One of my kiddos was more easy going, willing to take input and enjoyed discussing college with us. She had the inititiative to stay on top of her deadlines, etc and went to college.
Now her younger brother is another case! Lots of potential but doesn’t like to talk about it with us. Has no real plan yet and I am fairly positive he just needs guidance. I was considering hiring someone, there are a few options in my area, in order to help him explore his interests, make a plan, keep on top of deadlines, etc. Anyone use someone? Recommend anyone? Advice? We are in California but open to other locations, too. My son is likely to consider schools out of state, too.
We had someone (a friend who was a college counselor) who proofread our DDs main essay. Actually…what they did was look at what DD had written. Then they looked at the rewrite the 12th grade English teacher requested. DD asked which was the better one. The college counselor person said the one DD wrote, and that is what was used.
This person also suggested colleges to us…actually as an answer to a query I posted on this forum.
As I suggested, speak to some people you know who are willing to share their experiences with you. A positive recommendation from someone who has actually used a private college counselor is the way to go, in my opinion.
We used one with D19 as we had at that stage no experience with the US college system, and the school had little input due to counselor overload. In retrospect the main advantage was “the adult who is not my parent I will listen to” in helping getting essays done etc. She did suggest a number of colleges but D did her own research for a largely different list too. This sounds like the kind of person you’d be looking at? From talking to friends, this is one of the two main reasons for hiring a counselor. The other reason is the kids aiming at tippy tops and how best to strategize for those, though those seem to get the counselors on board as soon as sophomore year.
(We’re not using one with our current junior, partly because we understand the system better now and mainly because the school now has a dedicated college counseling department, they will do essays as part of all junior year English classes etc. )
Yes, we too are using an outside independent counselor. The primary reasons are exactly those stated by SJ2727: a) D25’s hs guidance counselors have little experience or time to assist with college prep (she goes to an under resourced school) and b) she responds better to suggestions, input, and timelines from a third party than from us.
Did not hire a counselor (hence my love for CC). The folks who did hire a counselor and were happy with the results pass on the following wisdom:
1- Be realistic. No counselor, no matter how wired or connected, is going to get your B+ student who hates to read books into Princeton, no matter what they tell you.
2- Know your kid. Some kids respond better to an outsider; some kids are happy to take input and suggestions from family members; some kids are determined to figure it out on their own, warts and all. Spending money for your kid to ignore the counselor’s advice? Figure out if you can handle that! Because if you are nagging your kid to listen to the counselor and get going on a draft of an essay, what’s the difference vs. YOU nagging your kid to start a draft of an essay?
3- Know your finances. If you are robbing Peter to pay Paul (i.e. spending tuition money on a counselor with some uncertainty as to how much you can actually afford, maybe there’s a more cost effective way to get the job done. Your kids freshman year English teacher who does “essay reviews and topic brainstorming” on the side for a modest per hour price?
4- Identify what’s off the table upfront. No use spending money on a counselor who specializes in finding “hidden gem” colleges if you know that at the end of the day, your kid is NOT going to Beloit, Ithaca, Hobart, College of the Atlantic. Whether it’s cold weather, rural, hours away from an airport that serves your home, too “fratty”, or whatever- don’t wait until the clock is ticking to figure out where your kid’s boundaries are.
Everything I Needed to Know (to get my kid into a top college) I Learned on College Confidential (plus a lot more). Well, not exactly. CC didn’t let me know about the Young Arts to Presidential Scholar route (which I will always regret not having known about), and some small amount of the advice I got was incorrect, but seriously, you don’t need to pay someone thousands to find out what you need to know. There are essay readers on here who will give you feedback for free. And tons of advice about what schools might be matches for him.
There is advice, and then there is motivation. If you have a kid who is not interested in doing the bare minimum that they need to do to assemble a college application, then that should be telling you where they should be going to college. For example - if one has a son who has okay grades, an okay score, who wants a major that your local state college offers, for which he is an automatic acceptance, and it’s affordable, but one wants him to try for much more highly selective colleges to fulfill his potential that one is sure he has, even though he can get a great job coming out of the local state college and do very well in his chosen career after that, then hiring a consultant might not yield the best result for that child. One might wind up with a child at a much more expensive, private or OOS college, who is still the same person that he was, who might have been better served by the fantastic value close-to-home state college.
