Last year, a Maryland high school student had an all-too-familiar problem: He had good grades and test scores, but he didn’t stand out from his peers. So in his junior year he and his family approached Ivy Success, a small company in Garden City, N.Y., that helps students get into America’s most competitive colleges — for a hefty fee, of course.
The cottage industry of educational consultants — basically coaches hired by parents to be part guidance counselor and part educator for their teenage children — is booming.
The Independent Educational Consultants Association, a trade group, has mushroomed to about 600 members from 150 in 1990, said director Mark Sklarow. He reckons that 20 percent of the freshmen at private, four-year colleges have used some sort of coaching service.
Sklarow points to a number of reasons for the industry’s growth. With more and more young people headed for college, school-based counselors are overwhelmed, with each one catering to the needs of 400 children on average. (In California the average is 1,200.)
And it’s getting harder to identify the traits that college admissions officers are looking for in prospective students, he added.
While companies like Ivy Success tout their success stories, there are some who criticize counseling services, and they are not always looked on favorably by college admissions officers. Colleges want to see the "real" applicant — not an image "polished" by a professional service, said Thomas G. Mortenson, senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education.
Another criticism of college coaching services is that only the wealthiest families can afford them. But Michael London, co-founder and president of College Coach, the nation’s largest education counseling service, has found a way to expand the market.
His company is one of a small number offering a new employee benefit: help with a child’s college admissions. College Coach has taken on about 65 Fortune 500 corporate clients and is offering their employees workshops on such topics as selecting the right college, applications and financing. Employees also can access counseling and support services on the Web or by telephone.
"College counseling has an elitist label associated with it. The benefit of working with corporations is that you can offer all employees equal access to these high-end educational services," London said. "Traditional growth within the private counseling segment has been limited to the number of families who can afford. In a corporation, services are less limited. In many instances, we work with greater than 1,000 employees from a single company.
The price of individual educational counseling services has risen about 15 percent since 2000, according to the trade group’s Sklarow, although a flood of new entrants into the industry has prevented fees from growing too dramatically, he said. But without regulation, almost anyone can set up shop in the field.
Sklarow says he receives about 100 requests for membership in the trade group each month, mostly from applicants who lack proper training. He rejects about 90 percent. The organization requires counselors to have at least three years of experience in college admissions or high school counseling and to have visited at least 100 colleges.
"About a quarter of the calls I get are from people who say things like, ‘I got my daughter into Bryn Mawr, and now I want to do the same for other kids,’ and my response to them is, ‘You didn’t help your daughter, she did it herself with hard work,’" Sklarow says. "It’s sort of like saying, ‘My daughter had strep throat, I nursed her through it and now I want to be a doctor for everybody.’"
