As college consulting expands, are high school counselors advocates or adversaries?

The FBI affidavit revealed how wealthy parents and William Singer, a private admissions consultant, lied to counselors about why students planned to take the SAT and ACT in far-flung locations, where bribed proctors would correct their answers. They rehearsed stories about falsified athletic records, claiming that although a student was not on a school’s sports team, he or she had played over the summer in Italy or as part of a private club.

The vast majority of private admissions consulting is perfectly legal. But the indictments last week pointed to an awkward reality for the nation’s high school counselors: With the growth of the multibillion-dollar college-prep industry, their role in the application process has become blurrier, especially in affluent communities where parents can pay for outside help. Even if they try to stop unethical behavior, the scandal shows it is impossible for them to police every wayward college applicant.

For school counselors working in lower-income areas, the investigation was a stinging reminder of the steep odds their students face in a process where parental wealth plays a major role.

Loretta Whitson, executive director of the California Association of School Counselors, said she would like to see state regulations ensuring that consultants “cannot give false information to kids,” such as guaranteeing admission to a particular school.

Even when a family hires a consultant, she said, school-based counselors still play an important role. They are the only ones who can write the counselor recommendation letters required by many colleges, for example, or who can access and send out transcripts.

While it is ultimately a student’s responsibility to sign applications and attest to their truthfulness, school counselors across the country said that part of their role was encouraging ethical behavior during application season.

Katherine Pastor-Lorents, a counselor at Flagstaff High School in Arizona, said one common problem she saw was parents trying to do their children’s applications for them.

“Are you going to college, or are your students going to college?” she asks them.

Few families at her school hire private consultants, she said, and in recent days she has had to reassure students who had heard about the admissions scandal.

“Kids can be kind of cynical and say, ‘There goes my spot,'” she said. “Now we’re trying to have those conversations in our school building about right and wrong, and how hard work can pay off, because that’s what they’ve always been taught.”

Dwight Schmidt, a counselor at Beckman High School in Irvine, California, said that several years ago, he had two students who claimed to have won awards for working in a foreign orphanage. He was skeptical, so he asked for the name of the orphanage and who their supervisor had been. The girls broke down crying and admitted the story was fabricated.

If he sees “embellishments,” Schmidt said, he will call them out.

His school has a comprehensive college-planning process that begins in 11th grade and includes help on essays and one-on-one assistance with applications, he said. Still, like most public school counselors, Schmidt said he spent more time dealing with social and emotional problems, such as anxiety and depression, than he did on college admissions.

Schmidt acknowledged that counselors are sometimes overwhelmed. His own case load ranges between 575 and 600 students, about 130 of whom are seniors.

Nationally, the average school counselor had a 464-student caseload during the 2015-16 school year, according to the American School Counselor Association. The group recommends no more than 250 students per counselor.

Private admissions consulting is common in Irvine. Schmidt estimated that 15 to 20 percent of seniors at his school hired outside help, with some parents paying up to $8,000 per month to keep a consultant on retainer. While consultants can help alleviate tension between parents and children over deadlines and to-do lists, he said, he warned that families should be skeptical of some of the claims that consultants make, especially if they promise to help conceal a problem such as a disciplinary infraction.

The federal investigation of Singer, his clients and the college employees they bribed revealed they were often anxious about being found out by suspicious school counselors.

When one counselor reached out to the University of Southern California to question how the son of Devin Sloane, a Los Angeles businessman, could be admitted as a water polo player when he did not play on a school water polo team, Sloane was irate, according to court documents. “The more I think about this, it is outrageous!” he wrote in an email to Singer. “They have no business or legal right considering all the students [sic] privacy issues.”

While school counselors sometimes do flag problematic applications, Emmi Harward, executive director of the Association of College Counselors in Independent Schools, said they should not be expected to be fact checkers.

“That just isn’t feasible or realistic,” she said, adding that some students are not comfortable sharing their essays or other application materials with school staff, especially if they are writing about a personal problem.

Harward said that although private-school admissions counselors, like the ones in her association, tend to have manageable case loads of 40 to 75 students per grade, the use of outside consultants remains common among private-school families in cities like New York and Los Angeles.

School-based counselors and private consultants are often wary of one another, but both sides agreed that the relationship can be productive.

An effective and ethical private consultant will often call a school counselor to learn more about a student’s grades, classroom demeanor and strengths and weaknesses, said Mark Sklarow, chief executive of the Independent Educational Consultants Association.

Good consultants, he said, have typically visited more colleges than counselors have time to visit and can have deeper expertise on how specific colleges deal with student disabilities or mental health issues.

He conceded, however, that open communication between consultants and counselors was not always possible. Some high schools ask parents not to work with consultants, and some consultants ask families not to reveal to schools that they have been hired.

“We advise our members that the ideal is to always to be in touch, be on the same page,” Sklarow said. “At times the ideal isn’t going to come to pass.”

Some school counselors said they felt far away from the world of high-priced consultants and elite admissions revealed by the federal investigation.

“We have parents who can be overbearing, but we’ve never had to deal with a consultant,” said Desiré DeSoto, a counselor at Wai’anae High School in rural Oahu, where the majority of the students are Native Hawaiian. While students are able to take some free college classes on campus, less than 10 percent go on to attend four-year colleges, she said.

One of her major responsibilities is helping students apply for financial aid. While the allegations in the federal indictment are shocking, she said she did not expect them to affect her community.

“We’re kind of cynical already,” DeSoto said. “Nothing has ever been fair for us.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.