"Parents feel a lot of pressure to be able to brag about their kid. They think 'my child is a reflection of me.' I think that the more successful the parent is, the more that is an issue," says Elsie Echevarria LMFT, a therapist who helps parents and teenagers navigate college admissions.
Not long ago, I heard an upset college consultant ask a group of other consultants why his student didn't get into Yale despite a 4.0. Bad college consultants can still get enough clients to make a living, but I don't want that client to be you. Here are the essential red flags of a bad college consultant.
“If you’re certain that you’re going to achieve above a certain level on that standardized test, then you should invest the rest of your time and your grades and your extracurriculars in particular,” says Nathan Poon, founder of Myntor, an AI that helps students achieve higher SAT, ACT, and AP scores with less study time and less effort.
“The moment that I was like, ‘Yeah, I really just want to be a doctor,’ was when…the doctor had the baby, gave it to the nurse to clean, and then the nurse gave it to me to give to the mom. I was in tears,” says Oklahoman Kareena Patel, a Class of 2025 ED admit to Rice University in Houston, the #1 most selective college in Texas with a 10% acceptance rate in 2020. This week, the founder and CEO of Meducate Youth shares:
“At first, I wasn’t really very open with my teachers, and I wouldn’t really communicate with them. I was an introvert and I thought I need to open up a bit and give them the opportunity to actually give me help,” says Arav Jagroop, a varsity tennis and basketball captain from Illinois who was accepted to Princeton University without test scores.
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I threw up on my first day of water polo camp. My mom found a coach to train me for the start of season. It was perfectly normal. But if academics are even more important for college, why are we so suspicious of parents who hire college consultants for their kids?
Years ago, I was a National Merit Commended Scholar. I forgot about that until today, when I dug up an old high school resume. In hindsight, nothing ever happened from that distinction. Today’s investigation: What is the National Merit Scholarship Program and is it worth the effort to compete?
I was a college sophomore when my sister, who’d applied to join me at Northwestern, texted me the ugly news: “WAITLISTED!!! :(” My investigative trip to the NU admissions office taught me something about a LOCI. Here’s everything you need to know about the Letter of Continued Interest, from purpose and tone to content and effect. Details here.
– anonymous reader
– Kyle, parent of a high school senior
– Arianna, a high school junior
– Leanne, mom of a high school senior
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