Reply to Are Private Counselors a Bad Idea?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Speaking as a college admissions consultant, the reason why we get a bad rap is because in the 2010s, the only credentialing programs for independents were the same ones that credentialed high school college counselors. So the perception that we were redundant and only for families who needed extra help the high school counselor couldn't provide was largely true.

Since then, however, the field has matured and evolved a lot. In many ways that school counselors aren't aware of. In my practice, we use admissions rubrics from highly selective college admissions offices that we've combined with proprietary data we gathered from colleges, the CollegeBoard, our partnerships with local high school counselors, and our own clientele dating back 16 years. It allows us to run gap analyses on students so services are targeted and pragmatic, and additive rather than redundant, wasteful, or off-target.

The admissions rubrics we used were gathered from active involvement in NACAC over more than a decade—and won't be found by parents searching online. Furthermore, the most valuable insights we gained about below-average SAT/ACT patterns that can still win admission at various colleges were drawn from the period before test-optional policies became widespread. The pre-test optional score thresholds still hold true in today's test-optional environment and aid in the decision to report SAT/ACT scores or withhold them. But someone trying to draw the same conclusions today would have an extremely difficult time sorting through current data given the diversity of testing policies across colleges.

Beware the bigger firms that are driven by sales. If you look on Yelp and Google Business Reviews, you can find college consultants who consult to the size of the gap that's actually necessary and helpful. You may have to search for consultants in other cities, as everyone works virtually now. But we're out there.[/quote]

[b]The outside counselors work for their clients, so they tell them what they want to hear, rather than giving them the honest feedback and realistic  advice[/b] that the school counselor is more likely to give. Telling kids to load up on as many AP courses as possible is not very useful and possibly harmful to some kids who cannot handle that course load. But, a lot of families feel that if they are spending a lot of money on something then it must be giving them an advantage. The school counselors can often tell which outside counselor has been hired as soon as they read the student’s draft of their essay. Not impressed at all by this business. [/quote]

It's actually the opposite. School counselors work for the school, so they lowball students and try to get them to ED schools that are less prestigious than what they can reasonably get into, so they can [b]make space for URMs, Legacies[/b], etc. Private counselors depend on word-of-mouth and marketing so they want your kid to get into an Ivy. The school counselor would rather rig the game. [/quote]

Correct.

School counselors advocate for the school, they work to maximize the number of students accepted to ivies.  But they don't laser-focus on an individual student particularly an unhooked individual student.  A high-stats unhook may RD to ten T20 and accepted to all ten, that means it takes away 10 acceptances from the school.  School counselors rather you ED Chicago and done with it so that the rest of the T20 can be allocated to FG LI, UMR, legacy, and other unhooked hi-stats.

Having an independent outside counselor can evaluate your DC's chance to ivies and t10 without the influence of school results as a whole.  But you got to work this carefully between school counselor and independent counselor.  The school counselor is the one who writes the recommendation letter, you want her to be on your side or at least approve your list.[/quote]

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