Please recommend a private college counselor
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Anonymous
You cannot generalize like that. Just because your child got success in admissions to their desired colleges, doesn't mean her approach is wrong and only for colleges outside of T20. You do realize that top SLACs are equally competitive as the T20s. |
Anonymous
My kid got a perfect ACT score and was accepted to ivies- so prep matters worked out great for her. |
Anonymous
| Lots of AN (Sara) Robertson and Echols scholar finalists this year. They had whole posts on the interviews. |
Anonymous
Wondering this too. |
Anonymous
Right on cue here's the Richard Montauk booster, maybe even Richard himself? I interviewed him after seeing his name on here. He didn't listen to what DC wanted at all, kept pushing foreign uni's even though I said kid wanted to be a few hours from home. We passed. |
Anonymous
| Curious about Application Nation. Any more reviews? |
Anonymous
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AN is a good deal for Sara but bad for families. It is a business model problem. She wants to make a lot of money, and one-on-one counseling limits how much money she can make. She can advise a million students at a low fixed cost with this model. So she came up with an approach that makes her a lot of money.
The main help families need in the admissions process is getting advice for their specific circumstances. The general advice you can get from reading any good book on admissions. It is like asking for relationship or counseling advice in a newspaper vs talking with a therapist. In a newspaper the person is probably famous and gives good general advice, but many of the nuances are lost. In competitive admissions space, this is not the kind of help that would give you any advantage. A counselor who is familiar with the student and the school system, can give targeted, direct help that we found to be vastly more useful. I wish we realized this much earlier in the cycle when we were applying. |
Anonymous
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You can get all the help you need or $3000 to $4000 dollars. Essay help, college list, application review, etc. Many local counselors cost no more than $250 to $400 per hour and we found we needed about 9 hours in total. For this we got a counselor who is familiar with FCPS, got to know the student, has a baseline of what similar students fared in the recent admissions cycle, got student on track to timelines, reviewed essays, reviewed the application and helped with many questions along the way. Dont waste money and effort on Application Nation.
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Anonymous
| I would say don't totally rely on Application Nation. Many families in the group use her group as a point of advice. But they also use outside counselors to help boost their child's application. AN is very good at teaching the granular process of college admissions, which the 1:1 private counselor won't be able to provide. To understand the system and how arbitrary the admissions process is, AN is very good. |
Anonymous
This is what we did. Outside essay help, outside application reviews, outside help with narrative. It’s a good group to follow though for general learning, knowledge gathering and frankly generating ideas (for my younger kid). Just pay the minimal monthly fee. And read what others are posting…. |
Anonymous
Oh come on… college of their dreams doesn’t mean HYP to everyone… many dreams are attainable. My kid’s dream was Williams. So then she made a list of schools like it and looked at most by start of senior year. She’s now at a SLAC, not Williams, but I’d say the dream helped her find a perfect fit. Good luck to your child OP.. whatever the dream is… and realize the dream may change. |
Anonymous
Why wouldn't a 1:1 private counselor be able to provide advice on the "granular process of college admission"? |
Anonymous
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I would only hire a one on one private counselor who has actually been in the admissions room - recently.
After going through this process now 2 times, their advice is more tailored, different and more relevant. |
cmsmeade
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We enjoyed working wtih Moxie - we just signed our second kid up. I think first kid ended up where we would have thought but really glad we had Moxie to walk him through the process so that it was really his decision making and not ours when it came to admissions strategy and applying. We are an FCPS family.
They were referred to us by a family with two students in a DC private. They were happy enough the first go-around that they used them again! |
Anonymous
| Hired Foundry Admissions on a friends rec. We're a private school family with a student who needed more help sticking to deadlines and I didn't want to have to do it. I was pleasantly surprised at how helpful they were with the entire process and will definitely hire them again for my younger son. Very reasonable and they were there when we had followup questions before committing. |