. And what’s changed, some of our listeners are going to need to know why they should keep listening and why this is an important topic for them, and what is ROTC? Yes,

 

Phil Black  03:55

ROTC technically stands for Reserve Officer Training core. Some people may have heard of it as ROTC. You know, back in the day, 20 years ago, they would call it ROTC. A lot of of my peers have people who I remember that was a ROTC kid. So that’s what ROTC is. It’s one of really two big ways to become what’s called a commissioned officer in the military, meaning a junior officer in the military. One way to do that is to go to a service academy. Those are places like West Point, the Naval Academy, Air Force Academy, Merchant Marine Academy and Coast Guard Academy. So if you go to one of those institutions, those are standalone institutions. They’re four years. You go there, you wear a uniform every day. It’s very structured. It’s pretty rigid. You get a great education, and you get what we call the automatic job for five years, meaning your your payback time for that free education. Everybody who goes to a service academy is on a full scholarship. So that’s one way to become an officer in the military. You go to West Point, for example, and then you, you, you commit to five years as an Army officer. Then you can either get out or continue a career. The military do whatever you want. The other way to become a military officer is through ROTC. I like to say that it’s a it’s a kindler, gentler way to become a commissioned officer. West Point enable Academy. They can be pretty rigorous. They can be pretty intense. All immersive. ROTC is not that necessarily. You go to a traditional college. You go to Boston College. Both of my sons are at Yale on Navy ROTC scholarships. So I know that that lifestyle well, and you’re basically an average Joe student, except for the fact that you have a part time commitment to your ROTC, basically affinity group, or I like to say it like a team, and you have maybe a handful of other people who are Navy ROTC. You may have a handful of people in your class who are Army ROTC at the particular school. And you learn what it’s like to be an officer while you’re attending a traditional college. You have a couple extra classes, you do some leadership labs, and by the end of your four years, you graduate from Boston, college or MIT, wherever it might be that have ROTC programs, and then you do what the West Point graduate did? You serve in the military for five years. You get deployed. You You’re in charge of up to 200 people, even as a 2425 year old. So that’s the broad strokes. Two ways to become a commissioned officer in the military. There’s another way through Officer Candidate School. It’s it’s much more niche. We don’t have to worry about that today,

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  06:28

and we should say your previous episode with us was episode 144, so flourish, coaching. Co com, forward, slash, 144, and we talked about military service academies and college majors. My favorite topic, career development, if people want to go and listen to that, so you do a little bit more of a deep dive, really, on the cert that the different service academies and how they work. And so people are like, oh, I want to hear more about that one. That’s another episode to listen to. But so really, one of the benefits I’m hearing with ROTC is and thank you. I was always like, are we supposed to say ROTC, or are we supposed to say ROTC? So ROTC would be more contemporary language. I guess it sounds like probably, yeah, so with ROTC, this could be a good fit for a student who has interest in serving, but yet, once the more traditional and, as you said, gentler pathway, but the more traditional college experience,

 

