WSJ article about consultant who starts them early

[TonyGrace]

@Mwfan1921

Maybe some see paying for this consultant and not private school is a wash.

But it is not. Regardless of where you land a good private school will typically prepare you quite well for college, and to make the most of the opportunities provided. So at least you have that to show for your money when its all said and done.

[admmda]

If the college counseling business had any regulation, it would probably include provisions to prevent engaging clients as young as 11. It could be seen as predatory, potentially? (In the business sense)

[BKSquared]

It’s the parents they contract with. Regulations should involve mandatory disclosure of consultant’s background and some type of standardized table of past results and cost matrix. The reputable consultants already do this, but I am not so sure their data/methodology is consistent across competitors.

[citivas]

@NiceUnparticularMan

Of course living in a “top” public district can also be very expensive

It can but it doesn’t have to be. I live in a “top public” NJ school district but also pay one of (if not the) lowest tax rates in the area and pay far less for our property than if I lived in NYC, LA, SF, the entire Bay Area, etc., where most of the public schools are not good.

That said, and on topic, in my experience there is a meaningful subset of parents in our district who still opt to send their kids to private school despite the exceptional public, and those parents are highly correlated with those who also pay for expensive private college advisors. I would suspect that those who pay for a super expensive counselor as an “alternative” to paying for a private are the minority. The majority are the people who are “in for a penny, in for a pound” and the more they invest the more they want to “protect” and “hedge” that investment with additional purchased perceived edges or advantages.

[admmda]

Oh, the irony of paying a college counselor top dollar to advise you not to send your kid to a top dollar, pay-for-play summer program…

[AustenNut]

@blossom

I have not seen the statistics- I hope someone here who works in pediatric public health has and can chime in.

But from what I’ve read, at a national level, the pediatric and adolescent stressors appear to hit vulnerable families very hard-- food and housing insecurity, parent or guardian with a substance abuse issue, etc. My guess is that the scholars who study stress and anxiety across population cohorts have not zeroed in on “Harvard vs. Yale vs. Doomed to flip burgers her entire life” as a trigger.

I do not have statistics; merely anecdotes. But in working with middle school students at a Title I school, there are kids stressing to be perfect. Not tons of them, but they’re definitely there. A few of the examples I can think of had siblings at the school (one was even a twin), so they were coming from the same home environment. In each of the families I’m thinking of, most of the kids were pretty chill. They were all in the honors classes, etc, but each family had a kid that was a perfectionist and stressed about academics and would break down crying worrying about something that was really not a big deal to most others surrounding them.

I can’t say for sure, but I’m pretty confident that when these kids would end up in high school (usually a magnet), there was a higher percentage of the perfectionists and then that some of that pressure would spread to others who hadn’t been that way in middle school.

This is not to say that academics (i.e. Harvard v. Yale) was the only type of stressor found amongst the students, but it definitely existed.

[sinkor_swim]

I have found this to be an excellent book on the topic of parental involvement, along the lines of the discussion above. The author is a former Stanford University dean and mother of two.

How to Raise an Adult by Julie Lythcott-Haims