The Fastest Route to Admissions
Our Program
Initial Consultation
90-minute, family overview of the entire admissions process, including academic, extracurricular, testing, and community service strategies.
$299
Application Packaging
CommonApp Boot Camps
$2250 (15 hrs)
CommonApp and Supplement Review Services
Start at $299
Founded by Michael J. Youmans, Ph.D. (aka “Dr. Yo”)—creator of CommonApp Boot Camps and author of The CommonApp Handbook—with degrees from Harvard, Middlebury/Oxford, and Boston College School of Ed, CollegePrepExpress provides individualized, comprehensive strategies for playing today’s ultra competitive college admissions game to WIN!
CPE Scholarship for Juniors
CPE is thrilled to announce the 2026 Recipient of the CPE SCHOLARSHIP FOR JUNIORS… Tuesday, February 10, 2026, 6:00-6:10pm ET 2025 Recipient from Northwest Catholic High School, West Hartford, CT: Marco Cornejal CPE is Committed to Helping Level the Educational Playing Fieldin College Admissions! CPE is indebted to Covenant Prep’s Kela Perkins and Nikki Canavoc and their ace search committee! Since 2019, CPE has been offering a full, free ride annual scholarship for one lucky junior among deserving nominees nationwide. The recipient gains complimentary access to any or all of the following: Up to 10 hours of private consultations for strategic panning and working through college applications supplements Up to 10 hours of academic tutoring with Dr. Yo or CPE-certified instructor CommonApp Boot Camp as a rising senior Unlimited standardized test prep classes All CPE’s virtual and printed resources Unlimited Academic Stress and Test Anxiety Workshops To nominate, email DrYo@CollegePrepExpress.com and include the student’s name, contact info, school, and school candidate (usually the best choice is someone in the college counseling department). Thank you in advance! https://youtu.be/-NjtRtzKBjY 2020/2021 Announcement/Ceremony, November 12, 2020 Left to right: Sonia Tamburro, Hartford Magnet Trinity College High School guidance counselor, Dr. Yo, Cyani Irizarri (2019-20 CPE Scholar), Cyani’s mom
More »
Results
REFERENCES To email or talk to former students and parents about CollegePrepExpress, LLC, email or call/text (413) 329-7540 for contact info. We’re happy to connect you with past families — just reach out! MORE RESULTS —>
More »
Rising Seniors Take Note: AI Can Level Up Your Education and Your GPA, but It Won’t Get You into College
When I was a graduate student at Boston College School of Education, I was lucky to learn from some of the finest researchers, writers, and educators in the field, including Drs. Polly Ulichny, Tom Keating, Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Walt Haney, and Otherine Neisler. They all taught and role-modeled the importance of making as transparent as possible any personal biases about a subject right from the get. In that spirit, I confess a clear bias about the topic at hand: I love technology in general, and educational technology in particular. It’s an affinity that goes way back. One of my abiding childhood dreams was to live in the Jetsons’ age—an outer space, tech-driven place even more wondrous than Disney World. My most memorable elementary school year was fifth grade, when calculators burst into classrooms and reformed STEM teaching and learning despite vociferous protestations that they would ruin students’ mathematical thinking—starting with their ability to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Turns out, however, that for the vast majority of students, calculators had the opposite effect: what the techo-naysayers neglected to calculate—see what I did there?—is that for every student who becomes dependent on a calculator and never learns the times tables, countless others are empowered by that same device to solve complex, often more realistic, math problems that had previously beyond their ability even to conceive. That’s exciting stuff in the world of education! Equipped with a Radio Shack TRS-80 in high school—a first-generation, monochromatic, MS-DOS, cassette-driven desktop—an 18-lb “portable” Osbourne computer in college, and an early Apple laptop in graduate school, I also lived through the advent of personal and networked computers in secondary and higher education. As calculators had reshaped math education, computer technology proved even more transformative across the curriculum. Based on these lived experiences, I had been a proponent of technology in education long before collecting dissertation data on high school teachers’ early uses of the internet. In my work today, I luxuriate in Google Classroom, Zoom, whiteboards, and access to all kinds of web-based tools, from collaboration utilities to Desmos to the complete works of Shakespeare. It’s not quite the Jetsons, but it’s starting to feel more like it every year. Enter AI, which may actually