You Think You Know Someone
What Dr. Erik D'Aquino taught me about college decisions, financial aid, real expertise, good mentorship and the peculiar experience of discovering that one of your close friends knows a lot more than you gave him credit for.
Sometimes the expert is already sitting at your backyard cookout
I did not meet Erik because I was looking for an expert in higher education. I met him because our wives are friends, both are excellent high school teachers, and somewhere along the way the husbands got folded into the package deal.
If you are married to a dedicated teacher, you know how this works. A school event begins as something you are vaguely aware of, then becomes a date on the family calendar, then somehow ends with you carrying a folding table across a parking lot at 9:40 at night. Nobody officially asked you to help. Nobody needs to. You just find yourself holding one end of something heavy while somebody says, “Actually, I think that goes in the other building.”
Erik and I spent enough time in that general ecosystem to become real friends. Not professional-networking friends. Not the kind where you exchange cards and say you should get coffee, then both silently agree never to do that. Real friends. Cookouts, football, family stuff, home-repair conversations, ridiculous text threads, school events, and the normal accumulation of ordinary moments that turn an acquaintance into somebody you would call when something actually matters.
We even chaperoned a high school prom together. That is a useful experience if you have not felt old enough lately. You stand there supervising a room full of kids who were not alive when you went to prom, while music you consider relatively recent is apparently now “old school.” It is hard to maintain illusions about youth under those conditions.
We also disagree on a matter of deep cultural importance. I believe pineapple belongs on pizza. Erik is fiercely Italian and receives this opinion about the way the Vatican might receive a proposal for a drive-through window. We have discussed it. No progress has been made.
So for years, Erik was simply my friend Erik. Smart. Funny. Calm. Good husband. Good father. The kind of guy who actually reads instructions before assembling something, which already separates him from a large percentage of my social circle.
Then I had a complicated situation involving my son's education, and I called him.
I thought I was calling my friend.
About ten minutes into the conversation, I realized I had accidentally called Dr. D'Aquino.
I brought him a problem. He started taking it apart.
I expected advice in the usual sense. A few thoughts. Maybe a name to call. Maybe a “here is what I would do” followed by an entirely manageable list.
That is not what happened.
I explained the problem
At least, I explained what I thought the problem was. That distinction became important fairly quickly.
Erik started asking questions
Not dramatic questions. Precise ones. Then follow-ups. Then questions about things I had treated as unrelated.
The problem moved
By the time we were done, I was looking at the situation differently. The answer mattered, but the reframing mattered more.
That is one of the easiest ways to recognize real expertise. The expert does not necessarily impress you by producing an answer faster. Sometimes the expert slows you down long enough to notice that you are answering the wrong question.
I spend a lot of my own professional life around storytelling, strategy and how people make sense of complicated information. One thing I have learned is that the first version of a problem is often just the version that is easiest to say out loud. “We need more visitors.” “We need better applicants.” “My kid needs to pick a college.” Fine. But why? What changed? What are we assuming? What happens if we are wrong?
Erik was doing the same thing in his world. He was not treating college as a brochure-selection exercise. He was looking at the student, the school, the money, the path, the risks, the likely detours and the consequences several moves later.
Good advice is not somebody making the decision for you. It is somebody helping you see enough of the decision that you stop fooling yourself about what you are choosing.
That sounds obvious until the decision involves your own kid. Then every parent discovers that objectivity is a lovely concept other people should practice.
“Which college should my child attend?” is not one question
It only sounds like one because English lets us cram a horrifying number of variables into a very short sentence.
A family may think it is comparing schools. An experienced higher-education professional sees a chain of decisions. What does the student want to study? How sure are they? What happens if they change majors, which teenagers and young adults have been known to do? How much will each school really cost? What happens if a scholarship disappears? Can credits move if the original plan changes? Is graduate school likely? What kind of support will the student need when October of freshman year arrives and the excitement of the campus tour has been replaced by an 8:00 a.m. chemistry lab?
And then there is the student as an actual person. Some kids thrive in a huge university where 40,000 people seem to be moving in six directions at once. Some would rather be launched into the Atlantic from a catapult. Some want to go twelve states away. Some discover, after twelve states, that Mom's cooking was an underappreciated institutional asset.
None of these are small details. They are the decision.
This is why the question “What is the best college?” bothers me. Best for whom? Best for what? Best according to which set of priorities, and who chose those priorities?
