<p><a href=“How much would you pay to get your kid into Ivy League?”>http://www.today.com/money/how-much-would-you-pay-get-your-kid-ivy-league-1D80283149</a></p>
<p>At my kid’s private HS, my guess is that ¾ of the parents hire an outside counselor - although where I live (New England), prices are typically in the $2K to $4K range.</p>
<p>The somewhat known figure is that 26% of “high achieving students” hire an independent counselor. That number has been published in numerous articles over the last 2 years. </p>
<p>@Periwinkle,</p>
<p>I think that more time and energy is needed to apply to the Ivies and schools of that ilk. Class requirements, ECs, standardized test scores are far different when applying to a school like Southern CT State University -vs- Yale. Do state schools even read the essays that their applicants write? Does it matter much you care about your ECs? Do they care that you took 4 years of Latin when they only require 2 years of a language? I’m not familiar with state school requirements.</p>
<p>“The somewhat known figure is that 26% of “high achieving students” hire an independent counselor. That number has been published in numerous articles over the last 2 years.”</p>
<p>I don’t remotely believe that, because of the vast swathes of high achieving students who happily trot off to a state flagship in all parts of the country except the east coast. </p>
<p>The data also shows there are a lot less independent counselors in the midwest.</p>
<p>Makes perfect sense. The “fallback” option of a B1G state school is pretty much seen as perfectly fine in most cases. There just doesn’t need to be Ivy or bust.</p>
<p>How laughable is it that one parent seems to think her $10,000 consultant was worth it because she “analyzed” the data and determined that applying ED to college would give her borderline daughter an edge? That’s just common knowledge to anyone who bothers to do even basic research. </p>
<p>I would say that it isn’t Ivy or bust for most parents, even on the East Coast. (Please don’t laugh.) </p>
<p>Unfortunately, “affordable college with good academics where my child will be happy or bust” isn’t click bait. </p>
<p>“The somewhat known figure is that 26% of “high achieving students” hire an independent counselor. That number has been published in numerous articles over the last 2 years.”</p>
<p>You gotta loovvvve the precision of 26%, especially when it’s said to be “somewhat known.” I call b.s.</p>
<p>For the East Coast this may not be a stretch. Though ludicrous, parents pay through the nose in some parts of New York to get their kids into the right nursery/Kindergarten. I think it’s ridiculous, but people said I was crazy for paying the tuition I did for my D for 13 years of school. It’s their money, so I say go for it. </p>
<p>A lot of the families I know whose kids are applying to the most selective schools do pay independent counselors. How much, for how long, I don’t know. I also don’t know what the results are. </p>
<p>I would have paid for a counselor if I’d had the money to do so comfortably. Too much of our money is earmarked as it is, and the amount charged for the services that supposedly make a difference were too expensive. It was bad enough paying for test prep and tutoring, and we only did three months of that for a single test sitting. But we did use an expensive service and tutoring. I truly believe in the next 10 years, in order not to be disadvantaged for highly selective school admissions, independent counselors are going to needed, just as test prep now is. I remember in my day, the mantra was that prepping and practicing for the SATs made little or no difference. Now, just about everyone does prepare. </p>
<p>So, the title question to me is an interesting one. I’d pay probably pay to get a kid into HPY. For a guarantee, I’d probably pay a year’s schooling and it would be a huge deal for us to do this, since we really should not be committing to full pay for such schools. I would not pay anything to get my son into any of the other ivies, but would likely borrow and scrimp, and somehow manage to pay what they cost. There are only a few schools for which I am willing to pay the full freight of $65K, and it would be a true stretch for us and a bad financial move. But for certain school, I’d do it. Otherwise, my son needs about $10-15K “discount” from that point to make the school work, and those sorts of schools have been on his list. Hopefully, he gets some merit money from his top choices. </p>
<p>26% might make sense if people are including Kaplan-type services.</p>
<p>I can’t imagine paying, still. CC is free. I learned everything we needed to know here. I mean, my thought was that if I had to pay money to package my kids, they probably didn’t belong there in the first place. Which, I admit, was kind of naive. But it worked out for us okay.</p>
<p>For us, no test prep, no private counselor, but private prep schools. I don’t see the need for an additional counselor, if the school counseling is good.</p>
<p>Having said that, I would engage a private counselor if our kids were enrolled in our local high school. College placement results don’t line up with the high school’s statistics. I suspect many students play it “safe” by applying ED to colleges which are low matches rather than reaches. I can’t explain why the results aren’t better.</p>
