Why IECs Are Still Important

I have been thinking about this all day. Between a few posts in FB groups and a steady stream of texts and phone calls from fellow IECs today, it is clear that many are worried. So I want to take a minute and share a few thoughts.

I have spent close to thirty years in education. Before I became an independent educational consultant, I spent many of those years in the high school classroom. I’ve been an IEC now for twelve years and counting. In all those years, I have watched cycles ebb and flow, come and go, and come back around again, in admissions, in enrollment, in testing, in pedagogy, in what families are anxious about this particular Tuesday. If there is one thing experience has taught me, it is that the ground is always a little less solid than it looks, and a lot more solid than the loudest voices claim.

Lately, my inbox, my feeds, and my group chats have been humming with the same worry. An article here. A LinkedIn post there. A prediction that enrollment is falling off a cliff, that AI is coming for our jobs, that the whole landscape is shifting under our feet. I recognize the feeling in the room. It is the same feeling we see on the faces of the families who walk into our offices (or into our Zoom call) for the first time. A quiet, persistent panic that somebody, somewhere, knows something they don’t.

So I want to say to my fellow independent educational consultants what we so often say to our students and families: take a breath, and check your sources.

We teach better habits than this

Every one of us has sat across from a student who arrived convinced of something they read in a Reddit thread, a TikTok video, or a Facebook group with 40,000 anxious parents and no moderator. We patiently walk them back to the actual data. We show them where trustworthy information lives. We explain the difference between a holistic review and a headline. We teach them that a single anecdote is not a trend.

If we expect that of a sixteen-year-old, we have to expect it of ourselves. The same principles apply when the scary article is about us.

Business fluctuates. I’ve watched it ebb and flow for thirty years.

In this profession, and in the teaching years before it, I have watched the market tilt in every direction. Test-optional became test-blind became test-required-again. Essay trends swung from vulnerable personal narratives to tightly argued intellectual pieces and back again. The “enrollment cliff” has been predicted so many times that, if we are honest, it is less a cliff and more a series of rolling hills we have been walking across for years.

Enrollment shifts. Demographics shift. Admit rates rise and fall. Universities open programs and close them. A school that was unreachable five years ago becomes attainable, and a school that was a "safety" becomes a "reach". None of this is new. None of it means the work we do has stopped mattering.

And on a smaller scale, your caseload this year may be lower than last year for any number of perfectly ordinary reasons. A younger sibling is not in your referral pipeline. A local high school class that was just smaller than the one before. A family that used to start early is now starting later. An economy that has households cautious about one more line-item expense. Word of mouth that takes a season or two to catch up. A handful of families who moved out of the area. These are the boring truths of running a small business. None of them means the ceiling is caving in, and none of them is a reason to rebuild your practice from the ground up.

AI is a tool, not a replacement

Yes, AI can generate a draft essay in thirty seconds. It can also list the average GPA of university admits, summarize a financial aid policy, and rearrange a resume. I use AI in my own practice, and I suspect many of you do too. It is a genuinely useful tool.

But here is what AI cannot do. It cannot tell when a student saying “I’m really excited about this school” actually means her mom is really excited about it. It cannot hear the quiet kid who won’t list his activities because he doesn’t think what he does counts, and it cannot ask the one question that unlocks an entire side of him. It cannot gently tell a dad the school he loves is wrong for his daughter and have him still be at the table on Monday. It cannot walk a family through the honest cost conversation, not the sticker price, but the monthly reality of it.

It cannot read a room!

Back to basics: what we do, what colleges want, and why we are the bridge

Let’s put this where it belongs, at the center of the conversation.

Colleges are not looking for perfectly polished applications. They are looking for fit. They are looking for students who will thrive on their campus, contribute to the community, graduate, and, yes, enroll if admitted. They are looking for authenticity (the thing AI tends to sand right out of an essay) and for a coherent story about how this particular student belongs at this particular place.

Families come to us with something different. They come with love, with hope, with worry about money, with a child they can’t always see clearly because they are standing too close. They come with TikTok in their head and a grandparent’s expectation on their shoulders. They come with a whole life’s worth of context that no algorithm and no marketing funnel will ever see.

What we do is bridge those two worlds. And we do it in three ways at once.

We earn trust. A family will tell us the real number they can afford when they won’t say it out loud anywhere else. A student will admit what she actually wants when she’s given permission to disagree with her parents in the room. An admissions officer will take our call because we have sent them prepared, truthful students for years.
Trust is not a marketing asset. It is built, one family at a time, over time.

We translate. We speak family, and we speak admissions, and we know when the same sentence means two different things in those two rooms. “This is our dream school” does not mean the same thing to a seventeen-year-old as it does to an admissions reader, and part of our job is to help both sides hear each other.

And we use judgment. Real, seasoned, human judgment. We know when a "reach" is worth the heartbreak. We know when a "safety" is truly probable. We know when to push a student toward a bigger application and when to tell them to take the afternoon off. We know when to slow a family down and when to move one forward. That judgment is the product of years of watching students cross finish lines, and of watching the ones who didn’t and learning from them, too.

AI does not do this. A marketing funnel does not do this. A scary LinkedIn post does not do this. We do this.

Make decisions from your own desk, not someone else’s headline

If you are feeling the pull to make a major change right now (to slash your fees, pivot your model, shut down a service, or abandon a niche), please pause before you do.

You wouldn’t cash out your savings the first time someone on the news said the market was about to crash. You’d look at what you actually have, what you’re saving for, how long you’ve got to get there, and consult with your financial advisor. You’re in this for the long haul, not for one scary headline.

An educational consulting practice is a long-horizon business. One anxious season is not a signal to liquidate. Look at your own inquiries, your own contracts, your own retention, your own referrals. Look at what your current families are telling you they need. That is your data. A stranger’s viral post is not.

If you want real data about our industry, go to our industry

When you do want to check the health of our profession, go to the people actually doing it. IECA, HECA, and NACAC each publish surveys, benchmarks, and professional data about how independent educational consultants and admissions professionals are actually doing. Talk to colleagues you have known for years. Listen to the practitioners who have walked students across the finish line more than once.

That is where ground truth lives for our industry. Not in a viral post.

Let’s not feed it

Every time we share the scary article without context, every time we repost the dire prediction, every time we add a breathless caption about how “everything is changing,” we are doing the opposite of what we ask of our students. We are feeding the frenzy. We are making it harder, not easier, for the families who rely on us to feel steady.

Our students need us to be the calm, informed adult in the room. So do our colleagues. So do you!

The work is still the work

The mission has not changed. Helping a young person find a place where they will be challenged, supported, and seen is as valuable today as it was the day any of us started doing this work. The families who need us still need us. The ones who didn’t understand our value before will not suddenly understand it because of a trend piece, and the ones who do understand it are not going anywhere.

So let’s take our own advice. Let’s consult the sources we would trust if a student brought them to us. Let’s lean on data instead of vibes. Let’s talk to each other more and doom-scroll less. And let’s remember that the quiet, careful, relational work we do is exactly what this moment calls for.

The noise will pass. It always does.
The work we do matters, and that is why IECs are important!

~Nagla