Rankings are seductive because they replace judgment with order. Number 7 must be better than number 19 because seven comes first. Very convenient. It is also how you end up choosing a restaurant because it has the prettiest sign.
The better question is: What is the strongest realistic educational path for this particular student, given who they are, what they may want to become, what the family can responsibly afford and how much flexibility the plan leaves when real life interferes?
Sometimes the answer is a famous private university. Sometimes it is the public university an hour away. Sometimes it is a smaller college. Sometimes it is two years at a state or community college and a deliberate transfer. Sometimes the right answer is less glamorous at the beginning and much smarter by the end.
College decisions get distorted when families start solving for the reaction they expect from neighbors, relatives, Facebook, or the parent at the graduation party who cannot wait to tell everyone where his daughter was accepted. The student has to live the decision long after the congratulatory post stops getting likes.
Information is everywhere. Judgment is still scarce.
We can now compare schools, majors, costs, outcomes, campus photos and financial-aid terminology before breakfast. That is wonderful. It also means families can become more efficiently overwhelmed than any generation before them.
College is education. It is also a very large financial decision.
People get weird when money and college occupy the same sentence. We want education to be about aspiration, growth, possibility and becoming the person you were meant to be. All true. Then somebody sends a bill.
Families will spend three weekends researching a $38,000 car, negotiate over floor mats and walk away because the dealer tried to add $900 for something called “premium protection.” Then the same family can stand on a beautiful college campus, see brick walkways and a climbing wall, and become emotionally prepared to discuss a four-year commitment that makes the car look like a rounding error.
I am not saying families should choose colleges the way they choose appliances. I am saying money does not become less real because the decision is noble.
The sticker price is not always the price
Published tuition and total cost can change dramatically after grants, institutional aid, state aid, scholarships and other assistance. What matters to the family is the real net cost.
The first year is not the whole movie
A package that works beautifully for freshman year can become painful later. Renewal rules, tuition changes and altered circumstances belong in the conversation from the beginning.
Aid and debt are not synonyms
A grant reduces cost. A loan postpones payment. Work-study is work. The headline number on an “award” can hide very different things underneath it.
A simple example that makes the point
Imagine School A costs $80,000 a year and proudly offers your student a $25,000 scholarship. School B costs $32,000 and offers only $5,000. If you stop at the scholarship number, School A looks far more generous. If you own a calculator, School B suddenly becomes interesting.
That example is intentionally simple. Actual aid packages can involve grants, scholarships, work-study, federal loans, parent borrowing, institutional rules and conditions that make a tax return look like beach reading. The point is not that the cheaper school always wins. The point is that “they gave us more money” is meaningless until you know what the whole thing costs.
| What families see | What to ask next | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Scholarship | Is it renewable? What GPA, enrollment status or program conditions apply? | A generous first-year award can become an expensive surprise later. |
| Loan | Who is borrowing, how much, under what terms and for how many years? | Money that solves today's bill can become tomorrow's obligation. |
| Transfer plan | Which credits are guaranteed to apply to the destination degree? | “They should transfer” is not a sentence I would bet a year of somebody's life on. |
| Low first-year cost | What is the realistic total cost to graduation? | Freshman year is not the objective. Finishing is. |
This is where FAFSA, the CSS Profile, institutional aid rules and each school's own policies enter the picture. They are important, but I would resist the temptation to pretend that learning the acronyms means you understand the strategy. Knowing what a wrench is called does not make you a mechanic.
Use the official resources. Read the actual terms. Ask the financial-aid office direct questions. Write down the answers, because after the fifth college conversation every parent develops the completely false belief that they will remember which school said what.
Sometimes the smarter path has a less impressive sweatshirt
There is still a peculiar hierarchy attached to college names. Say one school and people nod as though the student has already become a senator. Say another and somebody immediately asks, “Oh, are they going to transfer later?”
That is a lousy way to make a six-figure family decision.
Community colleges and state colleges can be excellent starting points for the right student. A deliberate transfer plan can reduce cost, give a student room to mature academically, keep options open and still lead to the same bachelor's degree destination. The important word is deliberate.
A planned transfer is strategy. “We'll figure it out later” is not strategy wearing casual clothes.
If transfer is part of the plan, verify articulation agreements, prerequisites, program requirements and how the receiving school will apply the credits. Do not rely on a general promise that credits “usually transfer.” Usually is a wonderful word until twelve credits do not.
