@chicaintheusa, hopefully the counselor will return for junior year. If that happens, it’s good to schedule periodic meetings in order to build a good relationship with her.
For some of the reasons Empireapple mentioned, we hired a counselor for some very specific assistance. D18 attended an essay writing workshop with her then received 1 on 1 follow up, to edit her essay. Writing is not D’s strong suit. And she’s a lovely “child” who isn’t quite as unwilling to listen to us as her brothers were, but it was still worth it to take some of the relationship pressure off by having someone else advise her. Once her Common App essay was done, she worked with the counselor for one additional hour to review her other essays and answer some Common App questions. She had come highly recommended by friends and we felt it was worth it. D submitted her first two applications this weekend and her essays sounded pretty good. I think they were likely noticeably better than if she had not had the feedback. Her website says she is a Certified College Planning Specialist, for what that’s worth.
We hired a consultant for our D, and it’s been a good experience. They have done the heavy lifting in editing her essays, and helped to narrow her choice of schools. My daughter was very well prepared for college (classes taken, grades, test scores), but for various reasons we were late in starting the application process.
I hope those who mention counselors are editing, don’t mean re-writing. Pointing out issues, suggesting a way to think, and encouraging are fine. But they really shouldn’t be running the race for your child.
Anyone can fill out a form.
My comment was about whether a person is knowledgeable about the financial aid practices of various colleges and universities —for example, which colleges require financials from the NCP, which do not. What colleges are more or less likely to offer your daughter merit money; wich colleges will leverage merit and need based aid to give a more attractive offer; which colleges will be more generous with grant aid, which will have higher expectations for loans, work-study, and student summer earnings.
“Some of the stories I hear about the private counselors make my head spin.”
Good private counselors are horrified, too. And we hear just as many stories about incompetent or uninformed school counselors.
There are so many different types of counselors out there, it’s hard to generalize. I can understand why a parent would choose to hire a good counselor. I would have done it had I met the right person. Believe me, the tension in our house during that application year was just plain awful and I am not proud to admit that I resorted to very ineffective shouting along the lines of “just * finish it * already! It’s good enough!” If only there had been another trusted person with just the right guiding touch.
I talked to two different people with strong reputations at the beginning of my daughter’s senior year. I thought I was emphasizing that my goal was to look at the non obvious schools that met my daughter’s interests, goals, and temperament. After telling me that I was too late for her to spend much time with my daughter, one counselor immediately proposed working on packaging my daughter for an elite school. I thanked her for her time and moved on. Maybe I wasn’t as emphatic as I thought or maybe she wasn’t listening. Either way it wasn’t a match. The second person couldn’t answer a question about a consortium. That’s fair. It was a very specific question that you wouldn’t necessarily know off hand. The problem was that she sent me a follow up email providing superficial information that my daughter had already discovered on her own pretty quickly. My daughter needed to know how the consortium worked in practice and whether it would work for her particular needs.
So we slogged through it on our own. I can’t say it was easy but I can’t say it was easy for the kids with private counselors either. I’m just glad it’s over and that the school she chose turned out to be a good one for her.
I’m going to assume that people with terrific experiences with their consultant aren’t exactly bragging about it. “Little Jimmy ended up choosing between Harvard and Dartmouth- if it hadn’t been for the admissions counselor I can’t imagine how things would have turned out. The counselor made the difference between Norwalk Community College and the Ivy League”.
Do people brag that their spouse was cheating on them and they were heading for divorce except a fantastic marriage counselor helped them get past it? Or that they were having sexual issues and their therapist managed to work them through it and the husband is no longer addicted to porn?
I think folks keep the names of the really top folks under wraps.
“I’m going to assume that people with terrific experiences with their consultant aren’t exactly bragging about it.”
The opposite is true. I’d say 90% of us have client-referral-based businesses. We couldn’t survive without referrals from our clients talking us up to their friends. Because of my specialty practice, I’m a little different; more of my referrals come from other independent consultants or from school counselors, psychologists, and lawyers. But even I get a lot of calls from moms saying: “My friend Laura sang your praises!” Just yesterday I got a call from the mom of a HS freshman who said her daughter’s friends are all talking about their counselors and she wants to reassure her daughter. People talk.
@Hanna I imagine you often get compliments like “you made a huge difference in my college app and admission…”. I wonder if the kids and their parents would say the same thing to other kids. So I see blossom’s point that successful applicants for whom private consults had made the most difference are the least likely to admit they had been helped enormously and gained a big advantage in the process.
