Dr. Eric Endlich on Gap Year Experiences for Neurodivergent Young Adults

Debbie: 

Hey, Eric, welcome to the podcast.

Eric Endlich, Ph.D.: 

Thanks Debbie, it’s great to be here.

Debbie:

I’m looking forward to talking about this phase of life with our young adults. I’ve done a couple episodes on the transition to college. We’ve done some conversations about navigating that and how to best present yourself to colleges. And we’ve talked about alternative paths, but we haven’t really talked about GAP years, GAP program. So I’m really excited to share this also personally. This is what I’ve spent the past year and a half of my life focusing on. But before we get into that, I know you do a lot of work in the space of supporting the transition to college and helping students. So can you tell us a little bit more about the work that you do in the world?

Eric Endlich, Ph.D.:

Sure, yeah. I, my background is as a clinical psychologist and I worked in the mental health field for a long time. Really enjoyed working with teens all that time. And then I discovered educational consulting, really fell in love with it and transitioned to doing this full-time. So I work with teens, primarily neurodivergent teens who have learning differences or mental health challenges on the whole transition to college process. So figuring out if they’re college ready, figuring out where’s a good place for them to apply, helping them get the applications done, write the essays, as well as kind of choosing summer programs, gap year programs, high school courses, all that good stuff. And sometimes we stay in touch after they’ve started college to make sure the transition works well too. A lot of it is about being kind of college ready and making sure that they choose a good option for themselves.

Debbie: 

Yeah, that’s great. And I just want to share with you and also with listeners, it was Sam Young of Young Scholars Academy who connected us. So I love Sam’s framework in supporting neurodivergent students as well. So that’s why I knew I wanted to be in touch and learn more about your work.

Eric Endlich, Ph.D.:

Yeah, Sam’s great. And I love working with neurodivergent students in general, but especially twice exceptional students, which is Sam’s gig too.

Debbie: 

Yeah, that’s great. Yeah, for sure. And so you said one of the things you are working on is to figure out whether a student is ready. And I’m just wondering, do you have some kind of best practices or thoughts? Like, how would a parent listening know if their child is ready for that? Because I will just say, in reading articles, again, because where we are in our stage of life, I’ve heard advice from college advisors or admissions specialists who might say, you know, your kid’s gonna be in such a different place nine months from now, just proceed and assume this growth spurt going to happen. And it can be hard to know where is my child going to be. So how do we do that?

Eric Endlich, Ph.D.:

Yeah, it’s a good point and a good question. And certainly, if you’re talking about a ninth or tenth grader, what you’re seeing now may be quite different from what you see when they’re on the verge of starting college. So certainly age and maturation can help a lot, but I wouldn’t just assume that everything’s going to fall into place. And with the pandemic, it’s been even more and I have webinars on it. So I don’t know if I can fully do justice to it. But if your child is in high school and they’re taking challenging courses and doing well, by challenging courses, I mean, honors, AP, IB, dual enrollment, and they’re getting good grades, there’s every chance that they are college capable, that they’ll be able to handle the academics in college. And sometimes when kids get accepted to a college, they or their parents think, well, the college wouldn’t have accepted me if they didn’t think I was ready. But being college capable and college ready is not the same thing. Being college capable means you can handle the academics. Being college ready means you’re ready for the independence of living away at college. Now, if you’re gonna live at home and go to a community college, and especially just take one or two courses and maybe work part-time, then you may in fact be college ready although even there, there’s gonna be some changes from high school. But if you’re talking about moving away, living in a residence hall, being in college full-time, not living with your parents anymore, that is, you’re making two major transitions at once. You’re transitioning to college level academics and you’re transitioning to being away from your parents. If you’ve been pretty independent in high school and nobody’s helping you make sure your assignments get done or that you know, brush your teeth or go to sleep on time or take your medication. And you’re doing all this stuff really independently. You might in fact be college ready. I’m not saying kids aren’t — plenty of kids are. But if you struggle with time management, especially, uh, and getting assignments done, procrastination organization, uh, you probably need to work on some skills. And I break it down to a few main skills. You need to have self-awareness. So you need to know, what are the things you need help with. You know, like maybe I’m not good at making friends or I’m not good at, you know, it’s not good or bad, but you know, it’s hard for me to remember to take my medication or I get so wrapped up in social media that I stay up really late knowing those things about yourself and then being able to self-advocate or take steps to address them, whether it’s getting help by going to the counseling center in college, talking to your professor when you’re struggling with a class, going to the tutoring center, taking some appropriate steps to deal with those challenges.