From what you describe, unless there is really some massively compelling reason to do otherwise, perhaps your son would be well-served by one of the huge number of excellent CA state schools for which his GPA qualifies him? Surely the CA college system must offer schools which have the majors that he is interested in. If family dynamics are such that he is resistant to researching colleges himself, and resistant to your working with him on this, perhaps there is a kind family friend or neighbor or classmate who has recently been through the process?
College counselor hiring is the norm in our region (and probably within our town, though not openly discussed). To be granular about possible benefits and pitfalls:
Benefits:
Organization - The counselor should create a very clear and concrete list of admission-related tasks and goals specific to your kiddo. That should include an assessment of strengths, weaknesses and possible areas kiddo can focus on as an upperclassman to demonstrate enthusiasm and capability. That can help create a “story” “identity” or “narrative” that then becomes a jigsaw puzzle for College “diversity”. Other tasks like standardized test prep, creating a college list, college tours, identifying LOR writers and other tasks should be enumerated and discussed.
Schedule - The counselor should keep kiddo aware of upcoming events, test dates, and the relative scheduling and concomitant workload of standardized testing prep, essay writing, creating a college list and other tasks that come with the territory. Kids’ schedules between their Junior year (often the busiest academically and with EC’s) and admissions-related tasks can be planned to minimize bottlenecks and crunch points. This also provides value to parents who may not be as expert nor as focused on helping kiddo meet all deadlines successfully.
Resources - Counselor or their organization should provide research materials and other support so kiddo can find matching schools, create a realistic school list and learn more about camps, jobs, competitions or other opportunities.
Essay assistance - As much as this is a third rail, it’s part of the industry. Essays are important, and some speculate increasingly so after SFA. Having a former English major at Yale “guide” your essays - a person who is also smart enough to make sure it doesn’t sound like a former English major at Yale “guided” the essay" - is part of the landscape. That said, basic vetting like making sure to avoid cliche topics (summer job building houses in Belize) or red flags (going negative on school experiences, piercing the 4th wall) seems at least somewhat fair.
Perspective - One of the greatest advantages of a college counselor is that they may have a broad perspective across students they are helping and across years as to where kiddo really fits in terms of the big picture. What will really distinguish kiddo and what is cool but is also quite prosaic in the scope of graduating seniors. College counselors can take this perspective and encourage kiddo to lean into what makes them stand out and avoid focusing on something that won’t move the needle.
Drawbacks:
Expense - Counselors range in fee schedule from single thousands to millions depending on factors that are difficult to elucidate. Packaging is a common thread where payment is expected for a full range of services and advice even for students who need more tailored or limited help.
Extras - Generally services like test prep, tutoring and some additional essay vetting may be recommended but are upsell additional charges.
Red flag extras - A more recent occurrence - Paying for someone to help you start a business, Paying for someone to walk you through starting an app, Paying for someone to give you a research opportunity, Paying for someone to publish your student paper. These are out there and difficult sometimes to distinguish from more acceptable opportunities. Also arguably a conflict of interest if these are recommended by a counselor whose company also administers the ancillary service. These paid opportunities have been around long enough that Colleges are wise to these. Not to say it’s always obvious when this happens, but it is a known red flag and a bad look.
Completely agree that an encyclopedic knowledge of CC can be a way to learn a lot (and perhaps enough) about admissionz. What a counselor brings to the table is basically what a management consultant brings to the table. Outside authority, possible expertise, a proven system that at least will get kiddo from point A->B, and a savings of parental stress and time. Whether kiddo would benefit depends mostly on kiddo’s own goals, characteristics and personality and also on family dynamics, parental involvement, time and expertise.
I’ll just reiterate- keep your expectations within the world of reality. A friend of mine hired a pricey counselor for their last kid (they were disappointed with the outcomes of the first two, although IMHO their kids are lovely and did well with their college and beyond choices). After the money and the meetings and the “packaging” and the editing and the selection of essay topics and the “don’t do this, do that” for summer activities, etc. the kid ended up at Binghamton. Which is a fantastic school, don’t get me wrong. But here in the Northeast, nobody needs to pay a private counselor for their kid to get into Binghamton, which is a public university in New York. Everyone’s HS has the stats on who got in; the process is relatively straightforward and transparent; a kid with solid grades and a rigorous transcript does not need to have cured cancer or started their own non-profit to end famine in the Sudan. Even the most checked-out guidance counselor can usually look at the kid’s transcript and say “Binghamton is likely, add Stonybrook and Albany and you’re done”, or “Binghamton isn’t happening, did you look at Geneseo, or how about taking a deep dive on one of the CUNY schools?”
