Reply to In hindsight, was your college counselor worth it? If so, can you share who it was?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Ours wasn't worth it, or at least not for a "full package." They are a local (DC area) highly regarded counselor. I don't want to post their name because they didn't do anything wrong, they just didn't do anything uniquely useful either, so it just wasn't worth even close to the $8,000 we spent.

The areas that we were least dissatisfied with their services were (1) coming up with college lists, and (2) analyzing DC's chances at colleges. As far as the lists, the counselor came up with a generic list of about 40 colleges that I could have easily, easily done myself - the only colleges on the list that I wouldn't have put on the list are ones that we all scratched our heads and crossed off immediately anyway. They basically then left it to DC to research and self-narrow the list. As far as analyzing chances, of course we did not expect the counselor to have a crystal or even opaque ball. But we did expect to receive some market and historical insights that we wouldn't know on our own. Also the counselor was aggressively conservative with chances, to the point that I believe that DC undershot because they were psyched out by their chances many places that they really didn't need to be. I know that ultimately the call as to where to apply was on DC and we the parents, but we were using the counselor for advice in these regards.

The area which was most helpful was time deadlines and the counselor being the nudge about the due dates with DC. That having been said, as another posted pointed out, the counselor can't make their students comply with deadlines, so there often were times that I as a parent had to get involved so it wasn't like it removed all angst between us, and also against weighing against the $8k counselor fee I would have accepted dealing with some more strife between DC and me.

For my next kid, I plan to hire an essay coach and that is it.[/quote]

NP here. I feel like I could have written this. I wonder if we used the same person/group. [/quote]

I have a friend who had a similar experience with even higher price tag. What I really don’t get is that he used the counselor for BOTH of his kids. They both got into great schools but transferred after a year because they were a bad fit.  Then, he used the counselor again to help with transfer apps. Prob $30k all in. What a waste.[/quote]

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