Reply to Pay to Play Summer Programs

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Why are college counselors dissuading kids from participating in so-called "pay to play" programs on the basis that they signal wealth and privilege?

Private school, club sports or other expensive ECs - not to mention the parents' professions and zip code - also signal wealth and privilege but no college counselor is discouraging those types of things.  Also, isn't "full pay" suppose to be an advantage in college admissions so, for example, it would be good for my public school kid to participate in an expensive program to signal that we are "full pay"?

People say that "pay to play" won't give your kid an advantage in getting into colleges, but from what I've seen from the current seniors, a good number of them did do a pre-college program at a college and also got into that college.  I can think of specific kids who did pre-college programs at Brown, Duke, UChicago, Northwestern, U. Michigan, Georgetown, and were accepted to those schools senior year.  They probably did leverage that "pay to play" summer experience in essays and activities lists to show "demonstrated interest."[/quote]

What are you quoting as "fact"?  Not every college counselor is discouraging kids from participating.   [/quote]

OP here.  My friends' kids attend different, very highly regarded private schools that send multiple kids to top colleges and their in-school private college counselors explicitly told the parents to avoid "pay to play" programs.  Also, Sara Harberson of Application Nation discourages these programs as well, as does the guy who does the podcast called "The Game."  So, obviously not every college counselor, but either way, most of the advice from all of the foregoing has made sense to me except for this one so I'm just asking for more thoughts/insight into the reasoning behind it.[/quote]

Our private school counselor said absolutely not to do these programs as well. It is a huge indicator of wealth and privilege. I find it odd too, since parents are both law firm partners and kid attends $55k+ a year private school. We are obviously HHI. It is sort of hard to hide wealth, but the CCO encourages community college classes or free internships/shadowing experiences instead of pre-college programs.[/quote]

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