When her daughter Shayna began looking at colleges, Disiree Holder-Walker found the process daunting. She knew college admissions had changed since she attended school, and her job in Manhattan made it difficult to meet with her daughter’s guidance counselor in Brooklyn during the day.
"I work very crazy hours and unfortunately I’m not one of the parents who can be at the school," she said. "I started to use the Internet and books in order to navigate the waters."
But then Ms. Holder-Walker, an executive assistant at Goldman Sachs, discovered a corporate perk offered to all employees: free college counseling. She was able to attend seminars on the college application process at her office and to schedule a private session to discuss Shayna’s strategy. She and her daughter also received unlimited access to a help desk, where Shayna could submit drafts of her college essay and seek other advice.
Richard Shapp had been considering buying such a service for his daughter Allison before he discovered that he could get it through his job.
"I’m the type of guy that subscribes to Consumer Reports," said Mr. Shapp, an associate in the investment banking and technology group at Goldman Sachs. "I saw this service as the Consumer Reports on the subject of college. You want to know which features are important, what you want to pay for and what you don’t, and all of that came through in the presentation and the counseling sessions."
Once the province of the rich, private counseling has become so commonplace that it now is increasingly being offered as a corporate benefit.
College Coach, a Boston-based educational consulting firm, has the contracts with Goldman Sachs and dozens of other corporations, including I.B.M, American International Group and the New York Stock Exchange, to guide their employees through the process. College Coach does counsel individual families, but the majority of its sales come from corporations, said Michael London, the company’s president. He contends that employer-sponsored college consulting fills an important niche in corporate benefits.
"When we looked at the work-life arena, we found that the majority of benefits were for childcare or elder care," Mr. London said. "But the greatest percent of the workforce are ages 35 to 50, and these are the people who are dealing with their child’s education. A stressful and time-consuming period."
His pitch to employers is that the college application process—the search for the right schools, the complexities of financial aid, the admissions deadlines, the essays and the anxiety—can be distracting to employees. The company Web site puts it plainly: "Where do you think your employees are finding the time to deal with all of these issues? In the workplace, on company time!"
Moreover, College Coach argues that providing college counseling supports diversity by providing the service to all workers, and not just to top executives and their children. Mr. London said that when he and a partner started the company in 1998, "the private college counseling world was an elitist service—if you’re a family that has a student that has aspirations to go to a very competitive college and you’re rich and you can pay $10,000, then you could get it."
With a third-party payer—a corporation. College Coach offers business clients onsite workshops in subjects like "Saving for College" and "Preparing College Applications," Web-based workshops, one-on-one counseling either onsite or on the phone and a help-desk, which can be reached by e-mail or telephone. The average corporate client pays about $100,000 a year for College Coach’s service—depending on the number of workshops offered and the number of employees participating—though contracts range from $15,000 to $500,000.
The company does not offer test preparation, but several companies in that business also have their foot in the corporate door. Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions works with dozens of companies, said Justin Serrano, general manager at Kaplan. Typically, Kaplan will offer free seminars on the college-admissions process at a corporate client’s offices and sell employees test prep classes at a discount.
Princeton Review uses a similar approach. Andy Lutz, the vice president of program development, said that corporate sales were one of the fastest growing parts of Princeton Review’s business.
