College App Parent Guide Skill

The college application is a project with two failure modes at home: the parent who runs it (producing an application that got in somewhere the student never chose, written in a voice admissions readers recognize as forty-five years old) and the parent who vanishes (leaving a seventeen-year-old to solo-manage a dozen deadlines and a five-figure decision). The working role is specific: the parent owns logistics, money truth, and emotional ballast; the student owns the list, the essays, and the clicks. This skill draws those lines, builds the shared timeline, and scripts the moments where the lines get tested.

What This Skill Produces

• The role split — parent jobs vs. student jobs, explicit enough to end the daily renegotiation
• The family timeline — deadlines mapped backward with the check-in cadence that replaces nagging
• The money conversation — the budget truth told early, the net-price-vs-sticker decode, the constraint framing that isn't a bombshell in April
• The scripts — the stalled student, the list disagreement, the rejection day, and the essay-help boundary

Required Inputs

Ask for these if not provided:

• Where in the cycle — junior-year planning, summer-before, mid-application crunch, or decisions-in-hand; the guide reshapes per stage
• The student, honestly — self-starter or avoidant, what they say they want, and how much they've actually done (the gap between those last two is the most common situation)
• The family's real constraints — what's affordable, geographic needs, and whether the constraints have been said out loud yet
• The friction, if any — the fight that keeps happening; scripts get tuned to it