bsat blog

One thing that's true for just about any school you could possibly attend is that college education is a massive investment. We all know how much tuition at various schools will set you back, but the fact that there are entire sectors of financial planning services based around helping parents send their kids to college is all you need to know. So, when you consider what you're paying to send kids to school, you can see why there is such an emphasis on picking the right school. And when you again consider the massive sums that are being forked over for tuition, it's easy to see why so many families are willing to shell out a little extra cash to seemingly help ensure that they make the right decision.

Enter: college counselors. An entire cottage industry based on matching up students with their ideal schools and getting them in. While the perceived need is obvious, the impact of a college counselor is very difficult to measure. After all, you either hire one or you don't, and a whether or not each individual student gets into school is pretty subjective to their own merits, so it's hard to definitively say what affect--if any--a college counselor has.

With that in mind www.SmartMoney.com has rolled out a list of "10 Things You Won't Hear from College Prep Advisors."  Spoiler alert: They're all variations on "you're wasting your money."

Obviously the college prep industry would argue otherwise. Still, it's fairly apparent that college prep is a non-essential. Basically when you're hiring a college counselor you're paying as much for your own ability to say "I've done everything I possibly can" as you are for any actual boost they'll give your application.

Yet, while it's easy to fall in line with Smart Money's attack on the college prep industry, it's hard to overlook the fact that some of their examples might simply apply to college counselors who simply aren't good at their jobs.  The student with a low verbal score whose essay was deemed too "professionally polished" for the use of the word "solipsism", for example, is probably dealing with a college counselor so pretentious and masturbatory that it can't exactly be described as "the cream of the crop." Although, in the college preparation industry pretentiousness and self-congratulation kind of come with the territory.