Collegewise is hiring part-time college counselors to join our offices in the following locations:

• Bergen County, New Jersey
• Irvine, California
• Millburn, New Jersey (update: this position has been filled)
• Redondo Beach, California

Specifically, we’re looking for (current or former) high school counselors or college admissions officers whose work and life circumstances have led them to seek part-time work not as a second gig, but as their only gig. At this time, we’re not considering applicants who wish to hold a full-time job concurrently. You can find more information about the positions and our choices behind them here.

Collegewise has always employed our counselors full-time. In fact, in 2019, we began searching for 11 new full-time counselors to join us and have since filled all of those positions with our strongest training classes yet. We believe that truly great counselors treat their work as a calling, not a hobby. And for us, we’ve walked that talk by providing the very best counselors with a professional home where they can do the very best college counseling of their careers, full-time. Full-time is what we know, it’s what we do, and it’s what works for us.

But the recruiting of part-time counselors is an intriguing opportunity for us to employ two important and seemingly contrasting Collegewise ideals: duplicate your bright spots, and always look for new and better ways to do great work.

Only one member of our current counseling team works part-time. But our lone part-timer, a former admissions officer who wished to re-enter the workforce in a part-time capacity, has worked out very well for us, for her, and for her Collegewise students. Her hours with us are part-time, but her engagement, her commitment to the work, and her results are full-time quality. We and she have proven that a part-time arrangement can still lead to the same great outcomes that our full-time model has always delivered so well.

There are also many potential advantages to duplicating that bright spot. In addition to easing our financial burden, we’re now casting an even wider net for more great additions at Collegewise. We have no idea how many future Collegewisers are out there just waiting for a part-time counseling option to present itself. And we’ll never know until we experiment.

As we do with any experiment, we’ve considered the potential cost of failure, and in this case, we’ve accepted it as one that we could bear. Any experiment has unknowns. It’s important to ask “What’s the worst that could happen?” before you open yourself up to discovering the answer the hard way. We couldn’t bear the cost of a Collegewise student being guided by a substandard Collegewise counselor. But our hiring, onboarding, training, and management are strong enough to prevent any such counselor from somehow finding their way to one of our customers. So our worst-case scenario is that we spend our time, effort, and attention on a recruiting search that fails to find who we’re looking for. We don’t expect that’s going to happen, but if it does, it’s a cost we’re comfortable bearing as one that comes with the consistent push to innovate and get better.

If you fit who we’re looking for (or know someone who might) and find your interest piqued, you can find out more about working at Collegewise, and about these specific positions, here.

We hope to hear from you.