A message from our Founder
Of the five most experienced and sought-after counselors at Collegewise—the ones whose calendars fill earliest every year, almost entirely through word-of-mouth referrals, and who are the highest earners on our team—only one is a former admissions officer (FAO) from a selective university. The other four built their expertise elsewhere—one as a school counselor, two as test prep tutors, and one we hired in 2004 as a recent college graduate and former campus tour guide. Five very different roads to the same place.
If your first reaction to that sentence is skepticism, I understand it completely. When families contact us asking specifically for a counselor with an FAO background, they’re making a reasonable request. You want someone who has seen the admissions process from the inside. Someone who knows what a highly selective admissions committee is actually looking for when they read an application. Someone who, when they tell you “this essay isn’t working,” is speaking from direct experience rather than informed guesswork.
That instinct toward deep expertise is the right one. What I’d like to challenge is the assumption that an FAO credential is where that expertise lives.
There’s a phrase we use at Collegewise when a former admissions officer joins our team: “moving to the other side of the desk.” It captures something important about two different kinds of expertise, and why one of them is more directly connected to the outcomes families care about.
A former admissions officer comes to this work having read thousands of applications, debated their merits with colleagues, and rendered final decisions about who gets in and who doesn’t. That is genuinely valuable experience. An FAO knows viscerally why a clichéd college essay about “what sports taught me about leadership” won’t move an admissions reader. They’ve felt that fatigue.
But that experience—as valuable as it is—is experience in evaluating applicants. Counseling requires something different: the ability to develop them. A counselor who built their career working directly with students has spent years navigating conversations with students and parents, helping families see the best path forward, and celebrating hard-won victories. When a dream school says no, a counselor is the one who has to sit with that student and help them find the way forward. That shapes you differently than reading applications does.
An FAO brings deep familiarity with how admissions decisions get made. A Collegewise counselor, regardless of their background, needs the ability to develop a student to put that student in the best possible position for that decision. Those are related but genuinely different skills. The first is one input into the job. The second is what drives outcomes. And the second is what we build in everyone here, regardless of where they started.
It’s fair to wonder whether someone who has done both might be even better equipped. Our own experience answers that. The one FAO among those five counselors didn’t outperform the other four. And the pattern holds across our full counselor pool: after 26 years of tracking satisfaction scores, referral rates, and admissions outcomes by individual counselor, we’ve never found FAO background to be a reliable predictor of stronger admissions results or family referrals. If it were, we would hire only FAOs.
At Collegewise, a counselor’s background before arriving is the beginning of the story, not the end of it.
Getting admitted to Collegewise is like getting into a highly selective college. In a recent hiring cycle, more than 3,500 professionals applied to become Collegewise counselors. We hired fewer than 1% of them—and the selection criteria go much deeper than credentials alone. We have no shortage of impressive résumés. What our most experienced counselors are actually evaluating is harder to find: whether a candidate is genuinely called to this work, whether they define success by the students they’ve helped rather than the titles they’ve held. Those are qualities training can’t manufacture. Everything else, we handle.
Before working with a single student, every counselor we hire—regardless of where they came from, what titles they’ve held, or how many years they spent in the field—completes the same 40-hour training program and passes the same final exam. No exceptions. Not for the former Harvard admissions officer. Not for the former school counselor. Not for anyone.
Think of it as a professional residency—not because counselors arrive knowing nothing, but because the point of the training is to ensure that every counselor, regardless of what they knew before walking in the door, meets the same standard when they walk out. What does that standard look like? By the end of training, every counselor knows exactly how Collegewise thinks about, communicates, and guides families through every dimension of the process: course selection, standardized testing, activity profiles, summer planning, application presentation, essay brainstorming, interview preparation. All of it, taught the way we’ve refined it over 26 years and more than 35,000 students. Not general college counseling—Collegewise counseling, with the specificity and consistency that come from two and a half decades of learning what works.
When that training is complete, there is no FAO tier and non-FAO tier at Collegewise. There is one tier: Collegewise-trained.
Every Collegewise counselor belongs to a culture of continuous learning that begins on day one and doesn’t stop.
Every week, we host Wiser Wednesdays. These are internal sessions where a counselor with particular expertise in a topic shares what they know with the rest of the team. Past sessions have covered working with students with learning differences, applying to honors programs, financial aid and scholarships, and military academy admissions.
Every month, our Learning and Development team publishes The Wiser Digest, an internal newsletter covering the timely and evolving topics counselors are actively navigating with their students. And when the admissions landscape changes, as it does regularly, our team responds with targeted training to keep everyone current.
This culture also produces something families rarely think to ask about: currency. Admissions changes constantly: test-optional policies shift, evaluation criteria evolve, and institutional priorities move in ways that aren’t always announced. An admissions officer’s expertise reflects the institution where they worked and the moment they left it. Accurate then. Not automatically updated since. A Collegewise counselor is inside this work every day, close enough to feel every shift as it happens. That ongoing immersion is an advantage no credential captures.
And behind every counselor is something most families never see: a network of more than 150 colleagues who share expertise with each other continuously. If a counselor needs current, specific knowledge about any individual college, they can tap that network in real time. Your counselor’s knowledge doesn’t end at the edges of their own experience.
The counselors most respected by their peers are the ones most committed to this culture. They’ll tell you they don’t know everything. They’ll tell you they’re still getting better. That is not a sign of inexperience. It is the signature of a professional who takes their craft seriously.
Please tell us if your student has specific circumstances—a learning difference, a recruited athlete, an international application, a particular academic focus—where specific expertise is genuinely relevant. We take those preferences seriously and match accordingly.
What you’re looking for is a counselor who understands selective admissions deeply, knows how to guide your student through every step of a complex process, and is as invested in your student’s outcome as you are. That description fits the overwhelming majority of our team.
When we recommend a counselor for your student, you already know what’s behind that recommendation. The same hiring process. The same training. The same culture of continuous learning. And 26 years of data pointing consistently in the same direction. Every Collegewise counselor knows what FAOs know. They arrived there differently, but the knowledge is the same. And every one of them brings that knowledge alongside the student-facing skills that actually drive outcomes.
That’s not a request to keep an open mind. It’s a reason to trust the match.
Kevin McMullin is the Founder & Chief Education Officer at Collegewise
About Us: With more than 26 years of experience, Collegewise counselors and tutors are at the forefront of the ever-evolving admissions landscape. Our work has always centered on you: the family. And just like we’ve always done, we look for ways for your student to be their best self - whether in the classroom, the applications, or in the right-fit college environment. Our range of counseling, test prep, academic tutoring, and essay management, all with the support of our proprietary platform, lead to 4x higher than average admissions rates.