Most students start their search with a simple four words, “college consultants near me.” Maybe you typed that yourself to get here. Every town in America from Brentwood to New York has a handful of local counselors that will come up when you search this. We however don’t think it’s the best thing to search and it's because of the phrase “near me.” Now you might be wondering, “why shouldn’t I search ‘near me?’”
“But everybody uses her!”
Every city has 2-3 counselors that “everyone” uses. These people can come highly recommended usually from a mom’s friend whose niece used them and got into their dream school and swears that everyone in your town goes to them. “Everyone” going to them at first seems like a huge positive, but it isn’t as great as you might think. Some of these counselors do not have a team and will take on up to 100 students in a season. For reference, we have a robust team and each counselor takes on about 12 each at a time.
Having a lot of clients means less individualized time with each. We purposely keep our counselors’ student count on the lower end so they can work on strategy. Every year, like clockwork, we get students who have left local counselors for us and we hear the same thing over and over, “well she proofread my essays but that was about it.” We talk a lot about strategy. From building your college list to deciding which niche major to talk about to submitting your final supplement, there is a lot of strategy that goes into applying to college and we believe that is also paramount to a counselors job. We see our jobs not as “I am here if you have a question,” but rather a bespoke and individual approach to each student's needs.
Let’s talk Data:
The other issue we often see with using a local counselor is compromised data. Behind the scenes, good college counselors use a lot of data. We comb through acceptance rates and incoming class numbers. We look at the number of students in every major over a 10 year period. We are constantly on the phone with admissions offices trying to get class data points so we can see how they measure up to our students. However, with local counselors, that data can become very narrow.
Let’s say there is a competitive high school in your area. Most likely, many students are looking for a college counselor and a lot of them will go to the same person. That person tends to become laser-focused on what the numbers are for that specific high school and a very specific type of applicant. They tend to be looking at the same demographics over and over and this can really color their data.
We have students from schools from all over America (and the world). We love that we have the experiences and data from a surfer from a boarding school in Vermont, a hopeful professor from a public school in New York City, and a humanitarian from Kenya. It gives us a great picture of what the macros of acceptance look like across demographics. Getting the bigger picture is important for us since each student brings their own wants and needs to this process.
Local is as local does:
Let’s say you live in Oakland California and you really want to go to UC Berkeley. A local counselor could probably work with you on that, however, let’s say that same Oakland student wants to go to Penn, this might be harder. Local counselors often specialize in local markets. For example, a California-based counselor will know a lot about California schools whereas a New York-based counselor will know more about the tri-state market.
For some students, location matters, but we try to push our students not to focus on one geographic area when they are crafting their lists. We would never push a New York-based student to only check out Columbia if they wanted to also apply to Stanford, but we see local counselors sometimes get specific about their region. Our counselors come from all over and we push ourselves to learn about all the options in all the regions for our students.
We pride ourselves on being able to help any student no matter where they live. We work remotely and have counselors in every time zone so that we can better serve students from all over. It’s important for us to be able to use a wide breadth of data to better tailor a strategy to each of our students whether they are in Boston or Bangkok or anywhere in between.
Want personalized help through this process? Reach out to us here!