Hire a Former Admissions Counselor for College Applications?

When parents hear “former Ivy admissions officer,” they light up.

They think they have found the insider. The wizard. The person with the secret recipe.

What they usually found is a former evaluator.

Hiring a former admissions officer to build your child’s application is a little like hiring a food critic to run the kitchen. Yes, they know what they like. Yes, they know what feels stale. Yes, they can often spot what is generic from a mile away. Great!

Can they actually make something unforgettable?

That is a different skill.

Reading an App ≠ Building One

A former admissions officer may know what turns them off. They may know what a particular institution tends to reward. They may know which phrases feel overused, which extracurriculars are oversaturated, which essays blur together.

Useful, absolutely.

But can they sit across from an awkward, defended, overcoached seventeen-year-old and pull out a real self?

Can they hear dead language and cut through it?

Can they tell when a kid is hiding behind polish, achievement, or résumé jargon?

Can they push past the safe answer, the fake mature answer, the TED Talk answer, and get to something sharper, stranger, and more true?

Can they turn a transcript, a robotics competition, a love of horror movies, a difficult family role, and a weird obsession with Greek mythology into a cohesive application identity?

Sometimes. Often, no.

Because evaluating what is on the page is not the same as knowing how to get something alive onto the page in the first place.

The Label Is Doing a Lot of Work

The admissions workforce is not some priesthood of omniscient tastemakers. It is a real higher-ed labor market, and a pretty young, underpaid, high-turnover one.

The data from the 2023 CUPA-HR report tells a very clear story about who is actually handling college applications. 

The day to day is much less “sitting in a candlelit room discerning genius” than parents imagine. 

Admissions officers commonly spend their time managing recruitment territories, traveling to high schools and college fairs, answering parent and student questions, running campus events, doing outreach, tracking funnels and yield, and then reading applications on top of all of that. 

Vanderbilt’s own admissions blog described the two main duties of most admissions officers as recruitment travel and file reading. 

Their job is usually a mix of recruitment travel, territory management, event programming, student outreach, and application review, not months of sitting in a velvet chair excavating the deepest truth of a 17-year-old soul.

Reading applications is largely an evaluative function. Building one is an interpretive one. One asks, “Does this work?” The other asks, “How do I pull something truly alive out of this teenager and shape it into something unforgettable?” 

Those jobs overlap a little. They are not the same job.

So, who should you hire?

Hire the person who knows how to find your child on the page.

Hire the person who can look at robotics, punk music, caregiving, Greek mythology, climate anxiety, or whatever else your teenager has accumulated, and say: there you are.

Hire the person who can build story, not just recognize it after the fact.

Hire the person who can make an application feel like a living mind, not a stack of respectable choices.

Because that is the real job.

And no, the most obvious hire is not always the best one.

You do not want obvious. You want exceptional.