Sophomore Garrick Zhang started college counseling at the beginning of his freshman year. After around a year, his counseling sessions at IvyMax have already had impacts on his life.

According to Zhang, working with a private counselor allowed him to find the motivation to pursue a career in business and pushed him to join several clubs and activities in his freshman year.

“If I didn’t have a counselor, I probably would not do any of the clubs or activities that I do,” Zhang said.

Private counselors represent a controversial aspect of high school. On one hand, they help students play to their strengths, pursuing activities that they find meaningful and have the potential to excel in. However, their growing prevalence reflects an increasingly common mindset centered on getting into prestigious colleges. College counselors also often charge $200 or more dollars an hour. Critics argue they represent a grossly unfair advantage for the wealthy in college admissions.

The craze over college admissions and the lucrative nature of the college consulting industry was brought to the forefront by the Varsity Blues college admissions fraud case early last year, where 33 parents were charged with paying tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to the college consultant William Singer to facilitate cheating on admissions tests or bribing college officials.

An article by The New York Times said that the prosecutors, as part of the largest-ever college admissions prosecution, described a family that paid Singer $1.2 million to allow their daughter to be admitted to Yale as a recruit for the women’s soccer team despite not being a competitive soccer player.

The willingness of families to pay thousands if not millions of dollars to ensure their child’s admission to top-tier colleges helps explain the growing prevalence of private college counselors, especially in Silicon Valley. Guidance department chair Alinna Satake finds this trend disturbing and getting worse. She said some middle schoolers are getting private counselors these days.

But some parents argue starting this early makes sense. After all, the better counselors know the student, the more they can steer them in the right direction during high school. 

Zhang began attending college counseling at IvyMax, an education service that offers standardized test prep, tutoring and college counseling, in order to develop his extracurricular interests.

“I started counseling, since I didn’t do much work in terms of extracurricular activities, and I didn’t know what I should do or how to do it,” Zhang said.

Due to the benefits he found in receiving college counseling, Zhang said that he would have started college counseling in middle school if he had known about it.

However, college counselors often charge exorbitant prices, which means starting earlier can translate to thousands of additional dollars over three or four years.

According to the Independent Educational Consultants Association (IECA), private college counseling is a rapidly developing industry, with the number of independent consultants in the U.S. growing from 2,000 to nearly 5,000 in recent years. Much of this growth is a direct result of the college craze, with parents spending $400 million on college consultants in 2012 according to the IECA. Some counselors charge close to $400 an hour, and prices can total to thousands of dollars over the course of a student’s academic life.

According to an article by IvyCoach, the average cost of a college counselor in the United States is $200 per hour. However, many consulting agencies sell packages that can total thousands of dollars. For example, Top Tier Counseling in Concord, Massachusetts, charges $2,500 for five hours of essay editing and $16,000 for a summer bootcamp.

Satake said these private college counselors are unnecessarily expensive, since the services they provide can easily be provided by counselors and administrators here.

“Part of our job is to support students through the college application process, and we would like to remind students that we are qualified and credentialed to provide college application support — and we’re free!” Satake said.

Satake attributed this expense to the ability of college counselors to take advantage of parents’ desires to get their children into the best colleges.

“I am a little suspicious of these outside organizations because any Joe Schmoe off the street can become an independent college counselor and charge tens of thousands of dollars for students,” Satake said. “They prey on families’ fears of being left behind or not being prepared.”

Despite their shortcomings and often lofty prices, college counselors do have their perks, even for students that start later in their academic careers.

Senior Felix Chen began working with a college counselor at LaMeire College Counseling in the first semester of his junior year.

“I had trouble picking summer programs, and I didn’t know a lot about the different colleges,” Chen said. “So, my mom thought it would be a good idea to have a college counselor.”

Chen said that his counselors helped in a variety of ways — they not only provided him with a list of summer programs to apply to, but they also suggested other opportunities such as messaging college faculty for research internships and helped him write his college applications. As a student interested in pursuing STEM in the future, finding research opportunities was important for fleshing out his apps.

Although Chen acknowledges the benefits of having a college consultant, he felt that their prices were excessive for the services they provide.

“I think it was helpful, but for me the most important part was editing on my essays,” Chen said. “It would have been better if I had a cheaper essay editor instead.”

Senior Christine Lee, who was admitted to Harvard University during the early decision cycle, said college counseling helped her in similar ways, specifically in finishing college applications and essays. She started counseling in the second semester of her junior year at FLEX College Prep.

“My college counselor mapped out a weekly schedule of what colleges to finish when, and it probably was the thing that stopped me from procrastinating really, really hard and pushing everything to the very last day,” Lee said.

Especially with constricting word counts and complex prompts, having an extra pair of eyes looking over her essays allowed her to concisely and effectively answer the prompts.

“It was useful to explain my thoughts to another person and reflect on what I’ve done with them, asking questions to help me dig deeper and clarify my thought process when writing essays,”  Lee said.

Many other students who attended LaMeire Counseling like Chen cited similar benefits, with all 11 of the testimonials visible on their website focused on the guidance provided for navigating college admissions and writing essays. Helping with essays is difficult for school counselors, given the sheer number of students that they have to work with. Still, some students are able to get essay help from English teachers and other staff members.

College counselors are inherently focused on one thing: college. So really, what constitutes playing to a student’s strengths, and what constitutes simply doing things to appeal to colleges?

“I feel like it’s good to ask college counselors for opportunities, but if they are telling you what to do that’s too much,” Chen said. “You should just do what you want to do.”

IvyMax, the organization through which Zhang receives college counseling, is a good example of an organization that may promote certain interests for college application material.

An article from The Atlantic notes how IvyMax offers “Global Philanthropy Leadership Programs” during summer and winter breaks. The article quotes IvyMax CEO Shin Wei, who says that students write reflections throughout their 15-day trips to developing countries or poor foreign cities to provide materials for their college applications.

On the other hand, Zhang said that the motivation counselors provide is difficult to come by through other means, despite their emphasis on getting into top-tier colleges.

“I think it’s OK to start early, like in middle school,” Zhang said. “My counselor put pressure on me and gave me the motivation I need to do things.”

Students like Zhang have found certain degrees of success with college counselors. Although pricey, college counselors are one method by which students can find and develop their strengths.

“I understand why parents feel compelled to get on the college counselor train because I know families want what’s best for their children,” Satake said. “However, children will get into college with or without those college counselors. Just remember that we’re here to help every step of the way.”