Phil Black  07:32

correct? It’s somebody who has an interest, I like to say they’re considering, or they would consider serving their country post their four year education, they may not be that interested in doing the really super hardcore, structured what you see in the on the on the YouTube videos, with the yelling and screaming. There’s a little bit of that in the beginning, but it’s much more. I don’t want to say laid back, because there are some rules, and you wear uniform maybe once a week, and you have some obligation during the summer. But it’s not, it’s not all day every day. In fact, there’ll be some students, some friends of yours in college, who go through four years of college with you and don’t even know that you are in the ROTC unit. So and you can, you can take that one way or the other, but it is. It is a way to for students who, I like to say are academically motivated, they’re athletic, to some degree, they don’t have to be elite athletes, but they typically, that’s one of the big pillars that they look for people who are athletic, and then they’re interested in leadership and serving. Those are the three big categories. So if you’re looking at a four year college and that’s in the back of your mind, and you’re thinking to yourself, I’m a I’m a good student, you know you don’t have to be a 1600 sat and a 4.999 GPA, necessarily. You have to be a solid student. You have to be have some athletic ability. Again, you don’t have to be all world in your particular sport, but if you play a couple sports, maybe play a varsity sport. Maybe you play intramurals, or you play on a club team, or something great that the military loves that. And then there’s some interest in leadership and service. And you’re thinking, do I want to go through the traditional path that most people will take, or do I want to do something different? Do I want to really challenge myself? Do I want to have the opportunity to serve after I graduate? And then the other things that sometimes get their attention, and maybe that’s what we’ll turn into, is there’s a there’s a cost factor. If you’re an ROTC student. You can get nearly all of your college paid for. Now, it varies on the branches. So let me back up a little bit. ROTC is given. Is available in navy, army and air force. And part of the if you want to be a Marine officer, you would do you would do Navy ROTC. So the Marines are captured under navy. So in those three branches, those are the three branches that have ROTC programs. And it’s, it varies a little bit in terms of how much of a scholarship you get. I’ll use a personal example. As I said, my sons have Navy ROTC scholarships. They’re identical twins. They both go to Yale, and they their tuition, which is paid in full. By the Navy, was $75,000 per student per year. So from the family’s perspective, that gets my attention, because that’s a lot of money. And obviously gets their attention because, you know, at some point, either they’re going to be paying for it, or we’re going to share in that, in that payment, whatever it might be. So that’s that’s considerable, given that the skyrocketing costs of education this year. So it’s another reason why people are like, Wait a second. They can go to a traditional college, which we always thought they would do, but have this added layer of an ROTC commitment, and we’ll be able to afford it, maybe to the point where almost no cost. And then they’ll have a guaranteed job for five years afterwards, making $100,000 plus a year for five years, traveling the world, getting great leadership experience, getting international experience, learning how to deal with real world problems, that gets people’s attention.

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  10:51

So I have a question for you. You’ve mentioned just a few, a handful of colleges as you’ve mentioned this opportunity. So how do we know which of the three rotcs are offered at which campuses? And you mentioned campuses, universities that are fairly very selective. Let’s just say that. So you mentioned MIT, Boston, Yale. Are these programs only found at those selective institutions? So if we have a listener who’s like, you know, my kid was thinking about a state flagship school that’s maybe moderately selective, are those opportunities going to exist? And how do you find out where these opportunities exist?

 

Phil Black  11:38

Yeah, that’s the beauty of the ROTC program is that you get to decide what level of college your profile will align with. You may not want, or you may not be, or be interested in the MITs of the world. You may be interested in a state school. The way you look it up, it’s two ways you can either go to look up Army ROTC programs in the United States, and they’ll have a big, long list. And just to give you the scope, Army and Air Force have considerably more opportunities for ROTC. They’re on about 1100 campuses across the country. Navy is smaller in terms of their footprint for ROTC. Navy, ROTC is only at about 150 different colleges. So if you’re looking from for maximum opportunities, army and air force would have a huge range of schools that that offer it, include, you know, from the super, super selective to the the not as selective. And then Navy has fewer of them, but also a wide range from the MITs of the world to schools that are much not as highly selective.

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  12:39

So I was going to ask that so that the Navy ones still are at a wide variety of selective selectivity across the institution. Interesting, though, they’re only on 100 campuses, and they’re and they are feeding both to the Marines and the Navy after graduation. So yeah,

 

Phil Black  13:00

the Navy has a smaller footprint than those others. They don’t take quite as many officers as the other branches do. And some of the the the Air Force and the Army ROTC units might be smaller. There might be more of them, but they might be smaller. Some of the Navy ones are larger. So I don’t exactly know the numbers on how many they’re they’re pumping out each but there is, there is a pretty significant change on the 150 on the Navy side versus the 1100 on the on the Army and Air Force side.

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  13:26

Okay, so when you and I, we we engage a lot with each other on social and we email some so we’ve become friends. You said to me, I really feel like we need to talk about this right now, because there are some changes that in whether, no matter what somebody how somebody feels about politics right now, we’re going to not worry about that piece. But regardless of whether you think there’s positive or negative on what’s going on, there are changes that impact this. And you’re like, This is a timely topic that I think we need to revisit. So why is this important? Now?

