Private college counseling?

Parents Forum
1

<p>My oldest of three children is now a sophomore at a competitive magnet public ib program. She is aiming for elite college/ ivy programs etc.. My daughter tells me that several of her classmates are using private counselors.
I am debating whether to spend the money on hiring one.</p>

<p>Reasons for hiring one:
If I do not hire one it would put my daughter at a competitive disadvantage in the application process.
Although they are expensive, the cost is only relative considering the tuition at schools where she will be applying.</p>

<p>Reasons for not hiring one:
Many of her classmates will not be able to afford one, and why should I give her an edge now. My own philosophy in life is that cream will rise to the top eventually independent of parental help.
I may inadvertently pick someone who absolutely does not add any value.
I am taking the college admission process too seriously. I graduated from Cornell 24 years ago. I missed the PSAT completely because I thought it was optional and did not even bother studying for the SAT because I thought it was an IQ test.</p>

<p>Any comments on this</p>

2

<p>So what are the advantages in hiring one?</p>

3

<p>Go with all the reasons for not hiring one.</p>

<p>Encourage your daughter to follow her own passions and to use books & other resources for college admissions. </p>

<p>A private counselor can be tremendously useful for a student who has very unusual interests or a profile -- something that doesn't quite fit the usual advice. </p>

<p>If your daughter is an all-around bright student & high achiever hoping for admission to a well-known college, then a private counselor will charge a lot to tell you what you already know. For $20 you could buy any of a number of how-to books written by the priciest of counselors that will tell you the same thing.</p>

<p>If your daughter has a stumbling block along the way --examples: great grades, but very weak test scores; a learning disability; an off-semester with low grades pulling down her GPA; highly unusual or specialized interests -- then it might make sense to seek outside help. </p>

<p>But right now if your daughter is aiming for elite and Ivy admissions, I would suggest that you buy her a couple of books: Colleges that Change Lives and Harvard, Schmarvard - she needs to expand her horizons so she isn't simply applying to the same colleges that her classmates. In a sense you've already put her at a "competitive disadvantage" by choosing a high school where her classmates will all be likely to target the same elite schools -- the elites have only so much room for kids from any one high school -- the best way out of that is to develop a college list that is better targeted to her individual needs and goals.</p>

4

<p>I also recommend continuing to read on College Confidential, including these Parents forums, for a few weeks. It will broaden your ideas about her college search, as calmom said: </p>

<p>
[quote]
" the elites have only so much room for kids from any one high school -- the best way out of that is to develop a college list that is better targeted to her individual needs and goals.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>That in no way lessens or derides your daughter's chances anywhere! It's just experience here that even the most stellar triple-800 students need to develop a multi-leveled list that includes some Safety, Match, and Reach schools. </p>

<p>For more favorite books to enrich your personal understanding of the process, here's a recent link of what the parents here found most helpful: </p>

<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=393308%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=393308&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Even if you end up getting a counselor, I'd never, ever give over a process to a consultant without filtering it through your own values and understandings as a family. I guess a good one would work with you on that.</p>

<p>I have a friend who brought in a consultant because she's busy with a 4-year-old and preteen, and is concerned she won't have the time to research it all well enough and fast enough to help her college senior. She brought this person in in late Spring of his junior year, and she's happy and more secure this way.</p>

<p>I went with doing personal research from books. WHen I discovered College COnfidential, it was tremendously helpful because I no longer felt alone in that work. Our public school guidance counselor was very young and overworked, so she did more of the processing than the real guiding, but our S also wanted a special major so I didn't expect her to do all that, either. </p>

<p>Parents Forum has the more serious topics; Parents Cafe is more light-hearted and just a place to talk about anything including trends in shoes.</p>

<p>There are useful sites on each college or uni, a section where people report on their visits, and strategy chat rooms that the students populate. I wouldn't put your D right onto those chatrooms, because at times they can be very competitive and upsetting to students. But I like this website for me, and filtered anything valuable to my S. SInce he knows I like CC, of course that made it off-limits in his own mind!</p>

<p>One frequent poster on CC -- SoozieVt --also runs a private consulting service. You can see if she's reachable by Private Message, but her mailbox sometimes fills up because she's very generous with her time to others. If I could, I'd ask her, "Why would I hire someone like you?" But it's her busy season; anyway, worth a try.</p>

<p>Finally, those recommended books probably have chapters on the pros and cons of hiring a consultant. How close is your nearest Barnes and Noble bookstore for stand-up perusing of their college book search section? Then buy your favorites.</p>

