I’ve never seen private college counseling as a competition between businesses. There are plenty of kids applying to college, and for those who want to pay for assistance, the more good options they have, the better. That’s why Collegewise doesn’t try to stop competitors from joining our free webinars, attending our sessions at conferences, or downloading our free materials. We can all learn, share, and work together to make our profession better.

And sometimes making the profession better means pointing out areas where those in the profession need to be better.

This week, my colleagues and a number of counselors and admissions officers in our industry were chagrined to see a competitor charging $2500 for a “Postmortem Evaluation.” The email, which appears to have been sent to a potential customer who then shared it with the headline, “Um, no thanks,” promises the buyer will “…come away with a firm understanding of why you didn’t get in early and what needs to be changed the regular decision round so you’ll have a better result to earn admission to the best school possible” (worth noting that I cleaned up several punctuation and capitalization issues in the email).

Can a qualified counselor review a previously submitted application and point out areas of potential improvement for future submissions? Yes. Collegewise works with families who approach us for that kind of feedback. But “postmortem” seems extreme. Let’s not compare a college denial with death.

More troublingly, this competitor can’t tell any student why they weren’t admitted to a college. And neither can we. We can hypothesize. We can make educated guesses based on years of experience. Your high school counselor can almost certainly give you the same feedback, and in fact, they often have even more insight because they can talk to the college. But I’m not sure any of us can offer a “firm understanding” of the specific reasons for the denial.

The only people who can tell you with certainty why you weren’t admitted to a college are the admissions officers who read the file, who were part of the discussion, and who were in the room when the decision was made. And even if they were available for hire to tell you, they often would not be able to point to specific shortcomings that can be fixed. The applicant pools at some schools are so competitive that you can be turned away having done nothing wrong, and even having done everything right.

It wouldn’t have been that hard to tell this student something like:

“If you’d like to engage our services for some feedback on your application, especially the kind that you might be able to use for your remaining apps, we’d be happy to help. But I should tell you that the fact you got deferred doesn’t necessarily mean that you did anything wrong. At competitive schools like this, students often get deferred when their application and essays really were the best reflections of them. If that’s the case, we’d tell you so, and we’d give you your money back. I’d hate to see you make changes if what you have is already great.”

Fellow counselors, let’s all remember that we’re dealing with teenagers who are immersed in a process that has become unnecessarily high-stakes and infused with pressure. Let’s remember that we owe it to them to know what we’re talking about and to be honest when we don’t have the knowledge they’re seeking. And most importantly, let’s try to leave those families we engage with better off than when they arrived, whether or not they decide to hire us.