 

Phil Black  14:04

Yeah, I mean, I actually wrote a couple of them down, and one maybe we’ll double click on if you will. But number one, it’s getting harder and harder to get into schools. Everybody probably acknowledges that, especially at the Super selective we’re looking at 3% at some schools, two and a half percent admissions rates. That’s dragging a lot of the other schools that used to be 20% select admit rate down into the low teens. So in general, it’s getting harder to get in. And some people are like, wait a second, ROTC is going to put me in a different category. And maybe that 3% looks more like 40% because I’m not competing against everybody. I’m in this small pile of ROTC candidates. So that would be number one, the selectivity and the admissions rates are plummeting to the point where and so many people are applying to so many colleges, just by the law of numbers, it’s getting harder to differentiate yourself. The second reason is, as I said, costs are skyrocketing. People are really looking for alternatives, whether it’s service academies, where you pay nothing, or ROTC. Programs where you pay almost nothing. So that’s that’s another big factor. As you said, there’s a new administration, they are breathing new life, if you will, into the military. The what used to be missing quotas in terms of recruitment into the military. Now this is on the enlisted side as opposed to the officer side, but the numbers of people joining the military have skyrocketed in the last administration. The army was down 25% missing their quota. I think the Navy was about 20% below their quota. Now those numbers are going through their going through the roof. So they need more officers in order to quote, unquote, be in charge of more enlisted people. I think there’s a growing sense of patriotism, at least from what, from what I’ve seen, obviously people, more and more people joining the military. So that’s that’s increasing the the salience of these ROTC programs on campuses, because the administration’s like, we need more officers, and they’re putting a sharper eye on how these different colleges are administering their ROTC programs. In other words, there may have been some ROTC programs, programs at colleges that had the ability to have 15 students, but they only had three seats filled that probably wasn’t, didn’t really hit the radar in the past administration, the new administration like, why aren’t you giving us 15 officers? You have the ability in your program to graduate 15? We want you guys to reach that number. We want you guys to hit your core. Hit your quotas now. Now, all of a sudden, those schools are like, we need to hit our numbers. So let’s take more ROTC people. And lastly, and that’ll let you jump in, is there is the sense these days, maybe you guys have heard that there’s been some back and forth about the federal government withholding money that they used to earmark for these big, prominent schools, the Harvards, the the princetons and other schools. This is just apparently the tip of the iceberg, but we’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars, 600 million, 700 million, and the administration is going to those colleges and saying, we take issue about how you’ve handled certain, certain things on campus, or protests, or Dei, whatever it might be, they’re going back and forth and saying, if you don’t clean this up, so to speak, we’re going to withhold this money. The colleges are bumping back and saying, but we want our academic freedom, we want our independence, we want our autonomy. So that’s probably going to be dealt somehow, probably in the courts. In the meantime, if those colleges don’t get that money, they really rely on that money, oftentimes, for billing the coffers for their need based financial aid. Now some people might think, Wait a second, I heard that Harvard has a $55 billion endowment. How could they possibly be relying on $500 million from the federal government? Certainly, they can create a need based financial aid bucket with their $55 billion the problem is that $55 billion endowment has a lot of strings attached. It’s in there in long term illiquid investments, they are earmarked to people who give the $200 million earmarked for their particular program. That’s not just a bucket of cash that, as we say, is fungible, meaning they could use it any way they want. A lot of that is is earmarked for certain programs. So it looks like if this is, if this, if this stalemate goes on, that those colleges are going to really be hurting for money. It seems crazy, but sometimes it’s it’s being uncovered that they need that $600 million not only to fund the need based financial aid bucket, but also to keep the lights on, to pay their workers, and this is something that is coming up. So the bottom line here is that it may be the case that a lot of these colleges that used to offer a lot of need based financial aid, meaning, if you didn’t make a lot of money, you were free to and even encouraged to apply, because if you didn’t meet certain income requirements, they would pay for your college. That may not be the case anymore. So some people are like, Wait a second. You mean, if I’m not wealthy, I’m not going to get I’m not going to get sufficient need based financial aid. I need to look for something else. So boom, ROTC steps into the breach and says, Well, you could still go to some of those highly selective schools that you would otherwise have to have need based financial aid, but you would do it on an ROTC scholarship. Well,