5

<p>I am a public school college counselor and am asked this question each year. </p>

<p>I think hiring a private counselor depends on a few things:
1. How much work is your daughter willing to do over and above the application? How much help can you be? As the previous other posters stated, you can get all the tricks in books available to you-but you need to read them and extract the info. Time consuming, but worth it.
2. How good is your counseling at the high school? Will the counselor read essays and offer criticism? Can you talk to them about placement in previous years? Are they available on an as needed basis? Since your daughter attends a magnet school, I would think the counseling would be quite good. ..but I've seen everything.</p>

<p>You may want to meet with the counselor and get a feel for exactly how much help you can expect. </p>

<p>I'm mixed on the private counselor. My son's best friend had some of the issues a poster mentioned, hired a private counselor an did so well. Worth every dime. I have also had parents tell me horror stories and stick with us.</p>

6

<p>Graduating from a competitive, well-known high school limits the advantages of a private GC. A private GC really helps students who are applying from schools the colleges don't know that well. Unknown schools are the ones that don't have a fifty year history with top colleges. </p>

<p>Private GCs have been known to tell kids in competitive schools to move to a lesser known school to escape the binding nature of admissions history. Parents have paid a bloody fortune for that advice.</p>

<p>In other words, even with the best of the best GC's, your D is unlikely to 'beat' her school scattergrams. Get a copy of those scattergrams and study them, believe them. Listen to your school GC's opinion about your Ds chances, relative to her school's scattergram story. She should set her app strategy from that starting point.</p>

<p>If money is not an issue--ED should be part of that strategy.</p>

7

<p>Several college counselors post on CC, including soozievt and carolyn - I would look up their posts. They are extremely generous in sharing their expertise.</p>

<p>I think you don't need a private counselor if, between you and your daughter, you are able and willing to put in the time and effort to research schools, find those that fit, polish applications, and stay on top of the testing and deadlines. In some families, this just won't work because the parent-child relationship isn't conducive to working together on the process. In some families, the parents don't have the time or the student's special needs make the college search especially challenging.</p>

<p>Even if you don't need a private GC, though, having one could be a terrific resource. If I knew then what I know now (and had the bucks, of course), I think I'd have sought one out.</p>

8

<p>
[quote]
Reasons for not hiring one:
Many of her classmates will not be able to afford one, and why should I give her an edge now. My own philosophy in life is that cream will rise to the top eventually independent of parental help.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I try to give my children advantages because I AM THEIR PARENT. I know plenty of other parents who do the same, as much as their means allow. The cream probably will eventually rise to the top, but it can stay homogenized with the milk for a long time if the educational environment keeps stirring it towards the bottom. </p>

<p>That said, I so far have found College Confidential to be an effective "private college counselor." I suppose there might be some reason to have a few trusted adults give my children reality checks about the approaches they are taking to prepare for and to apply for college, but those adults may be local friends with whom I trade favors rather than hired help. </p>

<p>What I spend the most parental time and effort on for my children is not application help as such, but simply providing them with sound primary and secondary educations. Many programs that provide educational supplementation have financial aid, making them available to many families of many different educational levels. It's not a bad idea to maximize your child's learning--that might help your child make a bigger contribution to society in general sooner rather than later. </p>

<p>Best wishes in figuring out what to do.</p>

9

<p>My sister-in-law whose son attended a well known private school wondered after the fact if her son would have been helped by a private counselor. She felt that her school concentrated on the superstars of her class. Her son is extremely bright, but a slight underachiever, he wasn't one of those kids who did science research in the summer like other kids in the school. (He'd tried, but perhaps not hard enough.) However he seems to have hit the ground running in college. He seems to have found a great fit, got involved in research before classes started and actually managed to get involved in some discussions with my husband that involved him getting cited in one of my husband's papers. In retrospect maybe his school got him into exactly the right school!</p>

10

<p>From my observations, a private counselor is a good investment if you need a neutral party to run interference with your D. If you've had a somewhat contentious relationship up until now, then the college process really amplifies that-- every discussion can become a fight; even neutral questions like, "should we stay at a hotel in downtown Philly when we visit Swarthmore so we can also see the Franklin Institute" becomes a ridiculous battle of the titans. Especially if the parents don't see eye to eye with each other... having that third party can really defuse a lot of issues early on and get everyone working on the same page.</p>

