Goal Setting
At Becker Academic, LLC, we take goals seriously. The goal of our evening converasations is to help teens and their parents launch a college search. Our family workshops share the goal of transmitting skills to judge the caliber of an academic community. At the most intensive level, our client packages meet goals formed in concert with individual students and their parents.

List Making
We do not hand out prepared lists of college names for dubious criteria of the “my child wants to be an astronaut” variety. We also do not provide lists of topics for application essays. For a quick, uncritical list of schools, try an online college matching service. Don’t even consider using, stealing, buying or plagiarizing someone else’s essay topic.

Skill Building
Our interactions with workshop participants and clients strengthen the key educational competencies (KEC) needed for successful undergraduate careers and in both professional and personal endeavors after college. We don’t sell packaged answers to complex problems. We provide the tools and the support services to help emerging adults create their own solutions.

Hand Holding
Our services do not include monitoring deadlines for client families or contacting third parties to elicit proprietary information on their behalf. You can purchase PDAs for the former task; consultants purporting to offer the latter service are, in our judgment, ethically challenged.

Student Mentoring
A left-handed monkey wrench is useless for a right-handed person. To be useful, tools must align with individual orientations. As tools become more sophisticated, the necessary adjustments are correspondingly more refined. Universal in application, key educational competencies are highly sophisticated tools. No two individuals perform these operations in the same ways. The process of college admission becomes an opportunity to refine key competencies only through active and intensive mentoring.

Student Marketing
It is fashionable to “market” the millennial student. If you want to have an emerging adult (yourself or your teenager) groomed, handled, packaged or otherwise commodified for elite institutional placement, please look to another company. We are not in the business of putting human beings on the auction block. (See Why Getting into College Is Not Like Getting a Job or Buying a Car.)