Before investing in college admissions consulting, practical parents need to evaluate potential consultants on three key factors: professional credentials and experience, student-consultant fit, and the realistic return on investment. The right questions help you distinguish between consultants who will provide genuine value and those who won’t deliver results worth your investment. For more foundational guidance on the college application process, see our comprehensive resource on top-tier college application tips to maximize your chances.
Hiring a college consultant is a significant financial decision, and the best outcomes come from thorough vetting. Quality consultants welcome hard questions—they understand that informed families make better clients. The following questions will help you evaluate credentials, understand what you’re paying for, and determine whether a particular consultant is the right match for your student’s needs and your family’s goals.
How can I tell if a consultant will be a good fit for my student?
A good student-consultant fit is essential for success in the college application process. This relationship will span months, and even years, of intensive work, including deeply personal essay writing and high-stakes strategic decisions. Before committing, your student should have an introductory meeting with the potential counselor.
Jamie Berger, a veteran college admissions expert, describes the key consideration: “What’s most important is that the kid meets the counselor and thinks, who do I want to meet with once a week for 30 weeks? Who am I going to work well with?”
During this initial meeting, quality consultants ask thoughtful questions to form a genuine personal connection while assessing the student’s counseling needs:
Topics typically include hobbies and extracurricular activities, what the student likes and dislikes about school, recent trips or experiences, books they’ve read, what makes them nervous about the college process, academic performance, and their goals. The counselor should demonstrate genuine curiosity about your student as an individual.
Parents may briefly attend these initial meetings to say hello, but should step back to allow the student-counselor dynamic to develop naturally. As Jamie notes, “If the parent starts talking, very often the kid is not going to.”
After the introductory meeting, a reputable firm will follow up by demonstrating the connection they’ve formed—showing they understand your student beyond just their transcript and test scores. This upfront investment in understanding both the student and the family is what enables the creation of a truly personalized plan, one tailored to your student’s unique strengths, goals, and family circumstances. One community member observed that the best consultants “really try to understand your kids’ needs, what their ambitions are, where they can go.”
What are some good questions to ask the counselor before committing?
Experience
- How many years of experience do you have in college admissions?
- What is your professional background—did you work in admissions, education, or another field?
- Do you work independently or as part of a team? If part of a firm, will I have access to other counselors’ expertise?
Fit and Process
- Can my student have an introductory meeting with the counselor before we commit?
- How do you get to know each student as an individual?
- What does your onboarding process look like? How do you understand both my student’s needs and our family’s priorities?
- How often will you meet with my student, and how does that change throughout the process?
Services and Approach
- What’s included in your packages? What’s not included?
- How do you approach essay support—brainstorming, editing, or both?
- How do you help students build a balanced college list?
- Do you offer support for specialized situations like athletic recruiting, arts portfolios, or BS/MD programs?
Philosophy and Expectations
- What should we realistically expect from working with you?
- How do you handle disagreements between students and parents about college choices?
- Do you guarantee admission to specific schools? (Be wary if the answer is yes—no ethical consultant can promise specific outcomes.)
Logistics
- What is your fee structure, and what payment options are available?
- Do you work with students in my geographic area, or does location matter?
- What’s the best way to communicate with you, and how quickly can I expect responses?
What is the typical cost of college consulting, and is the investment worth it?
College consulting costs typically range from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands of dollars for comprehensive packages, with variations based on service scope, starting grade level, and firm reputation.
When evaluating ROI, consider multiple factors beyond just admission outcomes.
Merit Aid Potential
“The sticker price might seem large, but it might save you $20,000 a year by getting more merit aid at a college. You can’t guarantee it, but it might very well—often does,” explains Jamie. At many colleges and universities, merit-based scholarships are closely tied not only to grades and test scores but also to how effectively students present themselves in applications. Strategic guidance can significantly impact these outcomes.
Hidden Gem Discovery
Quality consultants help identify excellent schools you hadn’t considered that offer strong merit aid and a great fit. “If we help you find some hidden gems, some off-the-beaten-path schools more in your target and likely area that you hadn’t thought of, then it’s well worth it.”
Resource Gap Filling
For families at schools with limited counseling resources, private consulting fills a critical gap. “If you go to a big public school and you know there’s almost no college counseling—especially if you made the decision for public school over private and can spend the money on this now—it will definitely serve you with personalized attention through the whole process.”
Long-Term Fit
Finding the right college fit often leads to better academic performance, higher graduation rates, and stronger career outcomes. As one community discussion noted, getting into a college that’s perfect for you means you’ll do better academically because you’ll be happier there, leading to a stronger career trajectory.
Be wary of consultants who promise specific admission outcomes—no ethical consultant can guarantee admission to particular schools. The real value lies in helping your student understand themselves better, sharpen their thinking about their future, and get through the process with less stress. Focus on process goals—a smooth experience where your student grows—rather than outcome goals like “get into Harvard.” When the process works, students come out more self-aware and ready for college, no matter where they end up.
How should essay support work without crossing ethical lines?
Ethical essay support focuses on helping students find and express their authentic voice—not writing essays for them. This distinction is crucial both for integrity and for producing essays that actually work in the admissions process.
Jamie explains the common mistake high-achieving students make: “The essay that writes a resume that duplicates their activities list is the worst possible essay. Imagine being an admissions officer reading 40 applications a day, and you come to one that’s just a reiteration of all that stuff that’s already right there on paper. You don’t get to know the kid at all.”