Debbie: 

Yeah, I love that distinction between College Capable and College Ready. That is really important. And also, I would love it if, you know, we can get some links for you for some of the articles you’ve written and your webinars, we can include those in the show notes, because I think that would be of great interest to listeners. And, you know, before we get into the gap year conversation as well, I’m just wondering what you have found in terms of the, I don’t know, I like statistics, even though they don’t always tell the whole story. But in terms of the reality for that first year of college or moving into college for neurodivergent students, in terms of how successful it can be or how, I guess just how smooth that transition or rocky that transition can be. Do you see any kind of trends or what have you noticed in your work?

Eric Endlich, Ph.D.:

I can tell you that a survey that was done last year, 2023, by a company called EAB found that 22% of high school students said they didn’t feel ready for college. Students who are planning to go to college don’t feel ready. That’s across the board, that’s not neurodivergent students. And that’s from the student’s own perspective. I think there’s plenty of students who think they’re ready and their parents would say, whoa, they are not ready. They forget their homework.They can’t remember to brush their teeth or take a shower or what have you. So yeah, I don’t know a lot of statistics off the top of my head. I would say certainly the kids that I work with, most of them have things they need to improve to be optimally college ready. But that’s probably true of neurotypical students too. And it’s not that you have to have all of the skills mastered. If you struggle with going to bed on time or getting your assignments in on time doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go to college, but you should at least have that awareness and have some plans to deal with it and figure out how am I gonna move the needle on that? Am I gonna work on those skills before I start college, like in a gap year? Am I gonna get some robust support while I’m in college to make sure I don’t kind of fall off the map and so on?

Debbie: 

Yeah, yeah, OK, that’s great. Thank you. So let’s then pivot to gap years. And I feel like there’s been an increasing interest in gap years, maybe since COVID, it’s certainly something that in my family we always kind of assumed was going to be the plan to give that extra year to kind of develop and grow and mature. And I hear more and more that, I think more and more students should, you know, every student should do a gap year. And I know they’re more popular perhaps in Europe. Just as a way to kind of set the tone, what do you think in terms of how popular gap years are, kind of what’s the general thought about taking a gap year?

Eric Endlich, Ph.D.:

Yeah, well, I would agree that the pandemic shed put a spotlight on gap years. I think, you know, when we were early on in the pandemic and a lot of education was remote, I think a lot of kids felt like, hey, that’s not what I’m looking for in college. I want to be in the dorms. I want to, you know, make friends and so on. I don’t want to be sitting in my bedroom on Zoom. So so I think for a fair number of kids, they decided, you know, I got into college, but I’m going to take a gap year. And hopefully by the time I start college, it’ll all be sort of back to normal or back to what I’m expecting from the traditional college experience. So I think that really accelerates things. Also, I think there’s been increasingly people gathering data on gap years, finding that kids who take gap years, and again, this is across the board, not just kids with learning differences that they are more likely to graduate on time, they’re more mature, they have a better sense of what they wanna do, what they wanna study, they get better grades. And so colleges increasingly are open to that, supportive of it, even a handful of them will throw money at kids to incentivize them to take half years. So I think it’s definitely, definitely growing. When I talk to kids though, I would have to say a lot of them are resistant to the idea.

A lot of them are like, oh no, you know, all my friends, you know, everyone else in my class is going straight to college. I don’t want to be the one who’s fallen a year behind. The irony in that, of course, is that if you take a year to work on your college readiness, your maturity, whatever it is, whatever skills you need to build, you may be more likely to graduate and graduate on time as opposed to jumping in when you’re not ready and maybe not graduating at all.

