<p>Sally,</p>
<p>I think you are being taken advantage of. His parents don’t appear to know much about the college admissions process. Rather than taking the time to learn about the process, they have decided that because your son got into all of the schools he applied to, you must know what you are doing. Now, you are supposed to work magic with his essays, when the essays are only part of the problem. </p>
<p>I could sit here and analyze the reasons he didn’t get into the schools he applied to, but I don’t know enough about him or the process to do so. What I do know, and I think that everyone on CC knows, is that to a certain extent college admissions are a crapshoot. Obviously he and his parents don’t understand this. It seems that they are trying to place the blame elsewhere. It seems like they think that he has done everything right (and it sounds like he did), but for some reason the colleges rejected him. And while the admissions process is a bit of a crapshoot, if he was rejected by all of these schools, something is amiss. It is not your job to figure that out. </p>
<p>If you are going to help him (and I REALLY don’t think you should), you absolutely should be brutally honest with him. It sounds like you have already spent a lot of time helping him last year, now they are asking you to do the same thing again. He needs to take ownership of this process. If I was going to volunteer my time to help him, I would make it contingent on him investigating other schools, and looking for a good match, not just a “big name” school.</p>