During her first years at English High School in Jamaica Plain, Ana Maria Medina Rodriguez, 18, didn’t think much about college. When Rodriguez did start to consider college in her junior year, she needed some help: Her mother, who cleans office buildings for a living, was willing to help but not fluent in English, and for every guidance counselor at Rodriguez’s school, there were nearly 300 students.
So she turned to a resource long available only to the rich: private admissions counseling. At a nearby college admissions center called Bottom Line, a local nonprofit, Rodriguez and a counselor came up with a list of colleges to consider and a plan of action for getting in and paying for school. The next year, Rodriguez enrolled in four Advanced Placement courses and continued to get free, one-on-one counseling at Bottom Line to polish her admissions essay. She wrote about fleeing the Dominican Republic with her mother and three sisters, and coming to Boston after years on the run from an alcoholic and abusive father.
This fall, she started as a freshman at Boston University.
From urban nonprofits like Bottom Line to services offered on the Internet, private counseling options are proliferating widely. In the face of skyrocketing tuition costs, stiffer competition for admission, and more students seeking the attention of school counselors, the admissions-counseling business is booming in suburban and inner-city neighborhoods alike. The challenge for parents and teenagers is making sense of it all.
Beyond the realm of free service, other firms have broadened the availability of college admissions counseling by offering a la carte products and mass-market alternatives to the traditional boutique operations that catered to a few wealthy clients. One such company is Road to College (www.roadtocollege.com), co-founded in 2002 by Steve Pemberton, former admissions officer at Harvard and Boston College.
Pemberton says that by sacrificing face-to-face meetings with clients and offering admissions counseling via phone and e-mail, his company is able to offer its services at a lower price. Although based in Maynard, the company’s 30 counselors work with students all over the country. They helped 500 families last year and are on pace to double that number this year, according to Pemberton.
I was first in my family to go to college," he says. "And if you’d come to my parents and suggested $6,000 for help with my applications, it would have been a very polite, but short conversation."
Besides it’s pricier items, such as the comprehensive "Premiere Application Revue" ($1,699), the company also offers consulting for $199 an hour, as well as more specific help, such as admissions essay editing ($99 to $315) or a mock interview ($195).
Staggered pricing allows for the fact that, in some ways, paying for admissions counseling is like paying for somebody to teach a child how to drive or help filing income taxes. Most people could do such chores on their own, though many don’t, and everybody has a different comfort level with what they’re doing on their own.
Toward the higher-end of admissions counseling, there’s College Coach (www.getintocollege.com), a company headquartered in Newton but with offices in several states, that is working with more than 20,00 families this year. "Our business has doubled every year since [our founding in] 1998," says Michael London, cofounder of College Coach, which offers high-school students a year of unlimited, in-person admissions counseling from a former college admissions officer. At $3,000, it’s not cheap, but it’s less than the $10,000-plus that some independent counselors charge.
London, whose company also partners with corporations that offer college admissions counseling as an employee benefit, believes the market for such services will continue expanding beyond the most affluent families. "The college admissions process is confusing, time consuming, and expensive. And for middle-class people trying to balance work and family life, counseling will increasingly be seen as a means to fill that work-life void."
Fees and Freebees
As private college counseling broadens beyond affluent families, new firms and websites have sprung up to offer services once handled exclusively by parents and high school counselors. The following list gives an idea of what you can get for your money.
Full-service counseling
$3,000 to $10,000
A private counselor is put on retainer to help an applicant through every step of the college admissions process. Services provided by College Coach (www.getinto-college.com, 617-393-7800) and College Confidential, as well as individual counselors who can be found through the directory of the Independent Educational Consultants Association (http://iecaonline.com/).
