Going Independent

When searching for colleges and majors, Mindae Kadous met with her high school guidance counselor twice.

The first time they met, they talked about Kadous’s interests. The second time, they tried matching those interests to college programs.

“Looking back, I really feel like I was fishing around in the dark,” Kadous says. “I just kind of took a stab at majors I thought would be interesting or ones I knew I would be successful at.”

Kadous, 22, graduated from St. John Fisher College in Rochester, N.Y., with a journalism degree and the confidence to launch her own company after graduation. But for families without the confidence to master the college admissions game and those with limited access to their school counselor, there are others who can help. You could hire an independent counselor to help your student and family with the college admissions process. Personal attention is the hallmark of independent counselors. 

 “My focus is only on the students that I work with and their families,” says Steve Michaud, owner of Massachusetts-based Family Pathways College Admissions Counseling. “When you work as a guidance counselor, you work with a full plate. An independent can put the complete focus on college planning for the student and the family.”

The American School Counselor Association recommends that school counselors be in charge of 100 (ideal) to 300 (maximum) students, says Carl Behrend, immediate past president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC). But that ratio doesn’t always happen. Behrend notes that, according to one 1999 Department of Education survey, the average counselor-to-student ratio in New York state was 1 to 494.

For students who require more individual attention, hiring an independent college counselor may be the answer. 

 “My course load is different,” says Francine E. Block, an independent counselor for American College Admissions Consultants and past president of the Pennsylvania chapter of NACAC. “I can get out and travel. Being available in the summer is a big help.”

Independent counselors work with students through e-mail, phone and in-person meetings. They can tell your family when to visit colleges, draft specific questions to ask while touring campuses, tell your student when to register for standardized tests, recommend a reasonable time frame for application completion and make calls to universities on your student’s behalf. They can also help your student (and yourself) bridge the emotional gap between high school and college. Independent counselors can expose students to schools they hadn’t considered, counsel them through writing the admissions essay and organize the family’s process.

“In some cases, I will have students who come into my office and use my desk to fill out their applications,” says Michaud. “Some use me just to read their essays and make sure everything is fine. Planning for college, going to look at colleges, making that big step from high school to college is a very emotional process. Hopefully a person like me can take the emotion out.”

Some independent counselors charge a package fee for their services; others charge hourly. It’s not a charge everyone is willing to spend.

“College is expensive enough,” Kadous says. “I was going to use the resources around me that were free.”

If your free resources aren’t meeting your student’s needs, Behrend says your first action should be to contact your student’s guidance counselor. “Very often, a gap in communication has caused this problem in the first place,” Behrend says. “That is correctable. A meeting would also ‘focus the spotlight’ on the student for the counselor and cause them to realize that this supportive family and student may need a little more of their precious time.”

If hiring an independent counselor is your family’s solution, Behrend recommends asking a professional association, such as NACAC (www.nacac.com), for a directory of independent counselors in your region. Though hiring an independent counselor may help you better understand the process, it’s not going to guarantee your student admission into a top-choice school.

“I do not sit in their admissions office,” Block says. “I say to families, ‘I can not get you in. There are some schools I can make calls to, but I am not in their admissions office.’ The colleges make their own decisions.”

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