And there is another human reality worth saying out loud: a student can change. The seventeen-year-old who chooses a school is not necessarily the nineteen-year-old who chooses a major or the twenty-one-year-old thinking about graduate school. A good plan leaves some room for that person to become somebody slightly different without detonating the finances.
AI can help with the paperwork without pretending to be your kid
I am a big believer in using AI for the work machines are good at. Give it a pile of college notes and ask it to organize deadlines. Have it build a comparison table. Use it to explain the difference between terms you keep mixing up, create a list of questions for a financial-aid office, or turn a chaotic set of program requirements into something you can actually scan.
That is useful. It frees people to do the part humans still need to do.
Is this school right for this student? Is the debt worth it in this situation? Is the kid genuinely excited about the program, or did the tour guide have great hair and the campus have a lazy river? Is the parent pushing the school because it fits the child, or because saying the school's name feels good?
AI can help organize the evidence. It cannot sit at your kitchen table and know that your child shuts down in giant classes, comes alive when working with her hands, wants to be near her younger brother, or has been saying for three years that she loves biology but gets miserable every time actual biology homework appears.
Research should make judgment better. It should not replace judgment.
At some point, I realized this was not really a college story anymore
It started with my son. It turned into a lesson about what good mentors and advisors actually do.
I have met plenty of people with impressive titles. Titles tell you where somebody sits on an organizational chart. They do not tell you whether that person makes anyone around them wiser.
Erik did.
They shorten learning curves
A mentor lets you borrow experience. Ideally, you get the lesson without having to personally step on every rake in the yard.
They say the inconvenient thing
Useful people are willing to tell you that your favorite option is not obviously the best one, or that the question you keep asking is protecting you from the one you should ask.
They make themselves less necessary
The best mentor does not create a permanent customer. You leave better able to think through the next problem when they are not sitting beside you.
A good mentor does not simply show you the next step. Eventually, you start noticing the next step yourself.
That is a harder form of generosity than simply giving answers. Answers make the expert look smart. Better judgment makes the other person stronger.
Real leadership rarely arrives with background music
We have turned leadership into an industry. There are leadership books, podcasts, retreats, seminars, keynote speeches and enough LinkedIn posts about “servant leadership” to make you suspicious that nobody has time left to actually lead anyone.
Some of that material is excellent. Some of it appears to have been written by people whose greatest leadership crisis was choosing a breakout-room facilitator.
Up close, leadership is usually much less theatrical. It is preparation. It is being calm when everybody else is accelerating. It is explaining why a decision was made. It is taking the phone call nobody wants. It is giving somebody else credit when the thing works and accepting your share when it does not.
It is also knowing enough to ask the question that saves everyone six months.
I have watched Erik in rooms with other accomplished people. You learn something about a person's expertise when the people you assumed were the experts start taking notes when he talks. He does not need to dominate the room. The room gets quieter because what he is saying is useful.
Bad advisors validate. Good advisors advise. If you hire somebody to confirm every assumption you walked in with, you did not hire an advisor. You rented applause.
That line matters to me because friendship gives somebody every opportunity to take the easy route. Erik could have agreed with me, offered a few comforting sentences and gone back to whatever we were arguing about before. He did not. He was willing to be useful instead of agreeable.
Questions I would want answered before making a major college commitment
You do not need to turn dinner into a congressional hearing. But before a family commits serious time, money and several years of a young person's life, I would want these answers somewhere other than “I think so.”
Useful resources for families navigating college and financial aid
There is no shortage of advice online. Some of it is excellent, some of it was posted by a stranger named CollegeDad1974 who appears to be typing entirely in capital letters. For rules, forms, eligibility and institutional requirements, start with the people who actually administer them.
FAFSA, federal grants, work-study, federal student loans and official federal-aid guidance.
Visit StudentAid.gov →Information from the College Board about the CSS Profile used by participating institutions for certain nonfederal aid decisions.
Visit CSS Profile →A U.S. Department of Education resource for exploring institutions, fields of study, costs and student outcomes.
Visit College Scorecard →At some point, the kid has to own the life
This may be the hardest part for parents, particularly parents who are good at solving problems. We see a complicated process, so naturally we start solving it. We make spreadsheets, schedule visits, read deadlines, compare housing, calculate costs and remind the student seventeen times to send the email that takes ninety seconds.
Some of that is parenting. Too much of it becomes project management.
The student is eventually the one who has to get out of bed, attend class, speak to professors, make friends, recover from a bad grade, decide whether a major still fits, wash something occasionally and figure out that the dining hall closing time is not a personal attack.
