Career Trajectory College Admission Consulting Corporate Benefits Program

Washington, DC, March, 20th 2019 | One of the hot new perks in corporate benefits is NOT focused on the corporate employees themselves but the employee’s children! The program is called Career Trajectory and it is helping the employees’ children succeed in their lives.

The theory is that children are employees' #1 priority and having them succeed ultimately helps the employee’s quality of life, keeping the employees happier, healthier, and more engaged in their corporate or startup jobs.

The Career Trajectory program’s focus is on helping high schoolers (9th-12th grade) and college-going kids (as well as their employee parents) to start thinking critically, research career opportunities, and build a custom formula for their future career success. The program introduces the students to tips, tricks, resources, tools, processes, procedures, and best practices specifically about college planning, research, selection, application, enrollment, and financial aid as well as in general about preparing for future career success and tackling any failures that come along in life.

The beauty of this corporate perk is that it can be delivered globally and digitally, by self-paced, video-based, micro-learning, and it requires minimal investment from the corporate employers due to the Partnership Programs.

It All Starts with Your #1 Priority: Your Children

The major expenditure for US and International families with children is typically college education, ranging from $80,000-$180,000 for a 4-year bachelor’s degree. This is for one child. If you have two or three children, a college education will cost you much more than your home! Most families don’t have that kind of money, so, parents and students take on student loans.

Today there are more than 44 million US borrowers who collectively owe $1.5 trillion in student loans or around $37,000 per student in the US! If you complete a master’s degree, you probably owe close to $60,000; with a professional law degree you are typically in for $140,000 in a loan, and with a medical degree you are at the very top with loan amounts approaching $160,000!

Now, if you think the issue with a loan is just paying back the principal with interest, you are wrong. What a student loan does to a kid’s future is much more. It saps them of funds to invest in retirement funds in their youth years.

This dramatically prolongs retirement due to the lack of compounded interest on early investments they could have made in retirement accounts instead of paying back the loan. A student loan will make your children work much longer in life and with more added stress. Developing college career strategies to reduce student loan amounts can save them hundreds of thousands of dollars in retirement savings — a simple fact most parents do not know. This is a big part of the Career Trajectory college admissions counseling program discussion.

College Admissions Consulting in the US is Costly!

Who guides you during the very important process of your child’s career planning including college research, selection, application, enrollment, and financial aid process? If you said school counselors, you are completely mistaken.

The average student-to-school-counselor ratio in the US is 482-to-1. Our school counselors are overworked, stretched, abysmally short-staffed, and sometimes not even well-trained for the careers of the future.

Our students and their parents need more support in college career counseling, especially in today’s hyper-competitive world, with an increasingly dizzying array of choices about “what comes next” after high school or while in college. So, rich parents hire private college counselors paying around $200 per hour or around $6,000-$10,000 per year. What about the rest of your employees, what do they do? They can depend on their intuition or they can work through the Career Trajectory college admission digital career counseling program at affordable rates.

Does College Admission Consulting Work?

Yes, if the counselor does not spoon-feed your child by doing things for them like in the recent college admission scandal in the US but by providing the tool kit, the processes, and helping our kids with the knowledge and the data to make correct career decisions. Honest career counseling provides the hard truths and the cold facts every high-schooler and college student needs to know to succeed in the 21st century. Sometimes there are issues a parent may not want to broach with their kids that counselors can discuss. Let me give you some examples.

We have known many parents who saved in their 529 college saving plans for years for a lower-cost, high-value in-state college education for their kids. What did their kids do? They selected an out-of-state college for flimsy reasons like wanting to be further away from their parents, a better-looking campus, quality cafeteria, nicer dorm rooms or a great college sports team. By doing so they increased their student loan burden exponentially. The parents did not object as they did not want to break the hearts of their kids. Does the student want to live in luxury now and suffer later paying huge loans, or do they want to take the pain now as a student and enjoy it later?

