 This is $500. That's right, a university offered me $500 for every student that I helped to enroll there. But I said no. Today I wanna tell you why I said no to that offer and I also wanna help you understand how you can get real help if you need help applying to college. When I do university episodes, I interview international admissions counselors and every once in a while they make me an offer where I get paid for every student that enrolls in that university. The University of Windsor was actually the first one to ever make me an offer like that and I gotta be honest, it was tempting. I mean, what's the harm in it, right? I can still give you an honest college list and just like put Windsor on that list so maybe you consider it and then, you know, I'm not gonna force you to go there but maybe you decide to go there and I get a little extra money. Is that so wrong? It is, it's actually very wrong and let me explain why. Score makes money when families and individuals pay us for college counseling services. If universities also were paying us then we would have a conflict of interest. I would have an incentive to recommend a specific university to you instead of looking for the best university for you. It wouldn't be the personalized service that we promise you because we would have these other financial incentives. Taking money from both families and universities is called double dipping and it's not okay when you're at a restaurant eating chicken nuggets with your friends and it's also not okay for college admissions counseling but how can you be sure that the company you're gonna work with is not double dipping? How do you know that they really want to help you? It helps to understand that there are basically two kinds of companies in this $2 billion college advising industry. There are consultants and then there are recruiting agencies. I'm gonna help you figure out how to spot the differences between the two. Consultants will let you apply to any university that you want but of course they're going to make recommendations based on your profile and your chances of getting admitted. They also expect you to do most of the work. A consultant is not going to write an essay for you and they're not supposed to do all the forms for you. You're supposed to do it and they're supposed to help. Consultants won't guarantee admission because they have no control over the admissions process and they don't have any sort of inside connection which means though that they are gonna charge higher fees because they don't get paid from universities so they need to make their money from you. Now compare that to a recruiting agency. A recruiting agency is gonna force you to work within a network of universities. Basically any university where they have an agreement to get money every time they send a student. They're also probably going to decide where you can apply because they have to balance how many students they send to different universities but recruiting agencies will do most of the work for you. If there's an essay requirement, they'll get it done. If there are forms to fill out, they'll do it for you and they'll probably guarantee admission to those universities because they have an agreement with someone inside the university. If they send a student that meets these requirements, they're in and they'll probably charge you lower fees since they're getting paid by universities. Some recruiting agencies don't charge any fees at all. I wanna make it clear that there's really nothing inherently wrong about one method or the other. Recruiters or consultants are not automatically bad. They're two different ways of approaching the same problem but I also understand why agencies can seem so appealing. I mean, if someone comes up to you and says, hey, I can guarantee admission to this university, all you gotta do is sign here, baby. That sounds like a pretty good deal. And if you just wanna get the hell out of your country like this guy and found hidden in the wheel well of a plane, the stowaway somehow went undetected and made this dangerous journey all the way from Guatemala. Then I could see why an agency might seem like the best choice for you. But there are some problems with the recruiting agency model. First of all, transparency. Recruiting agencies almost never tell you that they're getting paid by the universities that they recommend. And a lot of them present themselves as if they were consultants, trying to make it seem like they just perfectly selected a list of universities for you when in reality, all of those universities are in their network and they're getting paid by them. The consultant world isn't perfect either. There are many companies that are double dipping and they will never tell you that they're getting paid by certain universities but they always seem to find their way onto your college list. So that takes us back to our opening question. How can you figure out which companies are really there to help you? Well, look for this logo. The International Association for College Admissions Counseling brings together international counselors from universities, school counselors, and companies like ours. And I say ours because SCORE is now a member of the IACAC. The IACAC tries to promote a set of ethical codes that all of their institutions have to follow and one of the rules is that we cannot take money from universities. That is the reason why I said no to that offer over a year ago because I've intended for SCORE to be part of this organization from the very beginning and I knew that if I took that offer from Windsor it would compromise our values and make it impossible for me to be part of this organization in the future. And now we're in. And that's gonna bring a lot of benefits not only for us but also for you. Joining the IACAC is gonna definitely help this channel make more of the content you love. I mean, a lot of our most successful videos have actually been with IACAC members. For example, Pittsburgh, Purdue, and IE University, Rochester Institute of Technology was the first university to say yes to a university episode, also in the IACAC. These are great people who have shown a spirit of collaboration and a desire to work with even tiny companies like ours. Next week the IACAC is having an international conference at the University of New Mexico and I'm going. You're gonna see a video about that coming up soon on the channel and I'm gonna be reaching out to international missions counselors from a ton of universities, both in the United States and abroad, to set up visits so that the rest of this year I can churn out some of the best content you've ever seen. Well, it won't be the best you've ever seen. I mean, I'm not gonna be like Mr. Beast or Mark Rober, but you know, when it comes to colleges, I'm gonna be the best. And the reason I'm doing this and the reason I said no to, you know, $500 is because I want what's best for you. And what's best for you is working with an organization that doesn't have other interests. The only interest that should matter is you. And so whether you get help from Score or from some other company, I just hope that you get it from someone that actually wants to help you, not someone that's looking to put another 500 bucks in their pocket. Thank you for making it to the end of this video. I appreciate it. If you wanna see more about the conference that's coming up or you wanna see some of the new university episodes that we're gonna be recording soon, hit that subscribe button so that you can stay up to date with the channel. I appreciate that a lot. It really helps us out. It's a lot easier to convince a university to let me come on their campus if I got a bunch of subscribers. Thank you guys for watching. I will see you next week.