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  19:04

it also makes me think on that point, if there’s this gap, and if the schools still want to be able to offer scholarships to these students, and it’s not coming from those federal aid dollars, they might turn to raising their tuition or the hidden cost of I was just talking to an IEC who I had on the podcast recently, and she said one of her students who was in engineering ended up and it created a problem, having to pay 5000 more dollars for their degree than what they thought when they were looking at cost of attendance. And I said, Well, it’s because of the hidden fees related to certain majors, right? And so it just makes me think, if they’re going to try to bridge this funding gap, to fill the gap, then it could come in that way, which then, if the cost is going up, makes what you’re saying a little bit more appealing. Because I really heard two things that I think will resonate with our listeners, knowing our listeners very well, which is. My kid might be able to go. This could open the door to a more selective school for my student and and or this may reduce our out of pocket cost. You know, you and I were just laughing about, I’ve got two weddings for two daughters coming up, and I thought I was getting a pay raise a year ago when the youngest graduated from college. And that is not the case right now, because I have other things I’m paying for. So there’s always going to be these expenses. So why would we not want to be conservative with our expenses on or how we’re going to pay for college if we can save some Sure, I have a question about how this like piece of and I hadn’t really thought about it this deeply before, because I don’t work with this population as you do, but this idea of a school that is super selective, how does it work in the admissions office, with this idea of, hey, I’ve got I’m assuming whoever is representing ROTC on that campus is Saying to admissions, we’ve got a really great candidate, and we they’re going to advocate much like the coach for the whatever team is going to advocate with admissions to let this student in. How does that work? If you’re like, gosh, this could make a single digit or a double, you know, a teens in yield or, I’m sorry, acceptance rate moved to 40% How does that work? Sure,

 

Phil Black  21:24

yeah, I think it’s, I think you made a great analogy to an athlete. In fact, if things go the way they’re going with this need based financial aid potentially drying up or being curtailed or what have you, that the athletes now, the recruited athletes who get quote, unquote supported admissions, better be wealthy, because that may be that may, all of a sudden de hook them, as I like to say, versus ROTC. It’s the opposite. If you check the box off in your application that you’re an ROTC candidate, that that’s going to put you, as I like to say, from the big pile to the small pile. Instead of competing against 10,000 other people who look exactly like you, they all have 4.4 GPAs. They all play a varsity sport. They’re all in mock trial. They’ve all done an internship. They’ve all gotten a 14, 1500 on the SAT. Those are a dime a dozen. You don’t want to be in that big stack, because it’s really hard, hard to parse through that. Obviously, if you’re an athlete, you’re in the tiny little athlete pile. If you’re an ROTC, you’re in the tiny little ROTC pile. So number one, you’re not competing against the people who cut your same profile off the bat. The other thing, importantly is, if you have a scholarship, an ROTC scholarship, before you apply, or sometime during that application period before they make their decisions. In fact, the people that I work with with ROTC, I don’t insist, but I strongly recommend that they apply for that ROTC scholarship early, so that even if they apply in the early admission rounds on November 1, they attach to their application the letter that says, you won an ROTC scholarship. So on my son’s cases, they basically said, we both have ROTC scholarships. Translation, our application has a $75,000 check attached that really gets their attention, because not only are they now filling the quota of ROTC people, but they know the federal government is the one that’s paying that $75,000 payment. It’s not the school that’s absorbing your ROTC scholarship. It’s the school getting paid by the federal government on your behalf. So it’s almost like a super hook, because not only are you on a smaller pile, you’re not an athlete that they’re going to have to take money out of their their need based financial aid bucket if they don’t have the money, you’re coming, you’re supporting a mission that that they’re supposed to attain by filling their quota, and you’re bringing money with you, and you’re in a much smaller category of people to compete against.

