At any given school, yes... but what if you were to give people advice about which colleges to apply to? There has to be some way to optimize the effort here, and that's got to be worth something. Especially when helping to rank the second-tier choices -- so you didn't get into Harvard, but maybe you happen to know that such-and-such College favors applicants like your client for such-and-such reasons.
You are right to suggest that parents could use help knowing where to apply. That's the service that people wanted more than anything during my brief adventure in consulting. It was also the one that I felt the worst offering. Every school is different. Every school is a little weird. I don't think anyone can tell a kid where he'd be best off going to college.
Sure, you can read up on what the different guide books say and offer an opinion, but it's still a shot in the dark.
My advice to kids is always to go visit and see if they could see themselves hanging out on campus there. When I was in high school I visited about 20 colleges with my family. They all looked nice, but none of them inspired my imagination. When I visited Princeton, after I was admitted, I got the sense of a place full of people much, much smarter than myself. I felt like I'd somehow been invited to Hogwarts or the Jedi Academy. That sense of disbelief was what cemented my decision. I figure that's as good as method of picking a school as any.
How practical is that advice for the low-income families mentioned in your other helpful reply? I guess you come from the upper Midwest, as I do. Were your family visits to places like Princeton, Stanford, and MIT, or to colleges in your state and nearby states?
It's just being relentlessly resourceful as PG explained last week.
As an officer you're on duty a few days a week. This means you greet the visiting families. It also means you troubleshoot any weird things that happen in the waiting room.
Probably once a month you'd have a kid who hitchhiked across country to come visit and who would ask about where he could stay nearby. Or kids who would cut school to make it there for a visit.
Also, if a family's hiring outside help with the admissions process, then they've already blocked out time to go visit colleges.
I only visited Princeton after I was admitted. I applied blind. My father had almost had a chance to teach there while he was in the army and had always thought highly of the place. I applied to all the big Midwestern colleges and we thought, what the heck, let's apply to one of these fancy Ivies.
It's kind of a classic story of a dream deferred.
When did you apply?
It must have been in the '80s or '90s, because these days it's pretty much impossible to get into the Ivies without a campus visit on record (or two, preferably). The assumption is that anyone who hasn't done a visit or do doesn't have enough enthusiasm to attend.
I doubt that completely, as I know plenty of counterexamples. The eight colleges in the Ivy League
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League
mostly don't have any policy at all of tracking student interest when making admission decisions. All eight of those colleges know that they will get a good yield out of the smallish number of students that they admit.