get us all to the Jetsons. Add to Desmos AI’s ability to explain to individual students each step in the creation of a graph and what it means, and even help pinpoint that one step they always seem to miss. Add to the complete work of Shakespeare AI’s ability to bring to life and explicate Hamlet’s great speeches from any number of perspectives. Add to the internet’s vast storehouse of information AI’s ability to personify Euclid and Michelangelo and MLK in convincing detail based on an unfathomable amount of data to engage students in direct conversation to answer their questions and stimulate their intellectual imaginations. Perhaps best of all, when it comes to learning how to write—one of the most challenging and important skills to take to college—no longer do students have to rely on luck and getting rare and special teachers who take the time to write specific, detailed comments about their ideas as well as their grammar, style, diction, and the structure of sentences, paragraphs, and the essay overall. Giving detailed, accurate, and timely feedback on both the form and content of student writing is one of the things AI does best right now! The potential for AI to level up everyone’s college preparatory education can hardly be overstated. Nevertheless, just as calculators had many early detractors, so does AI. Many are concerned that students will use AI to do their work for them and not with them (Sal Khan, How AI Could Save (Not Destroy) Education), encouraging cheating and depriving students of learning experiences they might have without it. Nevertheless, my experience over the past few years suggests the contrary. For every student who asks an AI tool to compose an essay from scratch, say, for a school assignment, many others will use the very same tool to see and understand different ways a piece of writing can be constructed and how voice and tone, as well as meaning, are created through language, that is, through diction and syntax. AI will make it possible for every student to see how essay structure, grammar rules, word choice, sentence structure, and punctuation apply to their own writing. See also AI in Schools: Cheater or Tutor? (Paul Matthews). When it comes to writing college applications, it may be tempting to ask an AI bot to write a personal essay from scratch based on a few salient features of a high school career, or a supplement essay on good reasons why someone would want to attend University XYZ, and AI can quickly produce impressive looking and nice smelling responses to both prompts—but they won’t be effective in getting anyone into competitive schools. The reason is that no matter how well a writing tool captures the points you were hoping it would, and no matter how polished and elegant the mechanics and rhetoric, it will fail to create a picture of your authentic self, and that is a college application dealbreaker in today’s admissions game. If AI excels at pattern recognition, rhetorical analysis, and clarity of expression based on the mega-data that powers it, it is far less adept at original thinking, creativity, and emotional intelligence, all of which are necessary to produce applications that sound like real students and capture the attention of real admissions committees. Even if you could input every detail of your life from birth to senior year in high school, AI could crank out 1000 different essays, each of which would weave together events that make you sound college-ready, focused, and smart… But—and this is a big but, HUGE—AI can never know which events YOU would choose, or why: in short, it won’t pass the authenticity test (especially if thousands of other applicants are using the same tools for the same purpose). Essays AI produces will ultimately sound generic, robotic, and you will come off two-dimensional, or at best awkward like today’s robots. And that won’t get admissions officers excited about your candidacy. They want to picture real people on their real campus. Successful applications are not always those with the greatest number of impressive accolades, but those that manage to convey an authentic human being—a particular individual with unique experiences, ideas, values, perspectives, motivations, goals, and dreams. Students applying to competitive schools in the age of AI may well, and probably should, use AI writing tools, in much the same way they likely already use a spell or grammar checker, but they will create a personal narrative out of their own heads, hearts, and souls. Only real students can convey a real sense of self. Those who accomplish that substantial personal task make it much easier for admissions officers to see them on their college campuses and to send acceptance letters. Related post: 4 Reasons Why It’s Important to Tell the Truth and How It Can Get You Into College Check out our summertime CommonApp Boot Camps!
More »
