What college admissions consulting costs
PrepToDone costs $49 once. A consultant costs hundreds of times that, and does a great deal we do not do. Both of those sentences are on this page because a comparison that only carried the first one would be worthless to you.
What the market actually charges.
The figures below are the published ones, with their sources and the date they were priced. We have not adjusted them, and we have not quoted anybody's sales copy.
| Item | PrepToDone | Independent consultant | Premium multi-year program |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $49 one-time | $230/hour mean | reported to start around $30,000 |
| On that price | Lifetime access. No subscription, no renewal. | Most comprehensive packages $4,000–$7,500; mean $6,450 ($6,304 for college advising), as of January 2022. | For undergraduate admissions, per the reporting linked below. We do not assert an upper bound, because we cannot source one. |
| What you're buying | A data layer: where your profile sits against every college that publishes an admitted-student band, and what to strengthen. | A person. Multi-year strategy, school list, essay coaching, and someone accountable for the process. | The above, plus staffing depth: research support, project building, and test preparation bundled in. |
| Human hours | None. No advisor is assigned to you. | Typically a multi-year engagement with scheduled meetings. | A team, over several years. |
| What it does not include | No essay writing. No former admissions officers. No calls. | — | — |
| Source | Our pricing page | IECA, State of the Profession (December 2022) | Fortune, December 2024 |
| See it | See a real report → | Ask any consultant for a redacted sample before you pay. Anyone confident in the work will have one. | |
The consultant figures come from a survey of roughly 1,000 member consultants, published December 2022 and priced as of January 2022. Fees have moved since; treat them as a floor for what the market charges today, not a current quote.
What we do not do.
Three things, specifically, and none of them by accident:
- We do not write your essays. We do not draft them, ghostwrite them, or hand you a rewrite to submit. Your application should be yours, and the moment a purchased sentence enters it, it is not.
- We do not employ former admissions officers. Nobody here will tell you what a committee is thinking. What we have instead is the published record of what committees have already done.
- We do not get on calls with you. There is no advisor, no standing meeting, and no one to escalate to at 11pm in December.
What is left is the data layer — the same published admissions figures a good consultant pulls before they advise anyone, assembled and placed against your profile. A consultant does that as step one and then does the human work on top. We do step one, we do it thoroughly, and we stop.
That is the honest shape of the trade. You are not buying a cheaper consultant. You are buying the part of the job that happens to be arithmetic.
So is a consultant worth it?
We are the wrong people to ask, and we would rather say that than pretend otherwise. What we can tell you is which part of the question is answerable.
Nobody can price the counterfactual. No consultant, and no tool, can tell you what would have happened to your application without them — the student who was admitted after paying is never run again as a control. Any figure claiming to isolate that effect is a claim about an experiment that was not conducted.
What is answerable is narrower and more useful: whether you currently know where you stand. If your school list was built from reputation, a forum thread, or a ranking, the data layer will change it, and it costs $49 to find out. If you already have a well-sourced list and what you actually need is someone to hold a nervous seventeen-year-old to a deadline for two years, that is a consultant, and we are not going to talk you out of it.
Buy the cheap thing first. It is the only order that lets you find out which one you needed.
Third-party figures are cited to their publishers and are not endorsements, affiliations, or quotations of any provider's marketing. Results are data-based estimates and do not guarantee admission.