Before College, Costly Advice Just on Getting In

Before College, Costly Advice Just on Getting In

Jacques, Steinberg, NYT, 18 Jul 2009

The free fashion show at a Greenwich, Conn., boutique in June was billed as a crash course in dressing for a college admissions interview.

Yet the proposed “looks” — a young man in seersucker shorts, a young woman in a blue blazer over a low-cut blouse and short madras skirt — appeared better suited for a nearby yacht club. After Jennifer Delahunty, dean of admissions at Kenyon College, was shown photos of those outfits, she rendered her review.

“I burst out laughing,” she said.

Shannon Duff, the independent college counselor who organized the event, says she ordinarily charges families “in the range of” $15,000 for guidance about the application process, including matters far more weighty than just what to wear.

Ms. Duff is a practitioner in a rapidly growing, largely unregulated field seeking to serve families bewildered by the admissions gantlet at selective colleges.

No test or licensing is required to offer such services, and there is no way to evaluate the counselors’ often extravagant claims of success or experience. And Ms. Duff’s asking price, though higher than many, is eclipsed by those of competitors who may charge upwards of $40,000 — more than a year’s tuition at many colleges.

In the last three years, the number of independent admissions advisers (as opposed to school-based counselors) is estimated to have grown to nearly 5,000, from about 2,000, according to the Independent Educational Consultants Association, a membership group trying to promote basic standards of competency and ethics. While initially clustered on the East and West Coasts, counselors are making inroads across the country.

The consultants association has made a particular target of counselors who boast of helping nearly all their clients gain admission to their top-choice colleges.

“When you say things like, ‘We know the secrets of getting in,’ it kind of implies that it’s not the student’s ability,” said Mark H. Sklarow, executive director of the association, in Fairfax, Va. “It suggests that there’s some kind of underground code.”

A reputable, experienced counselor might, for a few hundred dollars, help a student compile a list of prospective colleges, or brainstorm topics for an essay. But others demand tens of thousands of dollars to oversee the entire application process — tutoring jittery applicants on what classes to take in high school or musical instruments to play, the better, their families are told, to impress the admissions dean.

Never mind that admissions officers say that no outsider can truly predict how a particular applicant might fare. “I guess there are snake oil salesman in every field,” said Amy Gutmann, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, “and they are preying on vulnerable and anxious people.”

While the going national rate for such work is about $185 an hour, a counselor in Vermont and another in New York City are among those who charge some families more than $40,000. Their packages might begin when a child is in eighth grade.

“It’s annoying when people complain about the money,” the Vermont-based counselor, Michele Hernandez, said. “I’m at the top of my field. Do people economize when they have a brain tumor and are looking for a neurosurgeon? If you want to go with someone cheaper, or chance it, don’t hire me.”

Dr. Hernandez, a former Dartmouth admissions officer, says she counsels as many as 25 students in each high school grade each year. She also offers four-day “boot camps” every August in a Boston hotel, charging 40 incoming high school seniors as much as $14,000 each.
Lee Stetson, who retired in 2007 after three decades as dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania, now has a counseling practice near Philadelphia, where he charges as much as $15,000 for his junior-senior package. Unlike many competitors, Mr. Stetson says he cautions his small group of clients, maybe seven students a year, that he will not handicap their chances of admission to a particular college, nor button-hole former colleagues on their behalf. “I’m hoping they see me more as someone who understands the process,” he said, “than someone who can influence the chances of acceptance.”

While Mr. Stetson was one of the most influential admissions officers in the country, the extent of other counselors’ experience may be more difficult for parents to divine.

On her business Web site, Collegiate Compass, Ms. Duff says she brings “firsthand perspective to today’s admissions landscape,” borne of her earlier work “as a reader” in the Yale undergraduate admissions office. While outside readers help evaluate some candidates’ files, they typically have no decision-making authority.

It is not uncommon for other counselors to exaggerate their backgrounds. Ivy Success, in Garden City, N.Y., which charges some clients nearly $30,000, says on its Web site that its counselors have “years of experience as admissions officers to help you gain an edge in this competitive and uncertain process.”

Victoria Hsiao, a partner in Ivy Success, said in an interview that she had worked as an admissions officer at Cornell for several years in “the late 1990s.” But Jason Locke, the director of undergraduate admissions at the university, said there was no record, or memory, of Ms. Hsiao doing such work. (Mr. Locke did confirm that she graduated from Cornell in 1996.)

Asked about the discrepancy, Ms. Hsiao said she had mainly assisted the admissions office as an alumna who conducted interviews. She also said a partner, Robert Shaw, had been an admissions officer at the University of Pennsylvania. Asked about this in an e-mail message, Mr. Shaw said he had been only “an assistant,” from 1987 to 1988.

“Don’t remember all the details,” he said, adding, “We really don’t want to be a part of your article as we’re not a service for the masses.”

Admissions officers say that for many students, the advice of their high school counselors should suffice. Those applicants who might benefit from supplemental counseling — like those at urban high schools with overworked counselors — are often among the least able to afford such services.

Regardless, colleges say parents should be wary of any counselor’s claim of being able to lobby for a candidate’s admission. While noting that there are “genuinely rational and knowledgeable folks out there doing this work,” Bruce Poch, the dean of admissions at Pomona College, adds, “Some of the independents leave me looking for the nearest emergency shower.”