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  23:45

Well, and it also makes me think about colleges are very concerned with yield, right? So families focus so much on what percentage of students are being admitted and all that. Well, the colleges have formulas. They’re like, No, no. We’re worried about, I mean, to put it just very bluntly, butts in seats. We need to fill our freshman class with paying clients. This is a business, and so if I would, I would guess, as you’re sharing kind of like how this happened with your son. So early on they get these ROTC scholarships, they attach this with their application on in the early round on November 1, and now they’re the college is going like, oh, well, if this student has an ROTC scholarship for our university, they’re more likely to say yes, so then the school’s more likely to say yes to them, right?

 

Phil Black  24:42

Yes. Not only that, Lisa, but in your ROTC, if you really want to get into details in your ROTC application, in many cases, you rank prioritize the schools you want to go to. So if you put MIT as number one, and you have the scholarship, you’re immediately going to match. So it’s either another it gives. Them even more comfort that you’re coming because they see that you were number that they were number one on your list. And then

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  25:06

that part’s transparent. The college side sees what your ranking is. The

 

Phil Black  25:11

only the college that was number one knows that that they were number one, Yeah, certainly. For the Navy’s case, the branches, there’s some variation in the branches, but and you can also tell them where you rank them, or you can tell them what you know, where they stand in the process. And so that’s certainly, as you said, from a yield perspective, gives the school a lot of comfort that you’re doing that, not only that, but you know, I advise all my students to get in touch with the ROTC person in charge there, take a visit, shake their hand, sit in their office, make sure that you’re really they know who you are. So you had initially said, Is it like call? Is it like athletes, where the college is advocating for somebody? I don’t think there’s a there’s a specific protocol where the ROTC person has 100% transparency through admissions and gets to hand select the people. But certainly, as we all probably know, there’s, there’s probably some permeability to between admissions and ROTC, if they have a host of, if they have 30 ROTC candidates, and the ROTC manager who’s on that campus knows one of them, or a couple of them, they have a great relationship with them. Oh, we know this girl is definitely coming. You know, she’s visited her offices. She’s made great relationships with us. I think that probably maybe not quite as explicit as as a coach who puts their asterisk next to a student’s name, but certainly in this big scheme of things, in these competitive worlds, that certainly I think is going to make a difference. So

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  26:36

okay, as you’re saying all of this, and you’re like, you want to have the ROTC scholarship commitment before you’re even submitting your applications? Ideally, ideally, I mean, in a perfect world, that’s where we’re trying to educate people on our two podcast about ideally, what you should do if you want to be ahead of the curve, right? So this sounds like it’s an additional layer of work where you just have to acknowledge that I am always advocating with starting this important work around like the Career Development and Advising stuff that I do back in sophomore year, if at all possible. Like, so there are real things that need to be done to put you in the best position. When do you say you should really start exploring ROTC? When can they even apply for these scholarships? Because I’ll just admit I assumed that rot scholarships you applied around the time that you’re applying for college, which sounded like some people do, but there is a way to get an edge. So when do you suggest to your clients that they start all this

 