A good career counselor would present the pros and cons of such decisions just like the Career Trajectory program does and allows the student to make an informed decision.

Your children’s career successes are not accidental. It is intentional. Quality career counseling during high school, college, and initial jobs can provide the right career direction and trajectory — making the difference between winning and losing in life. Let us look at another example. Your starting salary can vary widely depending on your college major. Select the “great” major and your starting median salary will be around $70,000 directly after a bachelor’s degree. Select a “bad” major and you could start with a salary of $40,000. Perhaps you may not even get a job! Do your children know which are the right majors and have they appropriately prepared themselves in high schools to be accepted by colleges in these majors?

The Birth of the Career Trajectory Program

Nitin Pradhan, the co-founder of the Career Trajectory program came to the US on a full graduate fellowship in the 1990s for his master’s program from India. His US college had told him then, that his college application was very different and exceptionally well organized. While, Nitin built a successful technology career in the US including being part of the Obama Administration, helping friends and family members informally apply for and secure financial aid to US colleges soon became Nitin’s hobby. He took it very seriously, regularly researching best practices, interviewing college prospects, and understanding university recruitment processes became normal. By the time his son decided to apply for his bachelor’s in computer science, he had perfected the college application process. His son applied to 8 colleges in North America using this process, got admission in all and merit-based scholarships from many, and is now fully funded and studying for his MS/Ph.D. program in AI at a world-class North American university.

The Career Trajectory program was formed based on Nitin’s 9th-grade daughter, Riya Pradhan’s advocacy. Riya had seen the “family” college application process and recognized its potency while she saw the haphazard manner in which high-school seniors prepared and applied for colleges. “Why don’t you change your career from being a CIO to becoming a college career counselor?” She asked Nitin, her dad. She would become the co-founder and bring customers to the table by marketing the program globally using social media. She would even pilot and promote the program with high schoolers. Together they would help young students join colleges and promote higher education topics of the future like AI, Robotics, and others with corporations. The Career Trajectory program was born! With hundreds of hours of hard work, a technology-based pilot was launched in late 2018. Feedback from the pilot helped to create the latest version which was launched recently in the US and internationally.

Digital College Career Counseling Is Here!

The Career Trajectory program is different. It is a digital, self-paced, video-based, micro-learning program that can be delivered at scale in the US and globally. The program is simple to use for technical and non-technical users and is accessible via the internet on desktops, laptops, and mobile devices.

The program encourages the students and their parents to join and prepare together. Career success is a team sport as per Career Trajectory.

The foundational section of the Career Trajectory Program provides up to 90 minutes of free, digital, self-paced, college career counseling to ANY high school students in the US and internationally. No student should go without quality college career counseling. It provides the hard truths and the cold facts every high-schooler from their 9th to 12th grade as well as college students (and their parents) need to know to succeed in the 21st century, especially, in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) careers.

Career Trajectory also has an affordable, comprehensive, digital, college career counseling premium, self-paced, paid program. This program provides detailed information on college planning, research, selection, application, enrollment, and financial aid to all 9th to 12th-graders and college students who successfully complete the foundational program and are ready to rigorously prepare for a successful college and youth career.

Career Trajectory Business Partnership Opportunity

Career Trajectory’s approach to promoting the program is twofold, education partnerships and business partnerships.

They have educational partnerships which include the US and international public and private high schools, colleges, universities, parent-teacher associations, and student loan granting organizations. The other is via businesses of all sizes including startups. The business partnering model is simple and includes referral and prepaid services. Under this model, the business organization signs up for the Career Trajectory program online and is provided with a discount code (for referral services) or a prepaid code (for prepaid services) that employees can use to avail of the Career Trajectory services for their children. Check it out and have your employers add this as a perk in your company’s benefits package today!

If you like the story, make sure to “share” and bring it to the notice of your HR executive and employer. Together we can ensure every student has access to quality career counseling!