College Consultant Training Standards: What Every Family Deserves (But Rarely Gets)
By Matt Kudlacz
Standardized College Application Help? It’s a Mystery.
I’ve always loved road trips. This summer, I’ll be taking one with my seventeen-year-old daughter to visit some of the high-priority colleges on her list. Like any good road trip, there will be plenty of adventure to be found in the form of diversions and side quests—but also lots of logistical monotony: gas stations, bathroom breaks, and meals that are middling in terms of quality, but reliably sustaining.
As I ponder these inevitable dietary indiscretions in particular, I find myself–oddly perhaps–also thinking about their relationship to college consultant training standards.
Years ago, on another road trip during college, a friend of mine offered a simple explanation for why we were pulling into a McDonald’s despite having no real desire to eat their food: “Consistency is what they’re really selling,” he said. “You’re not buying their food. You’re buying their guarantee that your Big Mac will be prepared exactly as you’d expect it to be.” This casual insight from that summer evening rang true to me then and has stuck with me ever since.
An enthusiastic student of business strategy, I later came to realize that what my friend described that night was more than just an intuition—it was what thought leaders like Roger Martin call an algorithm: the final phase of business evolution, in which early mysteries (i.e., could there be a need for this product in the marketplace?) give way to heuristics (i.e., how can expertise be used to satisfy this need?), which ultimately lead to reliable, repeatable systems (i.e., regular processes that are put in place to effectively and efficiently satisfy consumer need).
Although its not my favorite roadside restaurant, it is undeniable that McDonald’s has a highly-developed, effective, and efficient algorithm at the core of its business. Teaching, for all its flaws, also has one. But college consulting? Not yet. And that’s a problem we need to fix.
College Consulting: A Profession Without Quality Control
As a researcher, Learning and Development professional, and workforce strategist, I know that to study any system well, you have to hold the variables steady. Let’s take two students with identical resumes: same GPA, same test scores, same extracurricular profiles. One works with a highly-experienced, well-networked and crafty college coach. The other works with a well-meaning but improvisational consultant who relies mostly on hunches and personal anecdotes. The difference in their outcomes might be subtle on paper, but it will almost certainly be felt by both students, and by their parents, in the form of confidence, clarity, and stress.
And yet, this inconsistency is completely normalized.
College admissions consulting has long been an “open” profession, without a clear pipeline, profile or typology for practitioners. Some consultants are former admissions officers. Some are teachers. Some are freelance editors or parents who helped their own kids get into selective schools. The field accepts all kinds.
And while some are great at what they do, all college consultants have, to one degree or another, declared themselves to be “experts” in the realm of admissions counseling. But as we know from Martin, such a disposition can often tend toward ways of working that are, at best, based upon a well-developed heuristic — or, at worst, founded on little more than a hunch. To overwhelmed families and students, these hunches or heuristics can read as a kind of specialized brilliance. But few would mistake such practices as anything approaching consistency.
This outcome seems entirely intuitive, however, as there are no broadly-accepted benchmarks for what makes someone a qualified, effective, or ethical college consultant. While some institutions have begun to make efforts toward standardization, in most cases, there’s no required certification, no minimum observation hours, no industry-wide definition of success. For families, this means the quality of support they receive is shockingly dependent on chance.
Now imagine if we staffed our classrooms this way. As a licensed secondary education teacher, I know firsthand the rigor, oversight and litany of other demands that come with the profession—from pedagogical training to supervised practicums to ongoing professional development. Even with all of that, good teaching remains incredibly difficult. But for all of its limitations, we can at least rest assured that modern educational systems are built on the assumption that method matters.
Contrast this with college consulting. It’s a service delivered to adolescents at one of the most high-stakes moments in their educational lives, and yet there’s no shared definition of what good looks like. In fact, many consultants don’t even define themselves as educators. They define themselves as experts.
