I totally get it, and for sure there are various ways in which kids have to be more competitive today than they would have in their parents’ era for a variety of “top” colleges.
At the same time, though, since that prior era, those “top” colleges today are getting far, far more applications than they used to. In fact, they are getting far more than they did just before COVID. As a result, they have gotten more and more aggressive about things like doing an initial screen for truly competitive applicants. And even if you pass the initial screen, they are then looking for things that truly make an applicant stand out to them.
Given all this, it is inefficient and possibly counterproductive for kids, and the families supporting them, to spend a lot of time, energy, and concern on things that almost surely won’t actually matter, meaning they are neither going to help you get past an initial screen nor help you stand out if you do get to that point.
Indeed, I am not at all convinced everyone needs a pricey college consultant, but I think often to the extent they can add value, it is precisely because they understand what actually matters, and they can get the kid and family focused on those things. They can also help kids/families come up with carefully chosen colleges for their application list, the kind where the kid has the best chance of actually standing out.
But the reason I am not convinced everyone needs a pricey college consultant is there are other ways of getting help doing that. Some people have excellent college counseling at their school, and again the best of them help you stay focused on what really matters, and on coming up with good lists.
But I also think the community here is good at that stuff too. Occasionally we disagree or debate over strategies and colleges and such at the margins, but I think most of the people here agree on most of the important things most of the time, and also are great at generating good college suggestions.
So my advice is to take your energy and put it into supporting your kid in those ways, and do your best to avoid wasting it on things that really are very unlikely to actually matter.
Edit: Oh, and I just want to make something I implied a little more explicit. I think some parents and kids get into this mode of thinking where basically they imagine for the “top” colleges there is some perfect, 100-point sort of applicant, and then your kid loses points for various deficiencies, and if they lose too many points they won’t be admitted.
And we know this is completely wrong (from what AOs say, from studies, from information revealed in law suits, and so on).
What we know instead is these colleges are all trying to put together an interesting mix of different students in each class, not a bunch of identical students with the same qualities in the same measures. And of course no one is actually perfect, but different applicants stand out to them as particularly interesting in their own individual ways.
So I think on the first way of thinking, kids and families end up wasting a lot of time, effort, energy, sometimes money, and so on trying to “fix” what they see as deficiencies, plugging perceived holes, worrying about any instances of less than maximal success, and so on. Whereas what they actually should be doing is trying to understand what actually does make their particular kid special, interesting, and indeed not just like tens of thousands of other kids who will be applying to the same colleges.
And once they understand what truly does make their kid special and interesting–and there is always something, even if it is not on some traditional list of “good for college” things, indeed arguably BETTER if it is NOT on such a list–they can figure out how best to leverage that through well-chosen colleges and well-written applications.
