Hi
I’d like to start by saying that private consultants are typically great. It’s a great resource to help the student and family understand the process and help strengthen their application, since most HS counselors lack time and resources. Those who can hire one should. However, your mileage may vary depending on who you hire, and spending more doesn’t necessarily equate higher quality service.
I’m the student, not parent. I’m posting this here rather than on r/A2C because mostly parents are here, and it’s you guys that hire these services. I hope my insight will help you pick the best counseling firm for your child.
I’m subscribe to the premium USNews membership. With that, I receive emails from USNews that often included information on webinars hosted by Collegevine. I attended one before my junior year and was impressed by the depth of their knowledge in the college admissions process. It was my first exposure to these firms and led me to do extensive research on the company. They have stellar stats and comprehensive packages that led me to speak with my parents about it, and like me they were very impressed. Im not only an intl student living in the US but also an only child so the college admissions process to my parents was very foreign, despite my father having studied at UPenn for medical school years ago. We then hired all of their services together— the mentorship service, SAT tutoring, essay editing/application assistance, and the “decision support” team. We paid somewhere between $7-9k. Some “boutique” firms charge can charge even more, but it was still not cheap.
The mentorship and tutoring began together. The mentorship was actually great. I was paired with a current student from Duke that helped me a lot with my extracurriculars and creating “capstone projects” that later turned very useful for my application. The tutoring was awful, though. I had two different tutors that each taught me either the reading and grammar or math. They were both horrible. They were current students from T10 schools and claimed to have scored perfect scores on the SAT, but they couldn’t teach. CV prepares them with a set of questions that they’d share with me and we’d work on it together. However the process was extremely unintuitive, the questions were weak and the method of teaching as per the Collegevine policy was ineffective. I also had trouble repeatedly finding time throughout the week that would work with both of our schedules, so out of the 25 hours we purchased I only used 4. I moved on eventually to a local tutor that provided strong textbooks to refer to and my final score was a 31 ACT (from 1320 SAT). I could’ve done better had I gone with him from the beginning, but Collegevine truly wasted my time—an extremely undervalued but important in the application process spanning throughout high school.
Next up was the application help and essay editing services. I was paired with a student from Vanderbilt that I failed to really get along with. My mentor was very down to earth and his charisma made it much easier to work with him and look forward to making progress with the projects, but this person was quite the opposite. She was just difficult to talk to casually and it was hard to relate with her. Not only that, but my mentor knew me very well. Nothing my mentor learned from me (including my interests, important events in my life, etc.) were passed onto her and it was time consuming and felt awkward to have to repeat myself in almost a mechanical way. It was easier to work with her schedule compared to the SAT tutoring people and I felt like we had done good progress, but I had trouble staying timely with the essays. Often times I would write an entire essay days, or even hours, before the application deadline. Collegevine has a timeline to follow but it was seldom used with me. This was also where we used the company’s algorithm for college choices. Basically, I began this part by filling out a questionnaire on my preferences regarding colleges and I inputted my standardized testing scores and extracurriculars which were classified by tiers of “noteworthiness”. As such, the algorithm would take these factors into consideration and spit out several schools that would be of my liking. It also categorized them into safety schools, target schools and reaches. We narrowed the long list down and I ended up applying to 17 schools. My common app essay was revised a lot and we ended on the 3rd draft by Jan 1.
I felt good about the entire thing when ED/EA decisions started coming along. I got deferred from Cornell as my ED1 and Northeastern as my EA, but was accepted to UMiami and Penn State (rolling). I thought getting deferred from an Ivy was a good sign, and I felt my essays and ECs were strong as my friends that applied ED to Cornell had better scores and grades but were outright rejected. Between these decisions and my RD decisions, the person helping me sent me a goodbye email saying that the “decisions support team” would take over from there. I was left alone and had to write my Cornell deferral letter alone with no assistance from CV. Furthermore, when she didn’t feel like it she would forward my essays to a random person to edit them on her behalf. Mind you, these random people knew nothing of me yet were editing my essays with shallow feedback.
About a month after, I was emailed by CV. It was an automatized email that introduced me to the decision support team. They sent that email repeatedly, but I never replied because I hadn’t received any RD decisions yet. What good are they gonna do if there are no decisions to choose from? I guess their job is going to be pretty easy from here on out, as I was rejected from every single school RD school I applied to except for Indiana University-Kelley. The IU essay was one that I completely winged because the lady helping me with essay editing never got to it. She mentioned that I should apply to IU as an afterthought. I was rejected from Cornell after being deferred but accepted to NU. I was waitlisted at NYU and William & Mary. The rest of the schools rejected me, from schools labeled safeties by the “algorithm” like GWU or BU to Target schools like USC to reaches like Duke, Ivies, etc.
I tried reaching out to this team and made an appt. the guy didn’t confirm it and didn’t show up.
I should’ve noticed their sketchy practices earlier and dealt with them earlier to avoid what happened here. My application has been completely jeopardized by their influence and misleading claims of knowing what they’re talking about and asking for our trust. One would think that paying a price tag like this would guarantee you a worry free process, but no. My parents were also very off guard with the situation because I was being admitted and deferred (not rejected) from schools in the beginning, and I was being tutored elsewhere so they had their guards down the entire time. I am also privileged to say that to my family, the monetary expense was insignificant which led to our inaction. However, the significant expense was my jeopardized application and mediocre decision results.
To deal with my waitlists, we hired another counseling firm that is very expensive but very reputable and transparent. They’ll help me with my LOCIs. We could’ve stuck with CV as it’s not already paid for, but our skepticism on the quality of their advising took away our trust in the firm and we aren’t letting them touch my LOCI with a 10ft pole. Furthermore, the person we’ve spoken to from this new firm has looked over my common app essay and said it was trash. I thought at first it was an exaggeration but it made perfect sense as it’s why schools like BU and GWU denied me even though I have above average stats. This made me livid considering the amount of time and effort spent towards this specific essay all had gone into vain.
I hope this enlightens you.
Good luck!