You Don’t Need a College Counselor — Just Get a College Essay Tutor
It’s college application season, and you’re probably being bombarded with messages from college counselors. Admissions are more competitive than ever, they tell you. Applicants with great GPAs and SATs are being rejected all the time. If you want to get the edge over other applicants, here are the five secret things you need to do…
College counseling has become a massive industry in recent years, with parents investing ridiculous amounts of time and energy to give their kids the best chance of attending a top college. Some college counselors claim that students should start thinking about their college applications as early as sixth grade; others charge as much as $1.5 million for their services. Many of these counselors are former admissions officers who claim that they know how to package your application so you’ll be admitted to top schools.
We’re suspicious of the current boom in college counseling. We feel that something very wrong is going on when parents are paying huge sums for this service (as opposed to purchasing a service with a discrete educational benefit). Of course, if you’re having trouble picking schools, it might make sense to meet with a college counselor once or twice, and if you haven’t grown up in the US, it’s certainly a good idea to get some advice on the college application process. But the current situation is over the top, and it’s the exact wrong message to give to teenagers. Here’s why we discourage you from investing huge sums in a college counselor, and urge you to get expert help with your college essay (usually at a fraction of the cost) instead.
College counselors charge a lot of money for unnecessary strategic advice
When you apply to college, admissions officers focus on four main factors: your grades, your SAT/ACT score, your extracurriculars, and your college essays. Of these, there are only two factors that you can get tangible help with when application time comes, namely your SAT/ACT and your college essays. If your SAT is a hundred points below the average accepted score at your top-choice school, should you take a test prep class? Absolutely. If you’re having trouble writing your Common App personal statement, should you get in touch with a college essay tutor? Yes, that makes sense.
But college counselors don’t provide this kind of support. Instead, they meet with you to strategize what classes and extracurriculars you should take in high school. That’s why they recommend meeting with students over the course of several years; the idea is that they should start packaging you as a candidate early on to give you the best chance of being admitted to a top school.
This is obviously unnecessary and strangely controlling. An external college counselor may help you pick a good class or two, but on the flip side, they may prevent you from taking a class that helps you unlock what you’re passionate about. They may help you build a profile that looks good to the admissions officer reading your file, or they may make absolutely no difference whatsoever. A good SAT or college essay tutor, on the other hand, will improve your application in obvious ways — and they will likely teach you skills that you’ll use later in life as well.
College counselors turn students into brands rather than real people
This is the most disturbing aspect of the recent rise in college counseling. We understand, of course, that branding is an important strategy in the modern world, and it’s important for businesses and individuals to come up with a shorthand way of selling themselves. But college counselors apply this same strategy to teenagers and, in certain cases, even younger children. They tell them what classes and extracurriculars they should pursue not so that they can discover what they’re passionate about but so they can get into their “dream school” many years later.
Obviously this is not a good message to give to teenagers. College counselors are effectively saying that you shouldn’t have any opportunity to explore, discover yourself, and have fun. Instead, you should take direction from an expert adult who determines what your interests are from the start, because there’s no room for making mistakes.
The problem, of course, is that life doesn’t work this way. What do you think happens when you deny teenagers a chance to pursue their own interests and live lives of their own? Sure, there’s a chance they may get into their “dream college,” but even if they do, they’ll be lost the minute they get there because they’ll have no experience making decisions on their own. Either they’ll continue taking direction from adults and pursue a career path they have no interest in (and likely develop resentment later on), or they’ll have some kind of crisis because they feel that their lives have been taken away from them. Certainly they’ll have trouble growing into fully realized adults.
The point of high school and college is to explore your interests and grow as a person; after that you’ll have plenty of time to turn yourself into a brand if that’s what you want to do. Hiring a private college counselor to curate your high school experience is a big mistake.
College counselors devote less attention to the college essay
College counselors don’t only help students select classes and extracurriculars in high school; they also help students write college essays in their junior and senior years. Either they will help you themselves, or they’ll connect you with a “writing specialist” who will work with you one-on-one or edit your essays asynchronously.
What does this mean in practice? It means that college counselors focus on application strategy, and they relegate the college essay to second place. College counselors and former admissions officers don’t know how to help students with writing skills. They know what it’s like to read a pile of applications, but they have no experience with the notoriously difficult task of teaching students how to write. If they hire internal “writing specialists,” they select people who will edit large numbers of essays at a cheap rate. We know this because we’ve been offered these kinds of jobs many times ourselves!
The point is that college counselors charge a lot of money for a seemingly minor task (strategizing which classes you take), and they pay very little money to delegate the actual writing support to someone else.
So instead of hiring an expensive college counselor, we suggest you do the “applying” part yourself. After all, it isn’t rocket science. You can select your own classes and extracurriculars in high school. You can research a list of schools to apply to. You can fill out your application forms and write your own CV and extracurriculars list.
The only part of the application process that is legitimately difficult is the college essay, so if you’re going to invest in any kind of support, you should consider hiring a college essay coach. But don’t hire just anyone! There’s a big difference between a college graduate and someone with a PhD. There’s a big difference between someone who has published articles in major outlets and a book with a major university press, and someone who hasn’t. Finding a good college essay tutor takes effort, and we’ve written a guide on what to look for here.
The rise of college counseling as a billion-dollar industry is a troubling development, and you are probably being bombarded with advertisements on social media right now. But you don’t need their services. Instead, use your high school years as an opportunity to explore and work out what you’re interested in, and if you’re having trouble with your college essay when the time comes to apply, enlist the services of a qualified college essay coach.