<p>I know people in town do hire private counselors, but then again, I don’t see a smaller group of wealthy students doing much better than one would expect (once you take into consideration their parents can pay full tuition.) It seems to me the parents pay significant fees for their children to end up at the same college they would have attended without extra help.</p>
<p>Building a list is very helpful, as is being realistic about chances of admission. I’m not convinced that legions of people are paying tens of thousands of dollars for the service. Maybe in New York City they are.</p>
<p>I know more who did than didn’t. But that’s the world where we raised our kids. Plus nobody wanted to fight about it with the kids. The great thing about a counselor isn’t that they will “get the kids in an ivy” it’s that it’s not mom and dad setting the deadlines. JMO</p>
<p>I would have hired a consultant, and fully intended to do so, but all my friends giving me the names and recommendations and urging me to hire someone, neglected to tell me we needed to set this up at least by sophomore year. Silly me. I called sometime in the fall of senior year which seemed to me appropriate since we didn’t actually have all the gpa and test scores till then. No one could take us on that late.</p>
<p>I didn’t discover this site till after all the applications were in.</p>
<p>
School counselors work for the school. Their objective is to get X% of students into top 20 schools, and that X% of students are most likely athletes, legacies, favorite families’ kids. They get paid as long as they hit the target. If your kid happens to be one of those kids then great. On the other hand, if your kid is middle of the road then he/she is not going to get the attention the X% students would get. </p>
<p>At my school in particular, none of us, except the athletes, get any attention. The athletes end up getting into great schools because we have very strong sports teams (private Catholic school on Long Island; I’m sure you could imagine that our baseball, basketball and lacrosse teams are strong, as well as certain specialty sports) that get kids recruited to schools such as Yale, Harvard, MIT (crew), Johns Hopkins, Duke, UVA, Columbia, Cornell, Stanford, Notre Dame, Georgetown, Boston College, etc.</p>
<p>Basically, the guidance department sucks. The “guidance counselors” don’t have degrees in any kind of field necessary to be guidance counselors, and range in qualification from being very knowledgeable and having gone to a respectable school to being gym coaches to being 80 year-old senile priests who have no idea what they’re doing. My guidance counselor is sub-par, telling me that my list is “too reach heavy” and that he thinks I will get rejected from schools like SUNY Binghamton, Fordham, and Northeastern. I’m not saying that I believe that I’m above these schools or that I don’t think there’s a chance that I get rejected, but my stats are well above the middle-50% for those schools and those schools don’t have a history of rejecting anyone with my stats from my school.</p>
<p>Basically, I would have been completely on my own had I not hired an outside counselor. I don’t think that I really needed my counselor, but it helped a lot. He came up with a few college ideas that I wouldn’t have originally thought of, and he also has a pretty good essay reader who helped clean up some of my essays. He didn’t write my essays for me, but it was reassuring to have a professional writer go through my essays and proofread them for grammar and content. He also went through my Common App account several times just to make sure there were no stupid mistakes and that everything was worded as well as possible. Some people may argue that it’s not worth $3000 to have someone assist with this stuff, but considering neither of my parents have much experience with this and I got zero assistance from my school, it was a lot of help.</p>
<p>I don’t think everyone needs this. At my brother’s school, the guidance department is insanely strong. However, I don’t have the same opportunities that my brother does (ironically enough, he goes to public school which is free and I go to private school) and my parents recognize that. I think that for people who go to schools with weaker guidance departments or who aren’t really sure what direction to go in, it helps a lot to have a counselor dedicated to helping you. In my case, it helped me find a few financial safeties as well as consider what direction to go in with my reach schools.</p>
<p>Counselors at our school definitely don’t get paid to get the kids into top 20 schools. they’re just happy to see them in college at all (Title One school). It’s not the kind of place where people hire counselors. I’m sure a few did, but they would have been from the “other end” of town from us. Personally, I never heard of anyone who did. </p>
<p>“School counselors work for the school. Their objective is to get X% of students into top 20 schools.”</p>
<p>In a private school, that may indeed be the case. </p>
<p>In the case of those of us in public school, the school counselor’s objective is to a) try to scrounge up scholarships / ways to get some students to be able to attend ANY decent college, perhaps linked to convincing immigrant or first-gen parents that it’s ok if a kid goes away; and b) get the papers to the church on time for everyone else. </p>
<p>I certainly don’t think anyone at my kids’ school particularly cared whether my kids went to U of I or elite privates. Not that they weren’t happy for them on a personal basis when they got admitted, but I just don’t think those are the metrics of their successful job performance, at all. </p>