Reply to Senior Parents: if you hired a private college counselor

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It's not as easy to say if it is worth it or not - even with school results. What if they accepted your student based on something having nothing to do with the counselor's work? We hired a counselor once, not a high end one, and it helped us and our student. Since we have three kids, I can make a decent case that paying the first time helped across all three kids.

You hire a counselor to do one or more of the following:

1. College prospect selection without parent/high school bias
2. Set and manage a process
3. Overall story of the student and making sure it comes through the app
4. Additional eyes on essays and ideas for same
5. How to complete the common app
6. Any secret sauce on differentiation, how different colleges work, etc.
7. Maybe most important - you don't have to be the task master and sour your relationship with your student, the counselor does that (in a nice way).

For a family making a lot of money, spending 5k-10k won't matter. For the rest of us, I would say you can do a lot of this on your own for less. Or hire for specific areas of need, for example essay review.[/quote]

For older child their high school guidance counselor was somewhat helpful with the creating the list (assuming your child could articulate what they were looking for) and outlining the college process.  They were own their own for everything else.  We were looking for assistance with items 2-7.  We spent less than 3K and it was worth it.  My kid ended up at a low reach (EA) with merit and I think the brainstorming with the essay, organizing the process, common app review and reducing the conflict of us needing to be the task master for everything was worth it.

Our younger child has a very different set of schools , is more organized, attends a private high school where they do more of 4,5, and 6.  Plus I had been thru the process already.  We opted for essay brainstorming/help only rather than full college counseling.  Too soon to say the results.  From what I’ve seen though, I think they’ve put the best foot forward application wise, that they could.  I will add in our case we were looking at schools that offer merit which might not be  typical of someone with outside counselor or essay prep.  I worked with both my kids to come up with their college list and the counselors vetted/weighed in and maybe suggested an extra school or two.[/quote]

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