And experts, as Roger Martin might say, are often still stuck at the “let the expert cook” stage of the knowledge funnel: developing personal rules of thumb, intuitions, and clever shortcuts based on their own experience. But what happens when those heuristics are not only untested, but also unshareable?
This is why Graduwit is different. We’ve designed a coaching model that moves beyond hunches and heuristics to something repeatable and reliable—an algorithm, in Martin’s terms. Not a rigid one-size-fits-all checklist, but a well-designed, student-centered operating model. Like the best service organizations, from McDonald’s to Tiffany to Montessori, we believe the student experience shouldn’t depend on who happens to be on-shift that day. It should be anchored in consistent practices that deliver quality outcomes, even as they bend to meet individual student needs.
What Should Professional College Coach Training Look Like?
At Graduwit, we don’t just pair students with consultants. We’ve built a systems-based community of professional practice that emphasizes coaching consistency, developmental pacing, and accountability. Here are the cornerstones of our model:
- Expert-Designed Processes
Methods that have been designed using input from experienced and accomplished Consultants and world-class copywriters acting as Coaches. These are not ad hoc playbooks—they’re thoughtful systems grounded in pedagogical, creative, and organizational research. - Defined Coaching Frameworks
A shared approach for goal-setting, feedback, and reflection. Every Coach and Consultant learns how to guide students through our sequence of tools and prompts that both aid higher-order cognitive development in the student while also satisfying the high-demands of the typical admissions process. - Quality Assurance Loops
Ongoing, scientific measurement of student and family satisfaction and outcomes, along with ongoing evaluation of Coach and Consultant performance. As the old adage goes: what gets measured gets managed–and, by extension, improved. - Social Learning and a Community of Practice
We create space, time, and resources for Coaches and Consultants to learn from one another and align on processes and methods that deliver student and family satisfaction and optimal results. - Consistent and Comprehensive Systems
A completely customized platform and suite of collaborative digital tools that guide and enable a consistent process for shaping student essays and guiding successful application strategies. This ensures that every student benefits from the same high-quality implements, no matter who their Coach is.
One of our most powerful tools—the UWheel—offers a great example of how an algorithmic coaching process can still feel deeply personal. It helps students reflect across a spectrum of dimensions: identity, belief, origin, struggle, and aspiration. Coaches are trained not just to ask these questions, but to recognize narrative patterns, identify life moments that matter, and scaffold together these ideas in service authentic storytelling. It’s not a personality test or worksheet. It’s a conversational engine for creative brainstorming. And it’s consistent.
The result? Coaches don’t just help students write essays. They help students discover who they are—and do so in a way that can be reliably delivered at scale.
What Families Deserve (and What the Industry Must Deliver)
When families invest in private coaching, they should be getting more than just tips and tricks. They should be getting standardized college application help informed by research, experience, and ethical practice. Coaching quality should not depend on who answers your inquiry form first or what city you live in. It should be baked into the system.
In education, we’re rightly wary of one-size-fits-all solutions. But that doesn’t mean we abandon standards. On the contrary, it means that we are beholden to students and their families to implement true college consulting training standards that can be both flexible and repeatable.
As my colleague Anne Cochran points out, strategy fails when adults make rookie mistakes. I’d add: coaching fails when we mistake charisma (read: a heuristic) for craft (read: a standardized process). At Graduwit, we’re building a better way—one that doesn’t rely on luck.
Final Word: Method Over Magic
There is no magic formula to getting into college. But there is a method for helping students put forth their most honest, clever, and authentic applications.
That method is teachable. It is measurable. And it’s what every family deserves.
Let’s make it the standard.
Author’s Bio
Matt Kudlacz is a talent strategist, learning and development professional and educator. He has helped design and optimize talent systems at some of the world’s most admired brands like Apple and Johnson & Johnson. He is also an experienced high school social studies teacher and father of two. In his current capacity, he is leading the development and implementation of Graduwit’s talent strategy and acting as a Graduwit Coach–and having a great time doing it!