Guidance For Sale

By Tamala M. Edwards/Palo Alto

Getting a child into college is stressful enough to make some parents fret over starting their kid off in the right preschool. But most families like to think there are a few years of grace time, with the dilemmas of carpooling and sports schedules not giving way to full frenzy until, at the earliest, the summer before senior year.

Well, that's the way it is now. If you want to get a sense of the future, take a look at Achieva College Prep Centers, an education company. Give Achieva your child beginning in freshman year of high school, and the staff will help your teen pick classes, clubs, community-service projects and summer jobs, all with an eye toward creating a snazzy profile to present to college admissions directors. Achieva will tutor when your youngster falls behind and do the test prep to pull your kid ahead. The twentysomething counselors, who resemble the well-scrubbed models from a Gap ad, will even make a teenager, as adviser Tilden Fang did one afternoon, cheerfully agreeable to doing homework before play and going to bed on time.

But all that pales beside Achieva's birddogging of the senior-year college-application process. Advisers first help a student select 20 to 25 colleges, prodding the student along until he or she pares down the list to the eight or so to be considered seriously. Other kids may informally ask teachers for recommendations. Not with Achieva. Counselors help kids choose whom to ask for recommendations and then edit the cover letters and resumes that students are told to give to the chosen instructors. There's even strategizing on the art of asking. "Make sure you ask for a strong letter. You have to say strong," Elissa Hull, a counselor in Achieva's Cupertino center, insists to senior Will Chen. If the teacher demurs, she says, Chen should yank back the request rather than end up with lukewarm praise. Achieva keeps its student records in files that look like doctor's folders, with vitals--classes, test scores, deadlines and other information--regularly checked. Then there are the essays, which counselors help students conceptualize and write. And all this doesn't end when the application is dropped in the mailbox. No, the last stop may be when Achieva counsels kids on setting up their freshman college schedule.

Test prep and tutoring have been around awhile, along with one-on-one private college counseling, services usually purchased by the wealthy. But the advent of Achieva signals something very different. The company is the first to join all three jobs in one program, micromanaging a student's life. Achieva's pitch is simple: while others boast they'll increase a student's grade by one letter or an SAT score by 100 points, Achieva says all of last year's 1,050 clients got into college, and 85% ended up at one of their top two choices. In the past two years, the California company has boomed from one center to nine and plans to expand to 250 across the U.S. in the next 18 months. "We want to be a brand name like Coke," says Carlos Watson, the company's co-founder.

Test-preparation giants Kaplan and the Princeton Review, reacting to Achieva, have launched their own plans to compete with the upstart's full-scale service. This approach, which costs $300 to $5,000, is expected to become almost as common as braces. But it's a development many in education view as hysterical and unnecessary. "Getting into college is not rocket science," says Jon Reider, an associate admissions director at Stanford. "This is crazy."

Most can agree on the factors that have given rise to this industry. The number of college applicants is at an all-time high, creating a hypercompetitive environment at such top schools as Stanford--which accepted 2,700 applicants out of 18,000 last year--and pushing some once easygoing colleges to become more selective. At the same time, the number of high school guidance counselors, the traditional college advisers, has been slashed because of budget cutbacks, creating impossible student-to-counselor ratios (1,040 to 1 in California, for example) and diminishing, if not demolishing, the amount of information available to many students.

Into that breach stepped Achieva. In 1997 the company, initially called Sierra, opened in Palo Alto in a remodeled limestone house, whose major decorations today are framed acceptance letters received by Achieva clients from such colleges as Brown, Harvard and Amherst.

The advent of the company and its competitors may further distort a system skewed in favor of families with money. "It's the kids who need this, who already have 2 1/2 strikes against them, who'll get left behind," says David Breneman, dean of the education school at the University of Virginia. Watson counters that Achieva regularly does pro bono work in poor schools and has a free summer academy in East Palo Alto, a disadvantaged neighborhood. The company also has counseling contracts with seven high schools in low-income San Jose, where Achieva works with hundreds of kids who can't afford Watson's services. "We're doing well and doing good," Watson says. The counseling done free or under contract with the San Jose schools, which is usually done less frequently and in groups, is no match for the intensive weekly help given to those paying top dollar. Still, "some counseling is better than no counseling," says Terry Hartle, vice president of the American Council on Education. "In many cases, these kids wouldn't be getting any help with life after high school otherwise."