Debbie: 

Yeah. And I’m wondering if because of COVID to that there were more students who were taking time and that age, you know, whether it’s your friends or just being the same chronological age as your, you know, your roommate or the other students in your class and university is probably a wider range at this point.

Eric Endlich, Ph.D.:

Mm hmm. Yeah. I mean, there’s so many things that have thrown people’s schedules off. One is mental health challenges, which were already on the rise, but really got accelerated during COVID for a variety of reasons, which we won’t go into. I’m a mental health professional by training, so I could talk about that for a while. But because of that, you know, some kids have taken leaves of absence for mental health reasons. So then they took longer to graduate high school.

Debbie: 

So as someone who has gone down the rabbit hole of gap year experiences, how would we even define what a gap year is? Because there’s no one way that this should look, right?

Eric Endlich, Ph.D.:

Yeah, gap year really just means that you’re taking a year or potentially more than one year between high school and college. And of course, there’s no deadline on starting college. You can start college at any age in life. There are people who start college decades after they’ve graduated high school. But for the sort of stereotypical situation of a kid who wants to go to college from high school, it typically will mean taking a year between high school and college. What you do during that year, however, could be almost anything. I don’t want to see kids spending that year sitting at home watching TV or playing video games, I want them to be doing something constructive that’s going to kind of move their development along or build their skills. But it could be that they start their own business. And that may sound crazy. But teens start their own businesses all the time. So could be getting a job and working and saving money, which I think for some parents, that’s not a foreign concept at all. Lots of parents had to kind of earn money for college. So could be something that’s actually financially helpful in the college process. It could be doing some community service, mission work, volunteer work to make the world a better place and pursue something that a student feels passionate about. Could be an independent project, or finally it could be a formal gap year program that the family is paying money for. And that’s, I think, probably more of what we’re going to focus on here, those programs that are kind of structured and designed to help kids become college ready.

Debbie: 

Yeah, yeah. And before we get to that, do you get a sense from universities that they have a preference of how that gap year is spent? Are they very individualized?

Eric Endlich, Ph.D.:

I think the main thing is that the student has a plan. So if you get accepted, if you’re a high school senior, you get accepted into college, and you’re gonna put down that enrollment deposit and make that commitment, generally, not all colleges, but many colleges are completely fine if you defer and say, I’m gonna start not this coming fall, but a year from the fall, and here’s what I wanna use that time for. So as long as you have a plan, you say, I’m gonna you know, work and save money. I’m gonna get a job at, you know, wherever my local cafe, or I’m going to do some internships and help figure out what I wanna do for a career before I start college. So as long as you present some sort of reasonable plan, I think generally colleges are fine. They’re not necessarily biased for a specific thing.

Debbie: 

Okay, that’s good to know. So yeah, I would love if we could talk a little bit about some programs, especially knowing the space that you, your kind of sweet spot for where you like to work and supporting neurodivergent students, because just having spent a lot of time on the Gap Year Association website, there are so many options. I’m wondering how you would encourage parents to start to identify what would be the right type of program if they’re looking at a more formal program that would be a good fit for their child?

Eric Endlich, Ph.D.:

Yeah, well, you know, first of all, I should say there are gap year specialists. There are gap year consultants who do nothing but gap year and folks are welcome to seek out and hire them. Sure, they know way more programs than I do, but it is something that comes up a lot with families I work with. So I do help them find gap years, gap year programs. And I do try to make it my business to know about the gap year programs that are specifically oriented towards students with learning differences or mental health challenges. And I recently did a panel discussion of a number of them, which I have a YouTube recording of that I can provide the link to that too. So as far as how to find them, they can talk to us consultants, if you’re already working with a consultant, they can help you find some of these programs. You can also talk to other parents. So I co-manage a Facebook group of 16,000, almost 17,000 parents of college-bound neurodivergent students. And it’s very common for people to put into the discussion, hey, my kid needs such and such. Does anyone have any ideas? My kid wants to study engineering and is looking for a summer program. Or does anyone know anything in the Midwest for this particular need? So reach out to other parents. There’s so many parents who have gone down this road before you. Obviously, you can do searches online, whether with a search engine or an AI tool as well.