Phil Black  27:41

Well, I certainly especially on anything on the military side, start early. So my program starts in ninth grade. So again, ideally, we start to open your awareness to these things, because eventually, when you apply in your junior year for an ROTC scholarship, you’re going to have to reach back and put on your resume the things that you did. So if you only start thinking about this as a junior, and they’re asking about leadership, and they’re asking, did you do these things over the summer, and what type of basically demonstrate that you’re interested in the military and that you just didn’t find out a week before the applications do that, maybe you could get some money out of this. Show us a history. Show us a track record. Show us the breadcrumbs that this is something that you’re interested in. That doesn’t mean in ninth grade, you have to know that you want to do this. That’s why I always say, if you’re considering it, if it’s on the radar at all, please take these five steps, hit these five milestones, such that when you become a junior, you’ve laid the groundwork. So if this is something that you really want to do, you want to be a pilot, you want then this thing really starts catching flame that you’re not regretting that. Oh, had I only gotten better grades in my science classes? Had I only done this particular thing over the summer that demonstrates my interest in STEM whatever those things are, there are many, many things that you can do to, quote, unquote, pad your resume such that when you’re applying for that scholarship, you you look like you’re you’re you’re in really good shape. Having said that, with all those things we talked about, and with my phone ringing off the hook, it is getting more competitive to get these ROTC scholarships, because people are awakening to wait a second. They’re hearing about friends who are doing it. They’re hearing, wait a second, the career market. Five years from now, it’s going to be crazy with AI and a changing career landscape, I would like my son or daughter to have a great, oftentimes STEM education, and have that guaranteed college or that guaranteed job making $100,000 a year, guaranteed for five years, to help them get their footing, to help them launch their their world, to help them see the world that’s becoming a much bigger thing just because of the circumstances. It’s not just 20 years ago where people could just Bumble into a job somewhere and be fine. This is a very dynamic marketplace, and being equipped with a with a surface academy or an ROTC scholarship, getting that leadership experience for five years, even if you then left the. Military and went out into the real world. You have as a 26 year old, you have a lot of experience, you have a lot of leadership experience. You have management experience, and oftentimes, with the amount of money that students make, not only saving it during college, but making money during their five years, I want them to have $125,000 in the bank if, if and when they leave the military after five years to go to grad school, to fund a startup, to buy a home, to travel the world, you know, be be ahead of the game, not be backpedaling with $100,000 in student loan debt after graduating from school with with an with a major that you weren’t even really that that wedded to. Well,

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  30:40

we did a deep dive on that line of reasoning in that previous episode. So absolutely, you know, go back over there to Episode 144, where we really hit the you’re being paid afterwards to do a job. You know what it makes me think of when you said you start as early as ninth grade. Well, you, I mean, you’ll work with people. You’ll start with students later than that, right? Or do they have to start with you in ninth grade?

 

Phil Black  31:06

No, no, no. I start with people at any age, because there are people who have done many things that are going to resonate with the military. There’s not a like a drop dead milestone that if you didn’t do by the end of ninth grade, take your name off the list. You

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  31:19

know what I heard in there is, and this is what it made me think of. I had Rick Clark from Georgia Tech on the podcast on April 8. And I’m, you can see I’m searching here for what number that is. Episode 169, so floors, coaching, CO, com, forward slash, 169, and he talked about the hidden impact that the major that you put on your your application is going to play in the admissions office, and they don’t even admit to major at Georgia Tech. So he was just kind of talking about this in general, and he talked about a term, so we’re gonna, we’re gonna coin a new term for you, Phil, all right. He talked about FTM. And they talk about FTM, FTM, FTM, all the time at Georgia Tech, and they talk about it a lot of other schools. And that is fit to major, right? So he said, we’re looking for evidence of fit to this major, and we’re going back to the classes that you took in high school, the extracurriculars that you did, how you filled your free time where your intellectual curiosity lies. What job shadows? How do you know that this major is a fit for you? And so what I heard you saying, my brain right away went, Oh, there’s like a fit to military, like a different type of, a type of FTM, right? Or fit to ROTC, right? That’s a little bit more of a mouthful. I don’t know if we want to coin that one, right? But really, there are things that you can be doing ninth, 10th and 11th grade, just like fit to major. They’re going to be investigated to see, do you show the athleticism, the leadership, the academic, you know, whatever, whatever level of school selectivity you’re looking at, sure, but there’s a fit to military piece as well for the people that are headed down this path. And Rick did a really great job of explaining it over there in episode 169 but it’s all about being able to demonstrate your fit. And that’s why starting early is important, right?

