<p>Hello CC. It has been recommended to me that I hire an admissions consultant to help me get into Yale, but they are really expensive. So I have three questions:</p>
<p>1) Is an admissions consultant worth the money?
2) Are there any you would recommend? IvyWise at IvyWise</a> - Empowering students to achieve their academic and personal goals. and Admissions Consultants at College</a>, business, graduate, law, and medical school admission expertise have been recommended to me, any experience with these?
3) Is there any value in the cheaper online programs? College</a> Admissions | ApplyWise | College Admissions Guidance | College Admission Help | Admission Process | Admissions Guidance is the only one I have heard of, are there others?</p>
<p>Would love to hear your feedback.</p>
<p>How about neither? I seriously doubt the effectiveness of all these programs/consultants. What proportion of people who went to Ivies had to use a consultant? If you study a bit, talk with your guidance counselor a lot, you should be able to do just as well.</p>
<p>i'm going to have to agree and say that if you can get in with them, you can probably get in on your own...personally, i would say not worth it</p>
<p>Save your money. Get free advice online, here (check out the parents forum where you can also ask for free help on your essays) and through your teachers/counselor.</p>
<p>The "help" consultants give you is nothing you can't get on your own with a little ingenuity. The Ivies are very aware that some students are "professionally packaged" and often approach those application with a huge grain of salt. In the end there are only three things that help you get into Yale: grades/stats, ec's and luck. And none of them cost the fortune that a consultant will charge.</p>
<p>Thanks for your feedback! I'd like to hear someone's argument from the pro-admissions consultant side, but glad to hear your thoughts.</p>
<p>Here are the arguments on the pro side:
There are some families that are not able to accurately assess a student's chances and they benefit from an expert evaluation of realistic matches/safeties.
There are some kids who need outside deadlines to keep the application process moving along and they benefit from a consultant setting deadlines for getting drafts done.
Finally, some consultants have unique and expert insights into what makes a certain student the right fit for a specific college.</p>
<p>By all means hire the best consultant you can afford. I get the feeling all the nay sayers never hired one. I did and my results were better than most of my classmates with similar stats.</p>
<p>Who recommended it, letmeinnow?</p>
<p>I'd like to hear opinions on which ones are the best that aren't expensive - I need one for the upcoming season because various sudden circumstances have come up with my guidance counseler. I'll likely be guidance-counseler-less for the period of the college applications and so I'll need one.</p>
<p>Let's put it this way:</p>
<p>If you're a really motivated kid who can do well just by reading college guide books (a quick search on google will give you a whole list of good reads), reading CC, and really getting to know yourself and the colleges you're applying to / are interested in, you don't need a counselor.</p>
<p>If, even after exhausting all the free sources of information above, you still don't feel as though you personally are capable of deciding on the right college list for you and how to accurately "package" yourself, a counselor might be a good idea.</p>
<p>Personally, I'd never heard of counselors until I got on CC and started reading the aforementioned books, but I'm glad I never considered using one. I feel like my accomplishments in regards to admissions are my own, and while my essays might not have fit the perfect "package" a counselor would have wanted me to fit into, they were 100% me and I don't regret it a bit.</p>
<p>Good things never come cheap. I'd hire a top counselor but buy a smaller package. Hire them for strategy and execute yourself.</p>
<p>A good college counselor can help a lot. If I could find the right person, I would hire him. THe problem I have is that I've yet to find that right person for my kids. At this point I feel that I know enough to help my kids, but I wish that I had found someone for my first two. I would have used CC on line for my second child. I debated using CC for the third kid, and came close to doing so.</p>
<p>I agree that a good college counselor can help a lot with drawing up a good list of prospective colleges and help prepare a student in a general way. But OP doesn't want overall help, OP wants to get into Yale, and that's a very specific and a very tall order. </p>
<p>If OP has the stats and the ec's he/she is pretty much as likely to get into Yale with his/her own thorough application/essay as with the help of an expensive packaging company.</p>
<p>I could not disagree more. Here's an example. My best friend was borderline for the ivy she really wanted. She went to a high end counselor even though we had a great one at school because she could afford it and wanted every bit of help possible. The thing the counselor did that probably helped most was convince her to use the offbeat essay for her short essay as her main essay. This counselor had been an adcom at her ivy and simply told her they would love reading on the subject after all of the tedious self-serious essays they go through in a day.</p>
<p>Well she got in and recently was contacted by the admissions office to ask if they could give her essay to a member of the press as an example of their best essays this year. She would never have thought to use that as her essay.</p>
<p>If you can afford it, a professional set of eyes can change your results.</p>
<p>newyorka, your friend could have gotten the same advice for free on the parents forum where an admissions DEAN, a Harvard administrator, professional writers, attorneys, professors etc post on a regular basis -- and look over students essays. For free.</p>
<p>Sorry, but if I could afford it, I'd stick to the former adcoms. Heck, my parents and many of their friends are brilliant professional but they did not know much of what I learned from my counselor and while I think there's lot of good info on this site, the dept of what I got strategy wise is not here.</p>
<p>CC would be out of business and not able to afford to finance these boards if it's users didn't find value added in their paid services.</p>
<p>Sure someone can give you general advice on a message board but can you really compare that with someone who thoroughly gets to know you and all the facts relating to you coming up with a strategy that encompasses the entire application and neatly weaves everything together? I didn't know what I didn't know until I saw it happen. I also found that my counselor had lots of info about certain top schools looking for certain things that even my school counselor who personally knows all the top school adcoms didn't have a clue about.</p>
<p>Kataliamom, did your kids use a private counselor?</p>
<p>Sorry I'm just now replying to this. I was asked who recommended these companies: My parents friends whose kid got into Harvard recommended Ivywise and admissions consultants, and I found applywise on my own.</p>
<p>I used IvyWise, and working with a private counselor definitely made a difference. One of the most helpful aspects was the structure and organization it offered--my school, for example, never set deadlines as to when we should begin researching and visiting schools or write our essays. With my counselor's help, I got most of my work done over the summer, leaving the fall relatively stress-free. Applying to college can be incredibly demanding and time-consuming, and it was nice to have a little extra help.</p>
<p>But yes, it was expensive...Applywise is a really good alternative. It's basically the entire Ivywise program online, for much cheaper. It organizes the entire process, which is the most important thing a private counselor does. Definitely try it if you're wary of hiring a private counselor.</p>
<p>To suggest something of a middle ground - the former owners of these forums (now called College Karma) offer a Stats Evaluation for $150, which will review your stats and essays and evaluate your chances at your selected colleges and suggest other possibilities.</p>