Reply to Private consultants reality check

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Private consultants reality check "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]A close friend who tends to be more savvy about these things told me over a holiday get-together she knows some families in our school who hire private consultants who plan the kids’ whole life since 7th grade: help them apply to or even write essays for summer programs, plan sports (plan competition schedule and travel if it’s an individual sport without team schedule, summer skill camps at Ivies), school club leadership (how to recruit members, plan highly visible activities, manage their Instagram to document large gatherings, accomplishments), all the way down to drafting weekly emails for the kid to send to coaches, professors and college tour guides, band leaders they met on tours or summer programs over 4 years to establish relationships in a strategic and unannoying way. These are all before helping them ace the SAT and write their application essays.

Another friend told me last year (she had older kids and know many parents who have been through the process in the past decade) private consultants are useless, [b]that the ones she knew who use them are getting into T25-50 colleges after spending tens of thousands, but not the most selective ones, because the top ones see through the consultants’ finger prints all over an app. [/b]

So which is true? I know as with a lot of cases, the answer is “it depends”, perhaps a great consultant could do those things. We have zero plan to use one (we don’t even have a tutor!) but I’m so disheartened that DC who works so hard to get top grades, work so hard on weekends at his part time job is competing under these circumstances. If that’s true, I want to take my kids out of the game and just apply to Canada, which is where DH is from, where you shouldn’t have to play these games to get in.

Anyone BTDT has real insights? [/quote]

I see this all the time on DCUM (along with many, many, parents who claim their unhooked child got into an Ivy with no professional help, but the reality is that almost all the top Ivy kids I know used consultants to develop narratives and write essays, and all the top schools ate it up like peppermint candy.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics