Reply to Fascinating article from the WSJ re the methods of an "elite" college counseling firm

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'd like to see a grass root movement of applicants using the additional information section to note that they didn't use a private counselor [/quote]

How can you ensure the students wont lie about using a college counselor? They lie about ECs, race and everything in between..[/quote]

There is no way to track it. Also, it's not a fair question.  Given that Private school kids get the equivalent of what I hired (a $4K for 4 full years of college counseling, all in), IMO most Private school kids should have to check that box.  
But there would need to be a different box for people spending $10-20K, and 20K+

I think it's an assumption based on your zip code of what level of CC you likely have
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That’s true.

Colleges expect a more curated application full pay private school students. 
All the bells & whistles [/quote]

Private school kids do not get the kind of CC you are paying for -- they are paying for the outside counselors too. Sadly, I learned that too late for my kids.[/quote]

Well you get a huge step up from what my excellent Public school offered.  my kids had 600-650 seniors in their graduating classes, about 95% go onto CC and 4 year colleges (we have an excellent CC that is actually now also a 4 year college for some programs and it nearly guarnatees admission to the state flagship that is difficult to get into directly---T50 school).  We have TWO counselors and for one of my kids one of them was PT due to returning from maternity leave (and nobody was hired for the other 50% of the job).  So 1.5 people for approximately 600 kids going to college.   
Our regular counselors there are 6 for 2500 students.  Yes you read that correctly!  So they are also not much help.  Typically most kids have not even met their regular counselor aside by the time they graduate, save a 5 min meeting (which disappeared during covid) to sign off on next year schedule.

So I'm going to bet you have a much better reg counselor and CC ratio at your private school.  But still not enough I'm sure

That is why we paid for our 2nd to have one.  First I managed.  They applied to schools in the 60-130 range and got into them all.  It was easy as these were not "competitive" schools and my kid was 50-75%+ at all of them.

2nd kid had 1500/3.98UW/8AP and had interest in a few T30 Schools.  So we hired a counselor to assist with college lists and what to do (within reason) to increase chances.  Within reason includes my engineering interested kid who had no STEM ECs was recommended to take at least one 2-3 week summer course in programming/STEM focused, to show interest.  That was probably a good idea and certainly didn't hurt my kid.  But it was a simple course, my kid enjoyed it, and they actually learned from it.  But they were not "doing research" or writing a book.

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