Debbie: 

In your experience, does it really depend? I’m thinking that there are probably programs that are focused on those executive function skills that you talked about, being college ready, being able to manage your time, pay attention to deadlines, all of those kinds of things. I imagine there are some that are geared more towards social skills and feeling more equipped to engage in those environments. How do you advise parents on figuring out what would best support their student in terms of getting them college ready? Should they be looking at something that is going to, again, give them those specific skills, which may not be as exciting as some of the other programs that are available? Like, how do you help parents kind of hone in?

Eric Endlich, Ph.D.:

Well, it’s not dissimilar to the process of choosing colleges or summer programs in that it comes back to what is it that you want to accomplish? What are the skills you want to build? Or what is it you want to get out of that year? So for some kids, for example, the goal might be, I’m in high school, I have no idea what I want to major in. I don’t want to spend a lot of time and money in high school just sort of puttering around. I wanna sort of figure out what I wanna do and then start college with a particular focus. Obviously there are plenty of kids who go to college undeclared and change majors and all of that. But there are gap years. For example, there’s a program called Dynamee in Massachusetts where students do some internships during that year and that can help them figure out what they want to do. You can also do summer programs during high school, I have lots of kids who do a summer program on a particular topic. It might be STEM related. It might be arts related, partly to help them figure out if they really wanna go into this particular field. So that’s sort of one type of goal. Another goal, as you said, might be to work on executive functions, executive and planning and organizational skills. And if it’s a gap year program that’s designed for kids with ADHD or that explicitly talks about executive function skills and obviously that could be a good option. If it’s an, a program that has a large, that’s more focused on the autistic population or has a lot of autistic students, there’s a good chance there’s going to be a strong social emotional component. Um, so you kind of want to look, match up the population and the needs, depending on, as you said, what are the skills you want to work on? And, um, then there’s, there’s postgraduate or PG year programs, as well as gap year programs. I think people tend to sort of treat them somewhat interchangeably, and it’s totally fine to look at both. But PG programs, postgraduate year programs, tend to be offered at high schools, typically private boarding schools. And in those programs, frequently there’s an academic component where you’re taking some courses. And if you’re a high school student who needs a longer runway and maybe a little bit more on your transcript to sort of have a more robust college application, those can be a good option. So most of the time, this is a question that comes up a lot, when should we apply to college if I’m gonna take a gap year? Do I apply in 12th grade and defer? Or do I do the gap year and then apply to college? And like everything else in this field, it depends. So if you’re a senior and you have a pretty good, some one family called it a portfolio, if you can mount a reasonably good application based on your transcript and your activities and whatnot, go ahead and apply and defer. And if you get into college and you’re happy with your outcomes, it’s a real win-win. You go off to your gap year and you don’t have to think about college applications. You can just focus on that gap year.

Worst case scenario, if you go off on that gap year, let’s say you’re doing some internships or some work and then you decide, you know what, I got into this college for engineering and I changed my mind, I decided I wanna be a writer and I wanna go study creative writing in college. You can still go and apply again next year. You’re not absolutely locked into it. But for students who are not quite there, who they’re for various reasons, might have sort of, I hate to say a weaker application doing that PG year program, getting more stuff on their transcript, getting some good recommendations, maybe some more activities, they might wanna wait and apply a year after senior year because they’ll have more to talk about. Or let’s say if they’ve started a business, they could write some really good essays about what they did during that year.

Debbie: 

And the same question as before in terms of how colleges perceive this, a student taking a gap year. Is there any difference in how they look at, other than the resume or the application might be more robust if it’s done during or after a gap year? But is there any downside to applying after graduation from high school from the college perspective?

Eric Endlich, Ph.D.:

Um, no, not from the college perspective. And if anything, I would say they respect a student for taking more time to mature and doing something responsible, figuring out what they want to do. You know, starting a business, doing volunteer work. I think they respect all of this. I think that that’s all a plus. And I should also mention that one more year is also one more year of brain development. So we’ve talked about, you know, we touched on executive function skills. The part of your brain that is responsible for executive functioning, the frontal lobes continues to develop. I won’t go into the neurobiology, but that continues to develop into your mid to late 20s. There’s a reason why car rental companies don’t rent to younger drivers, because your judgment and your executive functioning are still developing. So that’s just from an executive functioning standpoint, one more year of brain development is a good thing. Back to your question about applying in senior year versus a year later, I think from the student or the family standpoint, it’s just generally more convenient to apply while you’re still in high school. You can walk into your teacher’s office and say, hey, can you write a reference for me and sit down and have that conversation with them.