Quality consultants guide students away from trying to “gamify” the process. “What the student should do in writing their personal statement and supplementals is try to dig somewhere they haven’t been before—to be truly self-reflective and give an honest answer.” The goal isn’t figuring out what admissions officers want to hear; it’s authentically revealing who the student is.
The essay development process with a quality consultant typically spans months. “The reason we spend months writing that main essay and those supplementals is because students have to shed that gamifying mindset and just do it authentically, not try to do it ‘right.'”
Expect your consultant to provide brainstorming guidance to identify meaningful topics, structural and strategic feedback, editing suggestions for clarity and impact, multiple rounds of revision, and respect for the student’s voice throughout. They should not write or rewrite passages in their own words or promise to make essays sound “professional.”
Quality firms maintain clear boundaries around parent involvement. Jamie describes receiving requests like “Johnny won’t show me his essay. Please share it with me.” His response: “No. Flat no. You and Johnny have to work that out. It’s not my essay, it’s Johnny’s essay.” Consultants who share student work with parents without permission are potentially impacting the student’s self-confidence and damaging the relationship they have built with the student
What’s included in a comprehensive consulting package versus hourly services?
At Great College Advice, our comprehensive packages are designed to support your student through every aspect of the college application journey. Here’s what’s included:
- Full suite of assessments and evaluations to get to know the student,
- Support choosing high school courses and extracurricular activities,
- Robust curriculum covering the entire college application process,
- Regular meetings with counselors,
- Counseling around potential majors and academic paths,
- Guidance in developing personalized college criteria,
- Strategic college list designed around those criteria,
- Application strategy tailored to the student’s list,
- Brainstorming and editing assistance for the Common Application personal essay,
- Support for multiple additional essays,
- and guidance in making the final college choice.
Elite packages add more intensive support for highly selective schools, including assistance with up to 25 supplemental essays, scholarship and honors program applications, and support across multiple application platforms.
Jamie prefers comprehensive packages over hourly billing: “If someone buys 10 hours from me and we’re just getting started, I don’t want to have to convince you to take 10 more. I want you on board from day one. A comprehensive package commits both the client and the counselor.”
The comprehensive approach also provides access to collective expertise. At Great College Advice, “there are six of us with well over 100 years of experience in college admissions. When you hire me, you’re hiring all six of us because we meet once a week, talk about our clients, ask questions, and bounce things off each other. We are all in different regions of the country with different expertise.”
Hourly services exist for families with specific, limited needs or budget constraints. However, they can feel transactional. We offer targeted services like essay-only packages or college list development as alternatives to full comprehensive support.
How often should my student meet with their consultant?
Meeting frequency varies based on where your student is in the process and what stage of work is underway.
Jamie describes the typical progression: “Some people like to hire earlier. I personally like to start working with students after sophomore year. I sometimes will meet students who are freshmen and help guide them in engaging in extracurricular activities.”
At Great College Advice, counselors would typically meet multiple times per year with freshmen and sophomores.
The intensive period—typically junior spring through senior fall—covers college research, list finalization, essay writing, application completion, and strategic decisions about Early Decision and Early Action applications. This phase requires the most frequent contact, often with weekly meetings. Quality consultants also remain accessible between scheduled meetings.
Students are often encouraged to schedule their own meetings, developing the independence and calendar management skills they’ll need in college. “We encourage students to take charge of scheduling their own meetings with their advisor. This is a great step for students as they develop independence. They will need to do this on their own in college anyway, so why not start now?”
Parents typically attend specific milestone meetings when appropriate such as reviewing the preliminary college list, but the primary relationship is between student and counselor. After applications are submitted, consultants continue providing support through decisions, deferral strategies, waitlist management, and final enrollment choices.
Can an online or remote college consultant be as effective as a local one?
Remote consulting has become not just as effective as local options, but often superior for most families. Modern video conferencing (Zoom, FaceTime, Google Meet), cloud-based document collaboration (Google Docs), and digital communication tools make physical location largely irrelevant for the quality of counseling you receive.
Jamie notes that geography rarely limits effectiveness: “I help people get into the University of California, Stanford, and Occidental—lots of places 3,000 miles away from me.”
Remote consulting actually offers distinct advantages. You gain access to consultants with national and international expertise rather than being limited to whoever happens to practice in your area. Since college admissions is fundamentally a national competition, working with someone who has broad geographic experience and diverse student exposure provides a valuable perspective.
As Great College Advice’s blog notes, “College admissions is very much a national game. Even if you’re planning to stay close to home for college, you still may be competing against kids from across the country. For that reason, you really want someone with a broad, national perspective. Counselors can only develop that type of insight by working with students from across the country and even around the world. And only counselors who work online are afforded that kind of opportunity.”
The one scenario where local expertise might matter more is if you’re exclusively applying to in-state schools. “If you’re someone applying only to schools in your own state and you’re only interested in those, you might want someone local,” Jamie acknowledges.
Online communication also often yields faster response times than scheduling in-person meetings. The convenience of not commuting to appointments saves time and reduces stress during an already demanding period.
Finding the Right Consultant for Your Family
The questions above give you a framework for evaluating college consultants on what matters most: legitimate credentials, genuine fit with your student, clear value proposition, ethical practices, comprehensive services, appropriate meeting cadence, and effective working arrangements. A quality consultant welcomes these questions because they understand that informed families become better partners in the process.
Remember that the goal isn’t finding someone to do the work for your student—it’s finding an experienced guide who will help your student do their best work while discovering colleges where they’ll genuinely thrive. The right consultant helps your family navigate complexity with confidence while keeping your student at the center of every decision.
For additional guidance on maximizing your student’s college application success, book a complimentary call with our team.
