When Sue Goszewski’s son was applying to colleges last year, she got the kind of help that most parents would envy: advice from a former admissions officer at Yale.
The adviser spelled out, among other things, what colleges look for in an applicant’s extracurricular activities, and why it’s important to have depth of experience in a few things rather than a finger in many pies.
This is the kind of inside information for which many parents pay private admissions counseling services thousands of dollars. Goszewski, who works in rehabilitation services at the Yale-New Haven Hospital, said she could never have afforded expensive private counseling. Instead, she received the help as an employee perk.
Yale-New Haven Hospital is one of a growing number of employers, particularly in New England, that are making college advising services an employee benefit. The hospital uses College Coach, a national company that advised 20,000 families last year on the application process, and expects its totals to rise significantly this year.
While families can pay College Coach directly, the largest and fastest-growing part of its business comes from companies that are adding its services as a benefit. College Coach is so far the only company to offer these services through employers, but the Princeton Review is looking into offering similar services.
Observers note that having employers pay for these services could democratize the private-counseling business: At companies offering these services, the CEO and the CEO’s secretary both have access to the counseling for their children.
"There’s no question that private counseling had been something primarily available to those in the upper-middle class and professional class," says Mark H. Sklarow, executive director of the Independent Educational Consultants Association. "If this approach makes private counseling available to working-class families, I think that’s a phenomenal thing."
Michael London, president of College Coach, says the Newton-based business was created in 1998 with that vision in mind. "We had a strong interest in educational counseling, and we believed that there was an opportunity to offer it not only to the wealthy, but to all people."
Among the companies that have added the benefit through College Coach are IBM, Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo, and Goldman Sachs. They pay the company a flat fee, anywhere from $15,000 to $500,000 a year, based on the number of employees and the number of programs offered.
Program topics include selecting the right college, financing higher education, and preparing applications, to more specialized topics such as coping with learning disabilities. For each topic a company selects, College Coach provides workshops (open to the employees, their spouses, and children), follow-up one-on-one counseling, and a help-desk for specific questions to be answered by phone or emails.
The workshops and counseling come from educators who have had senior positions in the admissions offices of top colleges and universities, including Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Vassar, Columbia, Northwestern, Yale, New York University, and the University of Pennsylvania.
The counseling students and their families receive is in many ways similar to that offered by the most expensive private counselors. Participants can have their grades, test scores, and interests reviewed so that they come out with specific colleges to consider and strategies for getting in.
College Coach is able to offer these services at much lower prices for a number of reasons. For starters, not all employees participate, and some attend only the workshops, opting out of the one-on-one help. Also, College Coach requires workshop participation prior to individual counseling, so time isn’t wasted covering the basics in those sessions. And while some private counselors perform many non-educational roles, College Coach draws a clear line: "We’re not going to pick up kids and drive them to the different schools for interviews," London said.
Adding new employee benefits may seem odd at a time when many businesses are trying to control the costs of employee benefits, chiefly because of rising health-insurance premiums. But London says that this benefit reflects a growing interest in "work/life initiatives," such as efforts by companies to help with childcare or care for employee’s aging parents.
The Princeton Review recently did a survey of parents using its website and found that more than 53 percent of parents spent an hour to three hours a week on college issues, while 14 percent said they spent three to five hours, and 5 percent said they spent five to 10 hours.
With parents spending that much time researching college options, "this becomes a productivity issue and a valued benefit to employees," said Princeton Review spokeswoman Harriet Brand.
At Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, which offers College Coach services to its 1,300 employees, employee surveys found that participation in the program resulted in a positive change in the way employees viewed their employer. In an employee survey by Harvard Pilgrim to measure the effectiveness of its benefits, the College Coach program has never received an evaluation below 4.8 on a 5-point scale – an unusually high rating, said Deborah Hicks, vice president of human resources at Harvard Pilgrim. Her Company pays College Coach $55,000 for the service, a fraction of the company’s multimillion dollar benefits budget.
Surveys of the company’s employees have found that mothers are more likely to feel pressure about planning for their children’s education than fathers. About three-quarters of Harvard Pilgrim’s employees are women, so it was a good match, she said.
Hicks said she has friends paying hefty fees to private counselors, in many cases because they have difficulty talking about college plans directly with their children, she said. "I know people paying $2,000 and $4,000 to a counselor just to have a conversation that they can’t have with their kid," Hicks says.
For students whose parents have College Coach as a job benefit, the experience is much the same as if their parents were paying for a private counselor. Tom Goszewski said he gained a lot of ideas for impressing admissions officers.
For instance, he was encouraged to apply early in the admissions cycle, when he would have more of his guidance counselor’s attention and admissions officers wouldn’t be swamped.
He is now a freshman at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, his first-choice college.
His mother is attending more workshops, planning for her daughter, a junior in high school. She wants to learn as much as possible about the admissions process. "It’s such a mystery," said Sue Goszewski, "and you don’t know what’s true and what’s not true."
