<p>Sally, Thanks for your response. You made some excellent points and those thinking about hiring an independent college advisor should take notice of them. In our case, Smitty did explain very clearly to us what his fee was and how many sessions we would need, and what each session would cover. He did not, however, mention anything about emails, and he was the one who asked us to email him the essay - and he did NOT mention anything about charging us extra for this. He changed his tune after he received the email. So, I hope he learned from this experience that any extras must be addressed at the outset. </p>
<p>With respect to your point that parents should not be under any illusion that an advisor could get their child into his/her dream school, I couldn’t agree more. However, the college list wasn’t an issue in our case. We already had our list before we hired him, and our list was accurate, as it turns out. But we asked him to give us his list of colleges, just to see if we were on the same page. (We hadn’t told him that we had our list). We asked him repeatedly, because each time he came, he brought no list. When he finally produced a list, it was clear to us that he ignored our geographic parameters (ie: no planes). </p>
<p>Bottom line: we didn’t really need him anyway, and our child’s HS guidance counselor was absolutely phenomenal and her concern for her students was genuine - probably very much like Smitty was with his students at Oyster Bay HS. We definitely learned from this experience and with our younger child we will not be hiring a college advisor. Having gone through the application process already, our fears and insecurities about this process have vanished and we’ve become empowered to navigate it again with our school guidance counselor.</p>