<p>If everyone is working together already, then I haven't seen the value in the families where I know they've hired a counselor. Nobody can get your kid into Harvard or Amherst if the kid isn't already Harvard or Amherst material.... and the cost of having someone else tell you about schools you don't know about seems quite high, given the plethora of free material out there for everyone. I know parents who felt burned after the experience- the counselor over-promised and under-delivered, both with the end result as well as the services provided. I'm sure you will also speak with parents who felt it was worth every penny.</p>

<p>We also encouraged our kids to speak with as many adults as they could to learn more about different schools and different types of college experiences. Kids don't always think to ask a favorite history teacher, "where did you go to college and did you think then that you'd become a teacher?" which often leads to an eye-opening discussion about why people choose the paths they do. We've got a couple of acquaintances and friends who definitely get the "most admired by teenagers" award.... one is a U of Chicago grad, which put that school on the map for us, and one never graduated from college (but is possibly the most erudite and well read person my kids had met) which also helped establish some balance around the process- you don't need a degree from an Ivy League institution to have a rich inner life and a deep appreciation for intellectual inquiry.</p>

11

<p>If you decide to go with a private counselor and your D has a specific interest/major that she's interested in pursuing, one good way to check out counselors is to ask about their specific expertise in that area. </p>

<p>DS has found that talking to folks who have participated in the same activities that he has, and who are a couple of years older, are EXCELLENT sources of info for the schools and major programs he is considering. Ditto the professors/teachers/sponsors of those programs, who may be able to tell your D where kids with X interest go to college.</p>

<p>Ditto tokenadult's and p3t's comments on CC as an extremely useful resource. I have been fortunate to know, online and IRL, "angel parents" who have showed us how to avoid the pitfalls and find the opportunities that lurk out there. I learn something new here every day, and try to pass on what I have learned over the years as well.</p>

12

<p>I think that you should consider hiring an outside counselor only if the following apply:
1. You have first hand knowledge of a really good one in your area.
2. Your child is motivated enough to work with the counselor.
3. You prefer to take a hands off approach to the college selection/
application process; and
4. Your child's credentials and/or interests are such as he or she can
benefit from information about lesser known colleges/programs,
particularly those that are not in your state or are unlikely to be known
to your childd's guidance counselor.</p>

13

<p>frazzled1 wrote</p>

<p>
[quote]
Several college counselors post on CC, including soozievt and carolyn

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Thanks for catching my oversight! I always look forward to their postings especially.</p>

14

<p>Many of these private counselors volunteer at college fairs. It's a good chance to meet them and get a private consult for free. You never know your D may find someone who absolutely "gets" her and a few consulations may be all she needs.</p>

<p>I do know a family whose private college counselor recommended their son do a gap year at a male only one year institution. It worked out great for their son as he had spent very little time apart from his parents and was immature compared to his classmates.</p>

<p>On the other hand I know a family that used the exact same private counselor who were disappointed in their experience. The schools the counselor recommended were ones that their student had already indicated they were not interested in. The family felt the private counselor did not listen or understand their child's interests. They said they paid a premium price for nothing more than a proofreader for their child's essays. Their student picked eight colleges on their own and was accepted at five of them.</p>

<p>So, be careful - what works for one of your D's classmates might not work for her.</p>

15

<p>Perhaps a general evaluation meeting with a private counselor might give you some insight as to what one could offer you--then make a decision. But, keep in mind, above all, that there are NO guarantees in life-not even for college admissions. It does not matter how much money you may spend for a private college counselor-there is no guarantee that they can get your child into the ivy or otherwise that they want! And, believe me, it does all work out in the end for the best. I have seen it time and again with kids, including my own, and I can look back now and say that things will work out for the best, no matter what route you take. Best of Luck to you!</p>

16

<p>There are sometimes good reasons to use a private counselor and we will use one for our older child but likely not for our younger child. Maybe our reasons for choosing to use such a counselor for one and not the other may shed some light on reasons to use and not use a private counselor.</p>

<p>The older child attends a very good suburban high school but has a guidance counselor who appears to be 23 and is likely not that experienced at what top colleges want to see. She has many advisees and likely can't spend much time on any individual. She is very nice and I think she won't be hard to work with, but her value-added may not be that high. </p>

