Guidance For Sale

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."

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