How has the admissions scandal affected your approach to helping your child apply for college?

I guess what I found most shocking about the scandal was that a place on a not a big spectator sport athletic team would guarantee you admission that a half million dollar perfectly legal donation / famous parent /not half bad EC (developed own make up line as you tube influencer…surely an interesting essay could at least be cobbled from that ) would not.

Thanks for sharing your comment. Would you be willing to email me at teichers@csps.com to set up a brief interview with you and/or your child about this? Would you be willing to have any of the written comments or material from an interview be quoted by name in a news article?

CTScoutMom, Musakparent, and Ultimom – I would particularly be interested in following up with you if you could email teichers@csps.com if you are willing to be interviewed by phone. Thanks.

"Your GC is out of touch and behind the times if your student wants to be in the selective colleges application crowd. "

That’s a little harsh, there really aren’t that many selective colleges, relatively speaking in the US. If the GC is in a district where most of the kids will attend community college, state school, and any college outside the say us news top-100, guess what, that’s good advice. The numbers change but usnews said they estimated 4000 4-yr and there about 1100 comm colleges, so 5100 total. If you define selective college as less than 50% acceptance rate, you’re talking maybe a 100 colleges, maybe 150.

“Well to do peers are paying tens of thousands of dollars starting in 8th grade to package themselves for selective colleges.”

Again you’re talking at the extremes, the average consultant according to IECA made $4620 in fees. Yes Singer gets the headlines but that’s not typical. And 4K is a lot of money for families living paycheck to paycheck, so at this point it’s pretty much up to the GC, kid and parents.

It just reinforced my opinion that kids who are chasing the elite schools have been sold a bill of goods and are wasting their time. They should be enjoying HS, taking a reasonable class load, and joining a few activities they truly enjoy. Instead, they are spending all their time taking five AP classes, doing hours of test prep, joining a bunch of ECs they aren’t all that interested in that fills up whatever free time they have left and then some. All for a 10% chance at best to get in.

Couldn’t agree with you more. The entire college experience is all about the school name nowadays and these kids are duped into believing the mountain of debt is worth it!

@Johnny523 At times I do wish my D19 had had an easier time in HS, but her hard work turned into $$$ for us and her. 1-3 points less on the ACT and she would have been paying more at her current school. Also she can now either double major or finish 1-2 semesters early.

So it can be tough. The good thing was she made the choice to take extra AP classes. We tried to talk her out of taking one of them junior year. Just like we told her not to work so much this Summer, but the goofball would work 10-13 hour days across two jobs.