 

Phil Black  33:16

And that and that’s why in the program that I do, I’m giving them suggestions all the time what type of if they’re interested in pilot being a pilot. Go to air shows. Start getting your groundwork, your ground study and to be kept. Getting your private pilot’s license, get your medical, get your your a one, I think it’s called your health physical. So getting these types of things, laying that groundwork, dropping those seeds, if, if possible, dropping those breadcrumbs, such that when you crescendo, when you send that application, it’s a very easy story for them to follow. They see you’ve slowly gotten more and more sophisticated in what your interests are, and you’re getting deeper and deeper on certain certifications. You have bought software that you use at home, fight simulator software, like all these things, again, in an ideal scenario, if you have an eighth or a ninth grader, who’s again, even sniffing around the military, get them involved early, slowly but surely, start building that demonstrated interest that fit to military. So by the time they have to apply, and as you said, applying early better, the more you already have in the can, the earlier you’re going to be able to apply and look like you’ve been there before. Instead of cobbling together volunteering for all these clubs in the middle of 11th grade, because you’re now so much to do. Yeah, you’re realizing that, oh, it looks like I need to have some extracurricular activities on my application. I better start. I better start founding six or seven new clubs at school. I mean, that the colleges see through that.

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  34:37

Yeah, I actually had a college counselor at a private, you know, or a private high school here, say to me this week, you know, I’m reading for a highly selective institution, and major hacking no longer works. That’s like leadership hacking, right there. It doesn’t work. They see right through it, right so these are, I get a lot of people it’ll say to me. That’s so early to start. But here’s my thing, even if they start down the road and they go, You know what I’m doing these things and it’s not a fit for me, that’s not a failure. That’s a win, because it’s one step closer to clarity. And that’s what we encourage people to do with you know, that’s why you do job shadows or informational interviews to see things in action, as well as bid the build the resume so that you’re demonstrating fit. So if people want to work with you or learn more about how you add value to these pathways, what’s the best way for them to do so

 

Phil Black  35:33

probably start off at our website, serve well. Academy.com like serving your country well. And that probably a good starting point. You could check us out on Instagram as well, and happy to walk people through the process. And you know, just reiterate, as you said, this is not a plea that people have to fit. Have to know that they’re interested in the military on day one. It’s an awareness. It’s an opening their mind to the possibility, even the parents too, because over time. As you’re observing your child, you can kind of get a feeling, are they showing this academic, athletic and leadership? Is it is? Are they forcing themselves into doing it, or are they naturally resonating to those types of things? And if that’s the case, then maybe they start getting closer and closer and closer to this becoming a reality, which probably by the beginning of 11th grade, they should really start zeroing in, like, Hey, I’ve been, I’ve been dancing around this topic. I’ve been preparing myself, just in case this military thing really is taking form. Now I really think I want to do it, or No, I don’t want, I don’t want to do it. Certainly you’re not going to have done anything that, that you will have regretted because you’ve done athletic stuff or or extracurriculars related to the military or leadership things, those are going to be all very transferable if you decide that the military is not for you, but certainly keep an awareness of laying some foundation, laying some groundwork, in case this thing comes to fruition.

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  36:55

Well, just like we say, we do career advising and development, it sounds like military advising and development. Thanks, Phil. I appreciate you making the time. Thanks

 

Phil Black  37:04

Lisa, thanks for having me

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  37:12

back. Thank you to Phil for sharing how ROTC programs can provide both an admissions advantage and financial relief. If you found this information valuable now is the time to take action, as we discussed earlier, strategic action will always help and never hurt your students. Trajectory. First visit flourish coaching co.com forward slash video to access my free on demand Guide To Helping our teen choose the right major college and career this resource will help you integrate what you’ve learned today into your broader strategy. Now. Secondly, if your team is still interested in exploring ROTC as an option, Phil has a number of fantastic blogs on the topic. I’ve linked to them in the show notes, or you can just visit his website at servewell academy.com to learn more about building that competitive fit to military profile. Remember, the earlier you begin preparing for these opportunities, the stronger your team’s application will be. Don’t wait until senior year, when it might be too late to develop the leadership skills and physical fitness needed to be a competitive ROTC scholarship applicant. If you found today’s episode valuable, please take a moment to subscribe, rate and review the podcast. Your support helps us reach more families who need this crucial information during their college bound journey. I’m Lisa Marco Robbins, and thank you for listening to College and Career Clarity, where we help your family move from overwhelmed and confused to motivated clear and confident about your teen’s future. You.