Hiring an advisor is not cheating. I don’t see why someone would hide the fact unless they were just embarrassed about spending the money or something. We know quite a few people who have hired advisors, and they often suggest to families coming up that they might consider the same. We know people that have advisors for the entire process, or that have hired tutors for SAT and writing advisors to help with the essay. To me, if you afford it, it’s about what problem you are trying to solve. Some families have said it was useful to have someone else be the one prompting their kids to get started/meet deadlines. Others have said they don’t have the experience/time/interest to do a lot of research on schools and an advisor helped them find a great list of schools that were good fits.
We considered hiring an advisor but decided not to because we didn’t have any of the problems that we saw one addressing. We did end up getting someone to help with the essay process.
I never suggested that hiring a counselor was cheating, nor do I think that there is anything to be ashamed of in going to marriage counseling or therapy. Zip, zilch nothing to hide. That doesn’t change the fact that if your kid ends up Yale you are going to bask in your kid’s awesomeness (with some humble bragging about how much he loved Vandy and Earlham) and are not likely to be passing out the name of the counselor who helped him get there.
Just a thought. Happy that Hanna’s experience flies in the fact of my observation since she is clearly dynomite!!!
I “cheat” on my taxes. I hired a CPA to do them. :))
As I mentioned above, we hired a college counselor on word of mouth from our neighbor. And I passed along the same name to a parent of a rising sophomore.
I think it is important to remember that paying for a college counselor is not a way to ‘buy your way into a top tier college.’ Because the best counselor in the world is not going to magically get a C+ student into Yale. Rather, a counselor can help an already-qualified student put their best foot forward on an application, improving chances.
I used a counselor and freely speak of it (OK, CC is anonymous, so it’s easy.) But I also tell some people IRL.
The best counselor in the world isn’t getting a C+ kid into Yale. But when a nice BWRK suddenly drops basketball in the 9th grade (an enthusiastic but marginal bball player) and joins a county-wide fencing club which he tells his friends he hates, or a theater loving kid who has been in stage crew throughout middle school (but never cast due to being tone deaf) quits theater to “focus” on starting a non-profit to buy cows and chickens for a village in India, bystanders cannot help but speculate which counselor is at work trying to remake this kids into a standout “something”. The high priced ones I’ve read about want to start working with a kid in 9th grade…
And those cows and chickens are no tip, half a planet away.
And they’re CPA’s out there stealing from their clients, service techs breaking cars, tree trimmers killing trees, grocery clerks breaking eggs, so is your point that there are always “bad apples” in any trade or business?
How many parents will agree with a college adviser and make their kids quit something they like doing for something they dislike or hate in order to improve their chances at getting admitted to a top university, especially when it’s an EC activity?
“I wonder if the kids and their parents would say the same thing to other kids.”
Some do, because the referred families will repeat it to us.
All good advisors are educators. I’m a writing teacher. If you view the advisor that way, then it’s easier to see why families would talk about them. If Mr. Chips takes a fearful, math-hating student and helps her become a confident, straight-A future math major, that family will often tell the story to everyone they can find. They don’t view it as any insult to their child’s capabilities to describe how a beloved teacher brought out her hidden skills.
It has happened once in my 18 years that a parent (who’d referred several of her friends after the older child went to college) told me she would only recommend me to families NOT in the younger child’s private school class, because the classmates were direct competitors of her child. So that point of view is out there too; I just see more of the first.
@Hanna from your posts here on CC, I’ve always seen you as a mentor and guide. You’ve mentioned finding the right fit for students. You travel a lot to stay carefully and accurately informed and maintain contacts. As well as other efforts. I trust your intentions and the value you add. I’d refer someone to you, even without having met.
Imo, while that’s true of many private advisors, there’s a subset that over promises and overstates their real experience and connections. I’ve seen web pages lure with names of tippy tops they supposedly got kids into, as opposed to the process of matching. And where the main expertise seems to come only from attending some highly competitive college as undergrads (“Hire us, all our reps are Ivy grads!”) If they had any admissions experience, it’s vague. Maybe they were junior for a few years- or who knows if it was work study in the office.
And some of this is found here on CC, too. There’s some caveat emptor.
@Hanna, I am about 95-99% word of mouth since I don’t have a website. I am honored when families use me with younger siblings and tell their friends about me. This year, a friend (who didn’t know that I ran a college consulting business, since I knew her from another context) was so excited to have found me/my services for her daughter who’s transferring, she immediately told other family members and another transfer student; so from this one person, I’m now working with five people!