The ‘Certified Stranger’ every family needs
- Posted by admin
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- in College Pete
I spoke with a mom this week who I just can't stop thinking about. She has two great kids, with two sets of college aspirations, and two very different personalities. Planning for college with/for them has been...tricky.
In fact, at one point during our conversation, she told me point blank that what she really needed was a "certified stranger" to take the wheel.
I cracked up; actually we both did.
And the truth is, she's not wrong.
Some of you will remember Lisa, a client of mine in 2015 whose fall nearly got hijacked by a weekend of bleacher wisdom. One soccer game on a Saturday and she was in a panic - the wrong list, the wrong class schedule, the wrong take on financial aid.
Here’s what hasn’t changed in twenty-plus years: everyone still has an opinion. Your sister-in-law has one. The guy next to you in the bleachers has one. Your daughter’s best friend’s best friend’s mom definitely has one, and she will share it at pickup whether you asked or not.
What’s changed is the scale. Lisa got cornered by one confidently wrong parent at a time. Today you open Facebook and get cornered by four hundred of them before you’ve finished your morning coffee — the humble-brag post about the “perfect” kid who is somehow still “not sure she’s enough,” the thread insisting the flagship school “doesn’t take kids from our school/town/district anymore,” the mom who’s certain financial aid is a waste of time because hers didn’t qualify.
It’s not that anyone’s lying to you. It’s that they’re extremely confident about a data set of exactly one child — theirs — and applying it to yours like it’s universal law.
So here’s my pitch, if you can call it that: in a world with an infinite supply of well-meaning, totally uncertified strangers handing out opinions about your kid’s future, what you actually need is one very specific, extremely certified stranger. Someone who’s done this for twenty years, and not just lived it once for one kid.
In our house we have a saying, ‘save your relationship and get a lesson.’ I’ve hired coaches for my own kids to develop skills I knew I could probably teach them myself. And, I’m the son of two doctors who always outsourced my care to a trusted colleague. They never treated my brothers or me themselves.
My point is that even if it isn’t me who becomes your certified stranger, get someone else who is qualified to help you. Your child is likely to listen more closely to a third party with independent data than to you, even though you may have the exact same data. Having a certified stranger to help you navigate your college planning journey will not only yield better outcomes, it will save your sanity.
If you’re curious what that has looked like for families like Lisa’s – and other real people with real numbers, real financial aid outcomes, not just vibes — the results page on our website has a few examples. Maybe check them out and then let me know if you have questions about whether and how they may apply to your family’s unique situation.
