Here’s my reply to this mom:

“JoAnn, thank you for reaching out to me about this. If you do hire and work with this person, please keep in touch with me and let me know how it goes and how happy you are! I don’t do this kind of consulting myself, so I am always looking for high-quality people to refer out to.

It’s difficult for me to comment on this situation because I don’t know the person, but I can tell you this.

Colleges have a limited amount of money to give out to their incoming students.

They usually take this precious money and use it to attract high-quality students that they believe will enrich their freshman class and make college a better experience for others. If your child is a high-quality applicant, colleges may tell her: “We would love to have you here! If you come, we will give you $20,000 extra to help pay your tuition.”

In my mind I can’t imagine the meeting at the college where a committee says:

“Well, this is really an outstanding high-quality applicant and we would normally extend her some merit aid, but look—she already found and applied for six scholarships and has $30,000 in scholarship money already set up for herself—let’s definitely not try to recruit her.”

It seems to me that being a go-getter and finding scholarships on your own would be a further feather in your cap and yet another reason for them to love you and want you to come to their school.

Now keep in mind I don’t know this man and so I’m not in a great position to fully evaluate his advice.

For all I know, he could know more about the subject than I do. But here is my thought: he seems to be assuming that colleges are going to give out money to students based on their financial need. The students are poor, they have little money to pay, they didn’t get scholarships, so the college gives them money?

I could be wrong, but I have not heard of many incidents of that happening.

It seems like poor people with no money are a dime a dozen – and if the college were going to do that they would be flooded with applicants who would like a generous handout despite having not done anything special to pursue it.

My understanding is that colleges don’t hand out a lot of money to people because of their financial need. They hand out free money based on merit.

I think we need to keep the consultant’s profit motive in mind here.

If you are a consultant, it is always easier to sell your services by telling people that they will not have to do any special work on their own – rather than by telling people that they will have to work hard to do things like finding and applying for scholarships. I don’t know whether this is entering into this consultant’s mind or not, but it is something to think about.

There is a way to find out for free which colleges hand out merit aid. You don’t need a consultant for that.

You can go to collegedata.com, locate the “Quick College Finder,” type in any college name you want, and instantly see whether or not that college gives out merit aid.

There are some colleges that will take a student’s scholarship money and use it to reduce the free aid the student was going to get, rather than using it to reduce the student’s future student loan burden.

This is a dirty trick. There are many, many colleges that don’t do this. Ask whether this is a college’s policy before your child applies there. If it is, apply elsewhere.

Here’s the upshot on what I think about this. 

I say, we probably shouldn’t depend on colleges to fully meet anybody’s financial need. They simply aren’t doing that these days. Massive numbers of families are shocked when they see their “financial aid award letter” and realize how little money is being provided for them and how much must come out of their own pockets.

Putting all your eggs in that basket could end up being a great great disappointment.

Instead, I think it’s better to get proactive ahead of time about getting private parties to pay for college by awarding you scholarships. If this man is not seeing students have much luck getting scholarships, he may not have a fantastic way of writing the scholarship essays like you do — now that you’ve had a class from me on the subject. : – )

I say, go ahead and apply for bunches of scholarships using the best, most convincing, most powerful essay you can. Better to have the money in your hand now than to count on some mythical gift coming in from a college later.

Best wishes!

~ Jeannie Burlowski

Below, learn the fastest, easiest way to fill out large numbers of scholarship applications.

Take my 3-hour video class MAKE THEM SAY WOW: How to Write One Brilliant Scholarship Application Essay and Use it Over and Over Again

[Video Class] MAKE THEM SAY “WOW!” Application Essay Writing

For more help, read these posts I’ve written on finding and applying for scholarships. There’s a ton of good information in here:

Top 10 Ways to Help Your Kid Rake In More College Scholarships

Looking for Scholarships to Apply For? Here are 1.5 Million of Them

Want More College Scholarships? GPA Matters Less Than You Think.

Learn every way possible to keep college costs down without getting scholarships.