How to Select an Admissions Consultant
Families ask me this all the time: how do we pick the right consultant? There are a lot of options out there, and they look very different from one another. I've worked inside more than one of these models, so here's how I'd think about it if I were the one hiring.
Team approach vs. all-in-one
The first fork in the road is whether you're hiring a team or a single person.
At my previous firm, each family was served by four people: a primary counsellor who managed the relationship day to day, a strategy counselor (that was me) who set the overall direction, a parent coordinator who handled parent communication, and an editor who revised and commented on essays. This is the team model, and it has real strengths. Each role is a specialist. The editor lives inside essays all day; the strategist sees patterns across hundreds of cases. You get depth of expertise in every function.
But the team model has costs too. Every handoff is a place where context can get lost — the family tells the primary counsellor something, who relays it to the strategist, who briefs the editor. Communication friction is real. And from the family's perspective, the most senior people on the team are the least accessible: you rarely talk to the strategist or the editor directly, and each person's attention is split across many families. The expertise is deep, but it's diluted and one step removed.
The alternative is the all-in-one model: one person owns the entire relationship. The person who talks to your family is the person who sets the strategy and reads the essays. Nothing gets lost in translation, because there's no translation. Your consultant has full context on your student — the school list, the essays, the anxieties — and is fully accessible to the whole family. The tradeoff is bandwidth: one person can only take on so many families, and there's no specialist editor on staff. You're betting on one person's judgment across every function.
Neither is categorically better. The question is what your family values more: specialized depth, or undivided attention.
The three types of firms
The second fork is what kind of business you're walking into.
The tutoring center that also offers counseling. These firms are built around test prep and subject tutoring, and counseling is an add-on service. The upside is convenience: if your student needs SAT prep and essay help, one relationship covers both. The thing to check is how much of the firm's real expertise — its best people, its institutional attention — goes to the counseling side versus the tutoring side. Sometimes counseling is a side business. Sometimes it's genuinely strong. Ask.
The counseling-only firm. This is all they do. Everyone in the building thinks about admissions, which means the advice tends to be deeper and the process more refined. The tradeoff is that you'll coordinate test prep and tutoring separately if you need them.
The large international education conglomerate. Test prep, tutoring, and counseling under one roof, often across multiple countries and offices. The breadth is the selling point — they can serve a family through every stage. The risk is scale: big organizations standardize. Your family can end up feeling like a case number moving through a pipeline, with the senior strategists far from the actual work on your student's essays.
Different families need different things
This is the part people skip. There's no best firm — there's the best fit for your family.
A family whose student needs intensive subject tutoring and moderate admissions guidance might genuinely do better at a tutoring center with a solid counseling arm. A family that wants deep, focused admissions work and nothing else might prefer a counseling-only firm. A family that wants everything under one roof and doesn't mind a larger operation might like the conglomerate.
And within any of these, the team-vs-individual question still applies. A counseling-only firm might run the four-person team model or the all-in-one model. Ask which one you're getting.
What I'd ask, regardless of the model
No matter which type of firm you're considering, I'd ask the same questions I laid out in my piece on former admissions officers:
• Who actually works with my student day to day — and how often can we talk to the senior people?
• Who does the essay work, and where's their line on how much help is too much?
• How do they define a good outcome — and is it about your student's growth, or about gaming the system?
• Do they talk about your child, or about themselves
The answers will tell you more than any firm's marketing.
The bottom line
Choosing a consultant is really about choosing a working relationship that will last months or years. The model matters, the firm type matters, but what matters most is whether the person across the table is curious about your student — and honest about what they can and can't do for them.
If you're in the middle of this decision and want a second opinion, I'm happy to talk it through. Book a free consultation.