So of course my friend is very down on the college counselor, bad advice, terrible outcome, etc. Which I don’t think is true. I’m going to bet the counselor said “Columbia isn’t happening, NYU isn’t happening, Cornell isn’t happening. But if your kid really wants a big school in NY let’s add Binghamton to the list”. And voila.
Thanks for everyone for the info/insight/advice. We are definitely on our own, we don’t have any time with the counselors at all, they are super overloaded. I am definitely going to consider hiring someone or at a minimum talking to a student who has been through the process. Now on the search…
We did so years ago for our brilliant, severely dyslexic, partially homeschooled kid. I thought it would be helpful to figure out how to package the kid as he was a complicated story. Our son’s HS guidance counselor was probably 23 in her first or second year on the job and really did not have any sophistication. I did not find the person/firm that we hired to be particularly helpful, though others did. To qualify, I’m a strategist in real life, know quite a bit about elite schools, and am a serious researcher, so I probably did a part of the job I was hoping to do myself, but I did not find that they augmented very much. I did not/do not know much about the inner workings of adcoms. I did not get any insight from the counselor that changed anything we would have done on our own.
We also hired very moderate test prep help for him. He probably worked with them for a couple of mornings to understanding the types of questions (especially typical trick questions) and he was off to the races. He prepped on his own for the better part of three weeks for SATs and ACTs and scored in the top 1% in both and we decided not to retake them.
We did not use a counselor for my daughter but got more help on test prep – she did not have quite the drive to do it on her own and was very busy with school and ECs.
We hired someone that charged hourly versus flat fee and we used them to keep our kids on track without it becoming a shouting match in our household. This way they were beholden to someone else’s deadline. They also helped to curate the application and essay, helping my kids figure out the best topic. I did a lot of research here as well; but especially with my D, she thought she knew it all and mom knew nothing, so having an outsider helped.
Completely agree with this. Our primary reasons for hiring our D25 a college counselor was organization and someone other than us giving D guidance. While our D is motivated and organized this is new territory for her and while I enjoy the research, I travel a lot for work, so having access to an advisor along the way has been tremendously valuable. I would certainly do it again for our D.
We hired an outside firm because our college counseling at my kid’s high school started really late (we didn’t meet one-on-one with the high school counselor until spring of junior year). That same spring, concerned we weren’t getting the attention needed, we hired a local outfit. They helped with keeping things on track and helped with essay topics. Where they didn’t help at all, and even hindered us, was with supplemental essays. We had visited all the schools; they hadn’t. We had skin in the game; they didn’t. They were much too directive and uninformed. We quit listening to them at that point. We already had our college list before we met with either the high school counselor or the outside counselors, but they were helpful in terms of eliminating one of the schools and giving us some insight (though not much) into others. The best thing were the deadlines and the nagging.
We did not use a college counselor. I have a friend who paid a lot of money for a college counselor. The counselor was very optomistic that the kid had the stats for a top 20 college. Besides the state flagship, did not really have the kid apply to any safeties. This was NOT a situation in which the counselor said the elites were unlikely, they basically said they were likely almost definite. Kid did not get into any elite schools and ended up at state flagship, which is a great choice but did not the counselor to get in there. In the end the parent realized that while the kid had great grades and something of a good story, the rest of his application was not outstanding. It is still not clear to me why this highly recommended counselor was so unrealistic.
While the counselor was good with setting deadlines, that doesn’t mean that the student will comply without parental nagging.
We hired an essay reader because S25’s high school is very large and very short on college counseling staff. Appointments were always weeks (sometimes month+ ahead) and you could only make one appointment at a time. While he got some feedback on his essays from his school, they only do overview analysis. He needed more detailed review rather than big-picture review since he already knew what he wanted to write about. I know some people on CC do essay reviews, but we were new to CC and didn’t really understood the process. We have a younger child and will probably not go the essay reader route next time unless maybe he gets into some of his reaches.