Just for clarification, my consultant had three tiers:
1: Putting a school list together
2: Tier one plus interview practice and application advise.
3: Tier one and two plus advocating for the student and advising on the right fit.
We chose 3 to help find the right fit (which was a moot issue in the end). We naively felt she had a strong enough application to get into the majority of the schools to which she applied without any help.
For us, the idea was no different than using a college counselor. But we quickly realized that I had enough knowledge of BSs to make our own list (one our counselor simply confirmed was fine), and the wonderful parents on CC helped fill in any questions we had during the application process. We will not be using a consultant when kiddo2 starts the BS process.