For families earning $120,000 – $250,000
But it can tell us where to start asking better questions. Thirty minutes with a college planner gives you a preliminary read on your family’s financial-aid position — and shows you which variables deserve attention while your student is still years from applying.
Identity, visibility, positioning and strategy decide it — who your student is on paper, which colleges can actually see them, where they land in a pool, and whether any of it was planned. That is the part almost nobody works on, and it is the part that moves both the acceptance and the price.
It is also the honest reason to work with Coach Randy rather than another tutor: a tutor raises a score. This changes where that score is worth the most.
Income alone does not tell you whether you will receive aid. A $150,000 household may look very different depending on family size, assets, student finances, special circumstances, the college's cost of attendance, and the institution's own aid policies. Two families earning the same amount can end up with very different outcomes, and two colleges can treat the same family very differently. Do not self-eliminate because of salary alone.
Current aggregate Direct Subsidized and Unsubsidized Loan limit for most dependent undergraduates, no more than $23,000 of it subsidized. If your four-year funding gap is much larger, your family needs a strategy for how the rest could be covered.
The FAFSA uses tax information from a specified prior year, and asks for the current value of certain reportable assets when it is filed. Both matter, at different times.
Average tuition discount off sticker for first-time undergraduates at private non-profits (NACUBO). Sticker price is rarely the price.
Your number, and the two or three things that would still move it. Worked out by a college planner, not generated by a form.
How the Student Aid Index is built, in plain English — and, just as importantly, what it does not tell you.
Income used by the applicable FAFSA year, reportable assets, household circumstances, student financial information, a college's cost of attendance, institutional aid policies and merit eligibility.
Which tax year may be used, when asset values matter, when the FAFSA is filed, when special circumstances should be documented, and when actual offers arrive. The goal is not to game the formula — it is to understand the rules before you are forced to react to them.
Need-based aid, merit aid and institutional aid, and which of them your family is realistically positioned for.
What a four-year bill could mean against what your family can actually cover, and how families close the difference.
Bring your income, your state, and your student's year and GPA.
What a family normally pays for each piece, and what this costs.
You should come off this call understanding your family's financial-aid position and what happens next. If you do not, say so and I will write you the breakdown myself, by hand, for your family — and you will never hear from me again. You risk thirty minutes and nothing else.
Said plainly, because thirty minutes with the wrong family helps nobody.
It is already decided what every college will charge your family. Thirty minutes and you will know it too.
Work out my numberCoach Randy, on what the session actually covers. Two minutes.
Who is running it
Coach Randy Narciso is the founder of AthletIQ Connect and the creator of College Pathway Intelligence. A USC engineering graduate with a USC MBA, he spent thirty years in business leadership, technology and strategy before turning the same systems thinking on college admissions. Fifteen years guiding students into universities across the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia, and a father who has been through admissions, financial aid and funding himself. He does not teach theory; he teaches what he has lived. He is a college planner, not a financial adviser, and he sells no financial products.
“Before AthletIQ, I was just another kid with stats. After working with Coach Randy for several years? I was a recruited asset. I received full ride offers to both USC and St. Mary’s College to play basketball. Coach Randy didn’t just coach me — he helped colleges discover me.”
“Visibility changed everything. Building a searchable online identity through AthletIQ Connect helped me land a full ride to UCLA to play baseball. I’ve worked with Coach Randy from elementary through high school. I didn’t just apply — I got found. That’s the game changer.”
“AthletIQ Connect gave me more than a résumé — it gave me visibility. I was accepted to USC, got on the pre-med track, and even landed a college internship at USC Keck School of Medicine before freshman year started. Coach Randy’s system works — period.”
The call is about money, not admissions. He does have an ongoing program and he will describe it once at the end if you ask. If you do not ask, he will not raise it.
Especially then. Strong students are the ones colleges pay to attract — but only at the colleges where their grades stand out. Knowing your number is what tells you which colleges those are.
You can, and you should. They are federally required and they are useful. What they do not tell you is why your number is what it is, which of the inputs you could still change, or how differently two colleges will treat the same number.
It is what almost every family assumes, and it is where most of them lose. Thousands of students have the grades, the scores and the activities. Highly qualified students are turned down every year, not for lack of intelligence, but because nothing in the application says who they are, how they lead, or why a college should remember them. The work is to be unforgettable, not merely qualified — and that is built over years, not written in an essay in December.
Probably not as far as it feels, and that is worth thirty minutes to find out rather than to keep wondering. Most families arrive saying some version of we do not know where to start, we do not know what to do next, or we should have begun sooner. The call answers those three for your student specifically. If it turns out there is genuinely nothing to do yet, you will be told that too.
No, and he will tell you so on the call. He is a college planner. He works out what colleges will charge your family and where the money comes from. He does not sell insurance, investments or savings plans, and he takes no commission from anybody.
No. Bring rough numbers — household income, roughly what you have in savings and investments outside retirement accounts, and your state. That is enough to get within a few hundred dollars, and nothing you say is stored.
It works better if they are, especially from tenth grade up — the decisions are theirs to live with. But a parent alone is fine, and plenty of these are booked by one parent who then plays it back to the other.
The families who end up paying least are rarely the ones who earn least. They are the ones who understood the formula while there was still time to act on it.
Work out my number