If it’s a year later, now it’s been, you know, they’ve been working with other students. Hopefully, they still remember you, but the memories aren’t going to be quite as fresh. You have to, you know, log in and access things. You know, you’ve got to request transcripts. There’s all this communication with your teachers, with your counselor. I think it’s just less convenient, especially if you don’t have as easy access to your school platform, counselors, teachers, transcripts. It’s completely doable. Students do it all the time, but I think it’s just more seamless when you’re doing it along with everyone else in your class.

Debbie: 

Yeah, yeah, we did that second option because of just stress and anxiety of senior year alone, we’re like, you know, let’s just take this off the plate and we’ll deal with the next year. So, that’s where we are right now. But that’s good to know. 

Eric Endlich, Ph.D.:

Yeah, and of course if a student’s overwhelmed, you know, if they’re in 12th grade and they’re having a mental health crisis or they’re barely keeping their head above water, academically, you know, emotionally, don’t put more on their plate. But when I work with, I work with high school students primarily, occasionally I work with college students, but primarily I’m working with high school students applying to college. We really try to get those applications and essays done over the summer, not during the school year, so they won’t be overburdened during senior year.

Debbie: 

So you mentioned a program in Massachusetts earlier in our conversation. And I would love it if we could just give parents a sense of the types of programs that exist specifically for neurodivergent students. Like what might they expect to see in a program in terms of maybe the duration and the types of environments or activities they could expect to engage in?

Eric Endlich, Ph.D.:

Sure. Yeah, I mean, I’m typically, we’re typically looking at year long programs or programs that would last for at least an academic year. Although their programs in some cases can be flexible and be you could, you know, sort of mix and match more than one thing during a gap year. There are programs that are located on college campuses, not very many. So landmark college, which is one of only two colleges in the US that are exclusively for neurodivergent students. They have a program called Transition at College. The nice thing about doing a program at a college is you’re already starting to kind of get that feel of a college, being on a college campus, living in the residence hall and so on. And they are certainly familiar with and comfortable with autistic students as well as students with other diagnoses. Another program located on a college campus is a program at Mitchell College in Connecticut called Thames. That’s been around for a long time. And again, it gives students the opportunity to have that kind of college-like experience. And in both cases, they’re taking maybe one or two courses, not a full college load. So it’s sort of a slow on-ramp into college. Then there’s programs located, as I said, there’s postgraduate programs located at high schools. There’s Middle Bridge School is a private high school in Rhode Island that specializes in neurodivergent students. They have a PG year at Franklin Academy in Connecticut Another private school for neurodivergent students has a PG year There are also non-residential programs so those are all examples of programs where the student would live at the program. There’s another program called Winston Transitions. They have a location in New York and San Francisco. Those are non-residential programs. So you would sort of need to live in the area and go to the program during the day. But that typically is gonna make the program less expensive, but also less immersive. So just kind of depends on what you’re looking for. There’s also, and I’ve mentioned high school settings, college settings. There’s also a program called SOAR, which is more of an LD or ADHD program. So for students who have an ADHD diagnosis, mostly wanna work on executive functioning, that can be a good option. Those are a few examples.

Debbie: 

Yeah, the SOAR program was one we looked at because my child did a summer camp through SOAR years ago. And it’s more of an adventure program, just to give listeners a sense too, that is one where you’re traveling around and you’re really doing outdoor adventure things while building these other skills. So it wasn’t the right fit for us. But an interesting option for families who have a kid who really likes that kind of experiential thing.

