I began providing College Counseling services in 2008, when my church asked me to facilitate college prep workshops. However, I didn’t start charging consistently for services until 2016. After several years in Corporate America, I left in 1997 to spend more time with my son after discovering he had a different learning style and some language processing issues. Before leaving my corporate position, I earned my real estate license and have been licensed for over 30 years.

Because of my business background, I have hired an attorney to review and suggest changes to the CollegeForSure (CFS) contract a few times over the last 10 years. Like most higher ed institutions, CFS is a business. Although it is a very small, woman- and Black-owned business, it is still a business. A business that strives to lead with compassion.

However, CFS has found it to be a thin line between leading with compassion and ignoring behavior that will not serve students well in the long run. Since the pandemic, in particular, we have seen an uptick in students scheduling meetings, then missing meeting after meeting, and chronically missing assignment deadlines, even though deadlines are set, documented, and visible to students, with multiple reminders automatically sent through the paid software subscriptions we use. In addition, we personally send manual (dashboard) and mobile phone text message reminders to both students and parents. These messages largely go unanswered, as documented by pages and pages of student dashboard messages. These issues have become so regular and disheartening that we have made the difficult decision to scale back services by accepting fewer students for the foreseeable future.

Students’ unresponsiveness, missed deadlines, and missed meetings have become so prevalent that I have personally missed vacations and other scheduled time off to review student essays and applications. I also sometimes send emails in the wee hours of the morning, primarily because I don’t have enough time during the day due to the issues noted above.

Recently, a student notified me less than an hour before a scheduled meeting that they wouldn’t attend. This wasn’t the first time this student has done this, but it was particularly notable because my son was in town and wanted me to go to dinner with him, but I declined because of this scheduled meeting.  During the summer months and at other times, students will tell me that they won’t have access to technology, so they can’t complete assignments or make meetings, only for me to see, via administrator access to the applications we use, that the student is online, on our applications, opening email after email that we send during the time that they have told me they wouldn’t have access to technology.

While the late meeting cancellation clause has always been in our agreement, we only started invoicing for this infraction sporadically over the last few years. We added the late essay/written assignment clause about 5-7 years ago after students were chronically late on essays, which logically put us behind in reviewing these essays and the accompanying applications. Although the late essay clause is now part of the agreement every parent signs, we still routinely send reminders instead of invoices, and we often invoice for fewer days than the assignment was late (i.e., we provide a discount/credit for some days).

What has surprised and concerned us most is that some parents have said, directly or indirectly, that they feel this clause is unfair. So, my questions are: 1) Unfair to whom? 2) Why is it okay for an individual- an adolescent, in this case- to have no consequences for failing to consider the impact of their actions or non-actions on someone else, and quite possibly themselves? 3) How will having no consequences prepare students for college, graduate school, or professional careers…life? 4) Are there parental suggestions for consequences that may be more impactful in reducing late assignments and missed meetings?

My son, who works for a Fortune 500 company and is far more corporate than I ever was, and our CFS Administrator continually chastise me for the number of hours I put in and the repeated allowances I make. As a member of a professional organization of people who provide educational consulting services (i.e., College, Graduate School, Medical School, and Law School Counseling Services), we know for sure that many counselors do not routinely make such allowances; and if and when they do, the fees for missed appointments and late assignments exceed those of CFS.

Moreover, this is evident and routinely discussed in a private online group of educational consultants and at annual conferences with over 1000 educational consultants in attendance. We estimate that fewer than three dozen attendees at these leading-edge, informative conferences are Black. CFS believes these conferences are vital to staying on top of current trends and topics related to college counseling. It’s also worth noting that, according to an annual pricing survey, CFS base services cost less than most other providers.