Yup we did some overseas as well as early rolling. And wow getting those acceptances in hand really changed everything.
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A study done 15 years ago showed that 26% of high achieving HS seniors were using independent educational consultants. So no surprise that the number is now a tad higher
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Ones that cost $120,000 a year? I donât think so. Supposedly 26% of Harvard students use these expensive consultants according to the article.
That was in response to the comment about the # of Harvard students who used IECs. Apparently the # at Harvard who reported using IECs isnât much different than the general # of high achieving students using IECs. Few families spend that absurd amount of money for an IEC. And there are also average achieving students, or students with special needs who use IECs.
I know. I think the article is misleading, frankly.
" In a survey of Harvardâs class of 2027, 23 percent of respondents said they had worked with a private college consultant. The gap widens once income is considered: About 30 percent of respondents from families earning half a million dollars or more per year hired a consultant, compared with just 6 to 7 percent of respondents from homes with incomes of $125,000 or less."
I understand what you are saying @jym626 but how many of these are hiring $120,000 a year consultants who have a $200,000 sign on fee? The article implies that almost 25 % of Harvard students are doing this.
I donât believe that.
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Can you quote where it says that? I didnât read it that way.
Its not a âsky highâ percentage. It is the average from 15 years ago of the # of high achieving students who used IECs. And surely that # is higher now. And many families use IECs for only a portion of the process (help with list building, help with resumĂ© writing, help with essays, etc).
It is a sky high percentage of those actually enrolled at Harvard. I understand many people use them, not all successfully, and not all for Harvard.
The way I read the article, it mentions a # of students at Harvard who used IECs that is no different than the average across all high achieving students at all colleges. If you see something different in that article, can you post it please.
It says 26% of Harvard respondents used A college consultant, not THIS college consultant.
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Hear, hear. While we arenât rich (we qualify for aid at most schools), we are highly educated. Spouse and I are both STEM profs, and could thus help our kids craft some pretty nice admissions profiles if we were so inclined.
Theyâre STEM kids but never even did science fair projects, and if they did we would have been super picky about the kind of help we provided. They do their own thing. Weâve guided them when theyâve asked for guidance (rare, LOL). We offer advice. We help with college searching and read essays (only when asked). But weâd never dream of giving them some nepotism research experience. I could have snapped my fingers and given my kids BS (or real) research experience. The HS âresearchâ thing is a bit of a pet peeve for me. Itâs well-suited to only a small minority of HS students and Iâm vexed by the trend of rich kids padding their apps with insincere research activities.
My college freshman is applying for summer internships right now. My coworker mentioned that one of our colleagues is looking for someone in her lab this summer and suggested I ask her. After our kid missed an application deadline, spouseâs grad school friend offered to get our kid an internship at that company (heâs a division head). We just canât do it. Our kid has to get his internship (or not) on his own steam.
We are so much prouder of the kind, resourceful taxpayers they are becoming than we are of whatever fancy school they could get into if we helicoptered. Maybe weâre nuts or bad parents for not doing everything we can to give our kids a leg up, but it just doesnât jive with how we do things. This scene described in the article is a whole other universe for us even as academics ourselves.
Also I think this guy is running a racket â these kids would get into great schools regardless. But heâs selling them something (he claims) theyâre clamoring to buy and they apparently have the money to burn 
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So it seems to me this might be analogous to financial services, where studies have repeatedly found a lot of wealthy people pay a lot of money for services that in the end seem to underperform just simple off the shelf products like index funds and Target funds. Absolutely, there is all sorts of word of mouth bragging about how âmy guyâ is doing great for me, but some people seem really bad at understanding you need a proper baseline for comparison.
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Wasnât Madoff a âmy guyâ type
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Yep. There is a basic psychology some people have where they believe there are insiders constantly getting an advantage over outsiders, and so they are willing to pay a lot to feel like an insider with a special advantage.
And of course their premise is not always entirely wrong, but very often they are actually failing to get any real insider advantage for themselves. When you think about, expensive as these services can be for them, they really are not plausibly paying enough to really get special access.
So this company appears very good at making these families feel like big shots. But I think the real big shots on Deanâs Lists and such are truly in a whole other class of wealth.
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This is one of these things where the math is true but doesnât really capture the complete picture. The true UHNW are not typically primarily interested in âbeating the marketâ per se because theyâre usually at least somewhat focused on capital preservation. Itâs tough to cry a river for someone with a $1B NW when theyâre down 30% in a market crash, because theyâre still worth $700mm right? But when their lives are financed by 9-figure PALs as they often are, that can lead to extremely bad consequences. So theyâre not measuring against the index. And in a sense this is not completely unrelated to a shifting asset mix for ânormal peopleâ as they age and approach retirement. Your risk profile is appropriately different.
ETA: also, theyâll often âpay upâ to find something not correlated to the market.
For sure.
There are some kids in our area who use private consultants --most are at public schools that do not have good college counseling(or so they say), one was at a different private school (they hired one because their D was told certain state schools were a reach and they did not believe it could be true). The ones I know personally have not gotten great advice (I am certain I could have advised them better, for free!). I do not know anyone personally who has used one at our private school, but it is discouraged so I doubt anyone would admit it. Parents writing essays is also discouraged yet we know some who did: It backfired. Off the record anecdotes from staff at the school indicate outside private counselors can clash with the schoolâs tailored advice and not be helpful, as they do not understand weighting and courses in the school and often give poor advice /encourage unreaslistic reaches. Yes, the private schoolâs regular college guidance is an advantage, but it is not anything significantly different than what one can find with thorough research on CC. It is nothing at all in any way similar to what this article describes. The individual school naviance and scoir data is an advantage, but many publics esp the magnets have that too. Our family has the benefit of being in these higher income ranges people have thrown out there, and I would never sign up for anything like this. It feels like cheating. How would my kids feel about themselves if they got in to their T10s with some of this ridiculous fake packaging? They were each their true selves and did their apps independently, and had success. The process is definitely very flawed, but kids do get in to top schools without any of this nonsense.
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The really big advantage is that the counselors and teachers can write great, personalized LORs. Thatâs a huge advantage.
There are also the personal connections with admissions offices and the ability to direct kids to different schools so theyâre not all competing against each other. There are undeniable, huge advantages to private high schools, especially the elite ones.
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100%. I feel like these advantages are minimized all the time. Our guidance dept at our feeder-y public high school doesnât help with any part of the college process. Itâs astounding.
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Going to have to disagree here. The in-school person will not only write their own letter, but theyâll read the teacher recs too. Not to mention have pretty good familiarity with the stuff thatâs not captured in Navience or SCOIR, how that would impact the kid, and how kids who are most like the applicant in question in ways that extend beyond hard data have done of late applying to X, Y, or Z.
Theyâre able to be far more helpful and far more specific than any help youâre going to get from an arms distance person, whether thatâs a paid consultant or someone here on CC.
Exactly.
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