Eric Endlich, Ph.D.:

Exactly. And that’s, you know, I want to be familiar and help families be familiar with the range of options so they understand it’s a gap year isn’t just one thing. It could be that sort of adventure type program. There are many, many gap year programs that have a travel component or adventure component that aren’t specifically for neurodivergent students. And just because you’re neurodivergent doesn’t mean you have to go to a program that’s exclusively for neurodivergent students. But again, it depends on what you work on, what you want to work on. If you just want that year to kind of explore the world and do some cool things and take a break from school, because you’ve already been in school for 12 or 13 years before you do another four years, then you could do a gap year that’s more sort of fun, so to speak. I’m still building some skills, but maybe not as academic or not as focused on skill building as the college readiness type programs we’ve been talking about.

Debbie: 

Right, right. And I’ll just say, you know, I think for a lot of us, I know when I was looking I was pulled to things that I wish I had done as a gap year and I always have remembered, oh, this isn’t for me. This is not my gap year. This is my child’s gap year. It has very different needs and a way of navigating the world. I want to spend a moment just talking about mental health challenges as well, which you know, might be separate from the neurodivergence often co-occurs with our neural divergence students. Um, are there any special considerations or things you would want parents who are looking for more of a therapeutic program for a gap semester or a gap year that we should keep in mind?

Eric Endlich, Ph.D.:

So none of the programs I mentioned are therapeutic per se, although certainly a ton of these students do have mental health challenges and they may have mental health staff or support students in getting mental health. I think, so I think there might be sort of a small mental health component to some of them, but if that’s the main focus, then you would be looking for more of a therapeutic program. There are therapeutic consultants that really specialize in this area. So that’s a bit outside my expertise, even though I’m a mental health professional by training. There’s programs like the DORM, which is in New York City and Washington, DC, which is more explicitly therapeutic. The therapeutic programs tend to be even more expensive, but they’re explicitly therapeutic, but depends on what you’re looking for. If you just need a safe place and you wanna continue seeing your therapist, you could probably do that at any program. If you want a program that is primarily focused on helping you build emotional regulation skills and so on, that’s something different. There’s also, you know,

There’s a program called Semester Off in Massachusetts. It’s just what it sounds like. It originally was for students who had to take a break from college, typically for mental health reasons, started by a psychiatrist. It is not a residential program, so you would need to live in the greater Boston area or have a way to have housing there, but it can also be used now as a gap year option, they’ve kind of expanded the population that they’re serving. And then there are some residential programs for college students that students can use as a gap year. I didn’t mention them before because they’re not gap year programs exclusively. So I’m thinking of places like Mansfield Hall, CIP, CLE, Summit Campus, places where students have lived in the program and typically would attend a nearby college. So for example, I have a student who’s gonna be living at Mansfield Hall and going to UVM, University of Vermont. Students can live at CIP in Berkeley, California and attend UC Berkeley, for example. However, some students will use those as a gap year option too. They’ll start at one of those programs before they start college. And those programs are a residential kind of wraparound. Not exclusively therapeutic, but they definitely see their share of students with mental health challenges.

Debbie: 

Okay, wow. I’ve heard of some of these. I definitely came across Mansfield Hall in my search, but what I’m kind of realizing and thinking about as we’re having this conversation is just like trying to find the right university or college experience for our kids. This is also a huge whole other world to dive into and explore. Any kind of best practices for getting started in finding and vetting a program that could be a good fit for our kids?

Eric Endlich, Ph.D.:

So I think certainly working with a consultant is one option. You can start by doing a search, reaching out to other parents, look at some of the programs I’ve mentioned. I haven’t created a, I have my own sort of list. I haven’t published or anything. But I try to be aware of pretty much all of the programs for neurodivergent students that are out there. And you can look at their websites. They often will have free information sessions, virtual sessions. If you can go in person and tour the program, all the better. That may or may not be practical if it’s in a different part of the country. Ask them for references to talk to families who’ve gone through the program. Have a list of questions in advance. And get multiple data points. So of course you want to talk to the program, but they’re potentially in somewhat of a sales role. So take everything with a grain of salt and get feedback from families who’ve gone through the program too. But I think these programs, unlike some, you know, unlike going to college, for example, they really want kids who are, I shouldn’t say unlike college, but

They really want kids who are a good fit, who are gonna succeed. So they’re not gonna just say like, oh yeah, all kids should come and be in our program. They’re gonna look at you fairly carefully and try to make sure that it’s a good fit. So they will often give you honest feedback about why they might not be the best program. And that’s sometimes true for colleges too. I just heard somebody from a college this morning say, hey, we regularly refer people to other colleges if we feel like we’re not the best fit.