Though none of the counselors said business was off in the struggling economy, some are making adjustments. Having initially presented the fashion show outfits as serious, Ms. Duff later said she had intended to “create a lighthearted environment,” the better to promote two new advisory DVDs she is offering, “at a price that is accessible.” (One for $45; two for $80.)
Katherine Cohen, the founder of IvyWise in New York City, has a team that charges from a few hundred dollars to more than $40,000. But she also has been emphasizing a spinoff called ApplyWise that for $299 helps students assemble their application in ways reminiscent of Turbo Tax.

Dr. Cohen, a former reader at Yale, is a member of the independent consultants association — despite a claim on the IvyWise Web site that runs afoul of an association admonition.

“Congratulations,” it blares, “100 percent of IvyWise students were admitted to one of their top three choices in 2009!”

Fewer than one of every five admissions consultants can claim to be an association member. Bill Dingledine, a longtime educational consultant in Greenville, S.C., is among those advocating even more stringent certification offered by the American Institute of Certified Educational Planners. It requires counselors to pass a three-hour written examination.

The concept has yet to catch on, at least in part because many counselors’ practices are already booming. Asked how many counselors had sought, and won, that certification last year, Mr. Dingledine had a ready answer: about 20.

No Right Brain Left Behind

No Right Brain Left Behind: Must Kids Prep For 'Risk-Taking'?

Marco R. della Cava, USA TODAY, 12 Jun 2009

On a recent foggy night, the newest wave in educational thinking crashed into this city's oldest high school.

And its waters weren't warm.

"It worries me that we're not thinking big enough, that we're not preparing our kids for a world that will be terribly different from the one we grew up in," says Patrick Bassett, scanning the rapt faces of a few dozen parents in the auditorium of 103-year-old Mission High School, whose alums include poet Maya Angelou and rocker Carlos Santana.

"We need kids to be more risk-taking, more entrepreneurial," he says. "More than ever, we need the right brain to mix with the left."

Although Bassett, president of the National Association of Independent Schools, has been quietly delivering this "Right-Brain Future" talk for a few years, recent economic events have lately sent him on the road non-stop. "My reception has shifted dramatically," he says. "More people seem to want to hear this message."

Here's the Cliff Notes version: As traditional jobs in the left-brain world of finance shrink, the USA's economy will increasingly be tethered to creative innovations rooted in right-brain thinking.

Sachin Desai, 45, attended Bassett's lecture with his wife, Sejal, 44. Both are software engineers; their sons are 12 and 8.

"Growing up in Britain, it was all about linear thinking," he says. "But my kids are American, a place known for coming up with unique solutions and ideas. I fear we're losing that. So it's critical these kids become creative thinkers."

No right brain left behind

An impediment has been a No Child Left Behind educational system that is too geared to test-taking, says Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, the book that inspired Bassett to hit the lecture trail. "What's troubling is that our system is obsessed with standardization at the very time when the future of our economy depends on the opposite."

Some schools have gotten that message. At High Tech High, a charter school in San Diego, students are encouraged to use those skills to practical ends such as dreaming up new sources of energy or calculating ways to stretch the West's limited water supply, says the school's CEO, Larry Rosenstock.

"You want kids who are math whizzes, yes. But you want them to also have the creative talent to apply those math skills to find answers to big questions."

Barrett praises other schools that are pushing students to think outside the box. He cites Fay School in Southborough, Mass., whose students last year teamed with peers at South Saigon International School in Vietnam. Using video chats and a specially created online wiki-space, they designed a "socially conscious business model" that involved both selling products and creating public service announcements to build awareness for disaster relief.

"That's the future," he says. "Kids being analytical and creative to come up with solutions for us all."

Not set in stone

The good news for parents of children who seem predisposed to either a right- or left-brain orientation is that neither aptitude is set in stone, says Po Bronson, co-author with Ashley Merryman of NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children, out in September.

Bronson says brain mechanisms controlling intelligence and creativity are in flux through age 25. "People told me as a kid that I had a math brain, and that I shouldn't write," says Bronson, a onetime Wall Streeter who went on to write five best-selling books.

"In the end, creativity is mainly an attitude," he says. "It's about coming up with an original answer to something as opposed to the one we've always seen."

Still, for those who display both left- and right-brain talents, the world is not yet their oyster.
Stephen Welch, 22, of Woodstock, Ga., is a graduate of Georgia Tech in Atlanta. An engineer and a guitar player, he has been accepted at the University of California-Berkeley's engineering program and Boston's Berklee College of Music. He fears either choice will deny one side of his identity; he plans to take a year off to think about it. "I'm struggling," he says. "I feel like it's an either/or situation."

Not so straightforward

That dilemma is not likely to be resolved anytime soon. Reflecting on Bassett's presentation is Ben Quinones, a father of three girls under 10 who attend the private Children's Day School here. He half-jokes that the lecture "was inspirational, daunting and all about figuring out what you're doing wrong."

As a lawyer turned CEO of semi-conductor start-up Lakota Technologies, Quinones says he sees firsthand the importance of not only fact-driven left-brain skills, but also more intangible right-brain weapons of creativity and adaptability.

"Things were so different, so straightforward when I was in school," he says, almost wistfully. "But globalization is driving this. For my kids, simply grasping a set of left-brain skills will never be enough."

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