What are their qualifications? I.e., what experience, training, ancievements, and/or skills make someone a good private counselor to hire?We have hired a private college counselor for our daughter. She goes to a huge public high school and the school counselors there are tasked with academic and student mental health counseling in addition to college counseling, and the first two take up all of their time and resources. They each have hundreds of kids assigned to them so they can't know most, if any, of them well. My husband and I both attended college way back when but the college application process and landscape are very, very different now and our experiences are pretty irrelevant. The counselor we hired knows the current landscape well, has been through it with hundreds of students, and I believe will save us all wasted time and heartache. It has been extremely helpful to have a third party forcing my daughter to think about where she'd like to go to college and why, focus her on the realities of college applications and admissions, and serve as a non-parent adult figure my daughter can confide in about school performance, pressures, and aspirations. My daughter is not super organized and the counselor has helped her organize the process greatly - there are a lot of moving parts. The counselor can also serve as the "bad guy" taskmaster when needed, lessening the friction around the topic in our house, which, though not worth paying for in and of itself, is a nice add-on. If our daughter went to a small private school with a resourced, dedicated college counseling department staffed with people who know, advise, and really help the students with college we definitely would not pay for a private counselor. But that is not our situation, and for us it has been worth the money. As for cost, I believe it varies greatly depending on locale. We found our counselor through friends who had hired her for their daughter and highly recommended her. It's hard to judge based on websites and marketing materials.
Statistics: Posted by angelescrest — Sun Jan 21, 2024 11:41 pm — Replies 14 — Views 835