Debbie: 

Mm-hmm. Yeah. That’s super helpful. And that reminder to get references and talk to other families, I think is a good one. And that’s a step that many of us, I think, don’t do. But it is such a helpful data point. I will say that we, you know, for our process, if this is helpful for listeners, you know, I kind of created a short list that was rather lengthy, but then reached out to all of those programs with very specific questions to really start to whittle it down to make sure that this was a potentially good fit, a safe environment, all the things that I knew were important for a supportive environment for my child. And then I took that list to my child, and then we started going through it in more detail. So it was a multi-step process.

Eric Endlich, Ph.D.:

Yep. And don’t hesitate to ask the programs for references. Say, can I speak to some families who’ve gone through the program? And I would hope that they would all be willing to do that. Of course, you could argue, well, they’re probably handpicking families that were really happy and there you’re going to get a biased view. But it’s still more data points and, you know, ask those families the tough questions. And I, you know, there’s families who are not getting paid to be a reference. So they’re going to give you honest answers. And you might think, well, you know, people are used to looking up reviews online, right? Whether it’s Yelp or Amazon reviews or TripAdvisor or something. And there really isn’t the equivalent for this specific niche that we’re talking about, but there is actually a website called Niche for colleges and so on. So you can, and that’s a useful resource in the college research process. But again, on social media, you can informally sort of get lots of reviews by saying, Hey, who else has used this program? And what have you heard? What was your experience with this program?

Now, if you get one family that was not happy, I wouldn’t say, oh my gosh, I shouldn’t go to this program because one family said it was terrible. I look for a pattern. I’ve had parents reach out to me and say, hey, you’re recommending this college and we had a bad experience. And I’m not gonna take a college off of my list because of one parent. But then if I hear multiple parents say, actually we agree, we also had a bad experience, I’m gonna take that very seriously.

Debbie: 

Yeah, yeah, that’s great. Is there anything that we didn’t touch upon that you would want parents to make sure that they know by the end of this conversation?

Eric Endlich, Ph.D.:

Well, one thing that we may have touched on very briefly, which I want to make sure we hit, is that there’s also summer college readiness programs. So if you’re thinking, you know, gee, a whole year away, you know, before I start college and these programs, you know, tens of thousands of dollars, I don’t know, it’s a big commitment of time and money. Keep in mind that there are also summer college readiness programs, and many of the same institutions that do one, do the other. So we mentioned SOAR. SOAR has a summer program. Mentioned Landmark, Landmark has summer programs. So I mentioned Summit Campus that has this sort of year round residential program in Worcester, Mass. Turns out they’re now offering summer programs. And there are a whole bunch of other summer programs for neurodivergent students to help them become college ready. So that’s a pretty good option if you’re thinking, you know, well, we want a little bit, but we don’t want a whole year or maybe you do a summer college readiness program, but your gap year is working and earning money.

Debbie: 

Yeah, so many options. Yeah, that’s really cool. Okay, so this has been super informative. I took a ton of notes and listeners, there will be a pretty extensive show notes page. But could you let us know, Eric, where parents can connect with you and learn more about the services and resources you offer?

Eric Endlich, Ph.D.:

Certainly they can go to topcollegeconsultants.com One of the things I have there is a database of what I call neurodiversity friendly colleges. People find that very helpful. Or they can email me at eric@topcollegeconsultants.com.

Debbie: 

Awesome. Excellent. Well, again, I’ll have links in the show notes for those resources. And Eric, thank you so much. I will say that personally, I feel like we did a pretty good job based on this conversation. So this was very affirming for me, but I’m sure it’s very informative, but very informative for listeners. And this is something I’ve gotten a lot of questions and requests to cover this. So thank you so much for sharing with us today. Thank you.

Eric Endlich, Ph.D.:

I’m sure you did, Debbie. You sound like a smart shopper. Thanks for having me.