<p>Moreover, he has a special situation. He is extremely gifted and quite dyslexic. As a consequence, he has been partial home-schooling. Typically this has meant math and English done outside of the school. He finds the AP and Honors classes too slow and we've hired a Harvard grad student to work with him on math,and to go faster and in more depth. He's working with tutors in English on creative and expository writing instead of taking the school's classes. He took an expository writing class this summer at Harvard for HS credit. He's taking AP Art (at which he is talented), AP Math and AP Science and is writing a novel that a large publisher has expressed interest in. He's done extremely well in Moot Court despite the dyslexia. But, the exertion of reading and writing actually makes him exhausted and then sick over time.</p>

<p>I don't know have a good sense of how best to present such a kid to colleges and I don't think the HS guidance counselor does. So, I've interviewed a number of private counselors and we have chosen to work with one whose judgment on this type of situation seems good.</p>

<p>I would stay away from the people who "guarantee" an Ivy admission or post their Ivy acceptance statistics. My sense is that they preselect only kids who will get in to the top schools and use this to create their success rate. We need someone who can also help with finding a good fit -- schools that are both good for kids with learning disabilities and have very bright kids and a curriculum and requirements that will work for him. I talked to a couple of the "we'll get your kid into an Ivy" types and was put off by some of the suggestions they had.</p>

<p>In contrast, my daughter goes to a very good private high school which has excellent college placement folks. They seem to have a lot of experience and knowledge. And, she doesn't have the same kind of special situation. She's a normal bright upper middle class suburban kid at a good private high school. They'll provide appropriate help on fit and guidance on how to apply and how to write an essay, etc. I can't see that a private counselor will add much value beyond her high school placement folks.</p>

<p>I don't know what kind of support your daughter will get at her school or whether it will be hard for your daughter to show how she is interesting and talented. These are probably important factors in your decision.</p>

17

<p>As with most of the college search process, one size does not fit all. I have seen students benefit from private college counseling, especially those who didn't have much focus on what or where they wanted to study. Depending upon the resources at your child's school, a private counselor can often present options for colleges (and majors) that school counselors can't or don't. I have a friend whose 3 children, all with very different needs and interests, each ended up at a university that was just right for them after private counseling. 2 of the 3 schools were not obvious choices (1 I hadn't even heard of and I work in higher ed!)</p>

<p>However, beware of packaging. I run programs for high-ability students and I sit on the committee that selects the students for our most selective, prestigious full-ride scholarship. I can spot a packaged student a mile away. Few make it past our first review of applications.</p>

18

<p>I'd like to learn more about " scattergrams". I'm following this thread because my daughter's school counselor quit about two weeks before this, her junior school year. In addition, it's a small Christian school with a 4 year old High School that has only "christian" college fairs and the kids who don't go to public schools usually go to christian ones. My daughter is a bit of a superstar there, but probably not at a bigger school in a bigger town. she is also URM. And she seems to think I'm an idiot. Chances of finding someone good within 60 miles are kind of slim, and DD is probably not interested. Her school has hired one of the teachers to start as GC next week, and she's a URM (the only one beside the gym teacher (football /coach /enforcer)who "likes" my DD. Any thoughts?</p>

19

<p>Inthebiz, can you tell me what clues you see that mark a kid as "packaged?" I do alumni interviewing for my alma mater and have seen a few kids whose story seems to well integrated and maybe too polished, but I would not have guessed on that basis that they were packaged.</p>

<p>Shrinkrap, I didn't see the reference to scattergrams, but our high school provides access to software called Naviance that does produce scatter diagrams. For kids who applied to a particular college, you can plot SAT scores and GPAs and see who got in and who didn't. I don't think it flags athletes, URMs, or legacies, but it appears to be helpful. [We're just getting into this so I don't know for sure].</p>

<p>Shrinkrap, on another note, my small sample suggests that at least 2/3 adolescent girls and probably a much higher percentage think that their mothers are idiots, or if not that stupid, are the most embarrassing people on the planet. The percentage is not as bad for fathers. In our family, our daughter still seems to think her father is OK but her mother is embarrassing beyond belief.</p>

20

<p>shawbridge: It's a little hard to articulate what makes a student look like they're packaged. Some of it is polish (not to say some kids aren't polished), but there's polish and then there's a sense that this high school senior writes more like a grad of the Iowa Writer's Program or analyzes more like a Harvard MBA!) It's a gut feeling that they've been coached and edited within an inch of their lives. It's not a science (I'm sure we've been charmed by some packaged students and we've thought some non-coached students were packaged clones) but after a while it's pretty easy to detect. </p>

<p>Sorry I can't be more specific.</p>