The objective is not a perfectly managed college application. The objective is a young adult who is increasingly capable of managing a life.
Good advising should make the student more involved, not give the adults a more sophisticated way to take over.
I trusted him when the stakes were mine
This page is not a neutral review written after three phone calls and a questionnaire. Erik is my close friend. I know his family. He knows mine. We have stood around at school events together, eaten together, laughed together and wasted time arguing about pizza toppings with a seriousness the subject does not deserve.
That is exactly why the experience mattered to me.
I already liked Erik. I did not need him to impress me. When I called him about my son, the only thing I cared about was whether he could help me think clearly about something important. He did.
He saw choices I had not seen. He noticed consequences I had not considered. He asked questions I should have asked earlier. He did not make the situation magically simple, because good experts usually do not insult you that way. Complicated things remain complicated. He made it navigable.
More importantly, he did not take the decision away from me or from my son. He gave us a better map.
I can write all the complimentary things in the world about somebody's résumé. The part that means something is simpler: when the stakes involved my own kid, I trusted him.
That is a different kind of endorsement.
So yes, Dr. Erik D'Aquino is a higher-education leader, strategist, mentor and advisor with deep experience in enrollment and the decisions surrounding students and institutions. I understand that much better now than I did when we met.
But he is still Erik to me. The guy from the cookouts. My fellow prom chaperone. The calm one who wants to inspect the map while I am already halfway over the hill insisting we will recognize the road when we see it.
My friend.
And a man whose judgment I trust on education, leadership, people, planning and a great many other things.
Pizza remains under appeal.
College advising, financial aid and mentorship
The story is personal. These are the practical questions families tend to run into underneath it.
What does an educational consultant do?
The role varies. Some consultants focus on admissions, some on college selection, some on financial planning, some on particular student populations and some work primarily with institutions. At their best, they help families organize a complicated decision, understand options and ask better questions without pretending to make the decision for the student.
What is enrollment management?
Enrollment management is broader than admissions. It can connect recruitment, admissions, financial aid, institutional capacity, student needs, retention, data and long-term planning. In plain English, it is part of how a college thinks about who comes, whether they can enroll, whether they can stay and whether the institution can serve them well.
What is FAFSA?
FAFSA is the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Families use it to apply for federal student aid, and the information can also matter to states and colleges when they determine eligibility for certain forms of assistance.
Is FAFSA the same as the CSS Profile?
No. They are separate processes. FAFSA is the federal student-aid application. The CSS Profile is administered by the College Board and is used by participating institutions and scholarship programs for certain forms of nonfederal aid. Families should check each school's requirements rather than assuming every college uses the same system.
Should families compare financial-aid offers?
Absolutely. A big number at the top of an offer can contain very different things underneath it. Separate grants and scholarships from work-study and loans, check renewal conditions and look at the likely cost over the full path to graduation rather than one attractive first-year package.
Can community college be a smart financial strategy?
For some students, yes. Starting at a community or state college can lower early costs and create a thoughtful transfer route. The key is planning. Verify which credits apply, what the receiving program requires and whether the student's intended path actually works before assuming everything will transfer neatly later.
Is the college offering the biggest scholarship automatically the cheapest?
No. A $25,000 scholarship sounds better than a $5,000 scholarship until you compare the prices of the schools underneath them. Families should compare realistic net cost, future-year assumptions and required borrowing, not the emotional size of the scholarship headline.
Can an advisor guarantee admission or financial aid?
No legitimate advisor controls another institution's admissions or financial-aid decisions. Good advising can improve preparation, organization and judgment. It cannot turn somebody else's decision into a guarantee.
Can AI help with college research?
Yes. It can be excellent for organizing notes, comparing published information, explaining terminology, building timelines and generating questions to verify with a school. I would still check important admissions, cost and financial-aid facts against authoritative sources. Use AI to reduce busywork so the humans involved have more time to think.
What makes a good mentor?
A good mentor brings experience, judgment and enough confidence to tell you something you may not want to hear. The best ones do more than solve today's problem. They leave you better able to recognize and handle the next one yourself.
You can know somebody for years and still not know the thing they spent decades learning to do.
Then one day life hands you exactly the problem their experience was built for, and the guy you have been arguing with about pizza becomes the person you are very glad picked up the phone.
Still pro-pineapple. Friendship does not require surrender.