Another concern is that counseling could cross the line into cheating. "Counseling helps you explain away the difficulties in your record and highlight your best features," defines Andy Rosen, CEO of Kaplan. But when does "editing" become writing a student's essays for him? Achieva insists that it only gives guidance and makes students do Internet and college-guide research and their own writing. Still, Andy Lutz, a vice president at the Princeton Review, admits the distinction is tricky. "There's a line between suggesting and rewriting," he says. "But it's a gray area."

And what does it mean for Achieva to be coming to the rescue of some public schools? It has become routine for schools to hire private companies to do, say, catering and security. But when the seven high schools in San Jose's East Side Union school district contracted with Achieva for college counseling, it marked perhaps the first time a business had been hired in public schools to handle an academic area. And this year Fred deFuniak, principal of Silver Creek High School, is thinking of hiring Achieva not only for test prep but also to teach reading and writing skills. "This may be controversial, but you have to be innovative to get results," he says. "Parents and legislators are demanding accountability."

DeFuniak says hiring Achieva is a bid not only for better results but also for efficiency. For $60,000, he can add one new guidance counselor, which would just reduce the student-to-counselor ratio to 650 to 1. Moreover, the person hired would be saddled not only with giving college advice but also with staying on top of disciplinary and psychological problems. For the same amount of money, DeFuniak is planning to employ three Achieva counselors to do only test prep, a service he expects to translate into a 50-point jump in SAT scores. He says such gains are more likely to help his kids--87% of whom are minorities, many from disadvantaged families--make college an option.

Still, private involvement in public education raises questions about whether the schools are relinquishing their basic function. While public school guidance counselors have to be certified and hold specific degrees, there are no guidelines for outside professionals. And, asks Stanford's Reider, "shouldn't DeFuniak's English department be doing reading and writing skills?"

Nicholas Lemann, author of The Big Test, a look at the SAT and educational meritocracy, says Achieva's success is the result of crazed but confused parents. Only nine universities take less than a quarter of applicants. In fact, 1,900 of the 2,100 four- year colleges accept at least half those who apply. Thus it is the families, more than most schools, that can afford to be selective. But then there is the perception that unless a kid goes to Harvard, his life is over. "The parents get obsessed, which makes the kids obsessed," says Lemann. "It turns the high school years into a nightmare." Lemann predicts the rise of an industry that will shoehorn kids into the most prestigious colleges, even if they aren't the best fit. Diagnosing the problem as laziness, he believes that parents and students are abdicating responsibility in a process they could navigate at little cost. "You go to the store and buy the guidebook," he snaps. "What's so hard about that?"

Watson says his critics don't understand the broader mission of Achieva. "This is not just college prep but life prep," he argues. He says his goal is to help students choose the best, not the flashiest, college for themselves. (Recently the service helped an investor's daughter decide that the University of California at Santa Barbara should be her first choice.) Some parents say the high price tag is worth it for calmer, more focused kids who are willing to listen to a voice of reason, so long as it does not belong to a parent. Arlene Kace, a Burlingame nurse, says Watson helped her daughter Kate turn a personal essay about the cartoon Calvin and Hobbes into a paean to the need to lace serious pursuit with joyful diversion. It was an idea Arlene had resisted as a mother, but she says it provided the extra lift that got Kate, a solid but not stellar student, into the University of Pennsylvania. "What Mom screams, I can say with greater results," says Achieva co-founder Jeff Livingston.

Perhaps the criticism directed at Achieva is just a lament for a world long gone. The new college universe is one where Aruna Balakrishnan was the only kid in her high school with a 4.0 average, 1560 SATs and the position of tennis-team captain. Her family spent $2,000 to have Achieva help her with her applications. "My father and I decided if it made only a 1% difference in getting into Harvard, it was worth it," she says. Three weeks into her freshman year at Harvard, she calls it money well spent. Why? She takes a minute off the line--"Boy talk, you know"--and comes back. Quietly, she says, "I'm here."