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Are Private Consultants Really Needed?
Posted by on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 5:25 PM (PST)
Ralph Figueroa, of the NY Times "Choice Blog" on college admission recently wrote a piece about private college consultants and whether or not they're worth it and if colleges can tell when students have been coached. He answers the question well, by first stating colleges don't necessarily know if a student has been coached in the application process. There is the rare instance when a school asks for a graded paper from the student and if the writing style is dramatically different, the student's application could be suspicious, but that never happened in the thousands of applications I reviewed for Pepperdine.
The second part of the question is what he focused most of the piece on by basically stating that private consultants are needed if there aren't enough resources at a school. I've the dismal state of college counseling in California and we've found, more often than not, school counselors welcome any help to ease their work load, whether it be with dvd's, workshops, weekly newsletters with tips, etc.
Below is my response to his article....
As a private college consultant in the Los Angeles area, I've seen the tremendous need for college counseling supplementation. The counselor to student ratio in California is approaching 900:1 if it isn't already there. I regularly speak to schools and put on free college admission workshops for juniors and seniors. Yes, I’m busy and swamped year around, but I’m not so above the system that I can’t spend a few hours a month helping a public high school. Inside the public education system, we're seeing first hand, the challenge counselors face with overcrowded and underfunded schools. We spoke with one counselor and in addition to being the only college counselor at her school of 2,500 students, she's also in charge of GATE, IB testing and coordinating state mandated tests. She said she's lucky to spend more than 10 minutes with each student during the year and on average spends about 30 minutes over the course of 4 years with each student. Students need more than 30 minutes of college guidance while in high school.
I personally believe students need about 5-10 hours of dedicated personalized college counseling; whether that comes from a private consultant or school counselor. Private college counseling doesn't need to be expensive and only available to the wealthy elite. A good private counselor will have a number of services available at several price points for families to choose. We recently launched an affordable package for families that gives them 5-6 hours of dedicated college counseling, self-discovery and essay editing for $499 and have seen incredible results for our students with as little as 5 hours of personalized help. Counselors we've talked to and worked with see private consultants as allies who make their job easier, we're all on the same team here.
Should a family be spending $25,000 on a pricey package? No. Should a family spend anywhere from $500-$5000 on private college counseling? If they need it. It's an invaluable investment in a child's future and I've seen, first hand, the profound impact our services have made in lives of our families....at every price point.
In the world of entrepreneurship, we're always trying to solve a problem. What's the problem in education? I've found there aren't enough college counselors in each high school to walk each student through their own college admission journey. Every student deserves that right because the the college admission process is a time of self-discovery, not just a rushed process with the end goal of college.
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