Paid services come with personalized help for students applying for college

Most high schools in Hawaii, public or private, offer free college admissions counseling, but for some parents that’s not enough. They want their college-­bound child to get more personalized guidance and maybe a leg up on the competition.

Longtime educator Seleena Harkness-Lee started Elite Prep Hawaii in 2015. She advises students on academic course planning, extracurricular activities and summer programs, test preparation, essay writing and interviews, and provides personality and career assessments and comparisons of financial aid packages.

Her rates start at $50 an hour. Many of her clients sign on for her services throughout their child’s high school years and beginning as early as the eighth grade.

With average annual costs of nearly $19,500 for a public four-year college and $41,500 at private institutions, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, Harkness-Lee said the most valuable service she offers may be simply helping students focus their interests and identifying “best fit” colleges.

“Because college is so expensive, it’s a huge investment for the family,” she said. “It’s one way to help make sure they are finishing the program in four years and go in with more focus and direction.”

Her other role, she said, is to serve as a bridge between college-bound teens and their parents.

“It’s really a high-stress time between students and parents, and a lot of the time they want to bring someone from the outside into the household,” Harkness-Lee said. “I’m an ally to the parents and an ally for the students.

That’s one reason Gayle Oura sought out Harkness-­Lee, who has been meeting with her daughter, Karlyn, once a week since her sophomore year at ‘Iolani School.

“It keeps the peace in the family. We don’t have to get on her case,” said Oura. “Sometimes it’s good to have someone from outside with different perspectives and an eye for different kinds of opportunities. As a parent you have to pick your battles, and this is one situation where things need to get done and you don’t want to battle about this.”

After two years of test prep tutoring, the Ouras’ arrangement with Harkness-­Lee “evolved into college advising by walking us through the application process and helping (Karlyn) with essays and understanding scholarships, developing a list of schools and over the summer narrowing down the list through research, advising her on essay writing and which teachers to ask for recommendations.”

Karlyn, a senior at ‘Iolani School who is interested in neuroscience, has been offered merit scholarships to attend her top choice, Chapman University in Orange, Calif.

Academics are often overlooked by parents of athletes seeking scholarships, according to Matt Wright, managing director at Accelerations Learning Center in Honolulu.

“There’s so much external pressure on young students that all of their focus goes to athletics and there’s no balance or understanding that there’s an academic side to this,” Wright said. “You need to get good scores; good scores equate to larger financial aid and more opportunities.

“This is where we bridge the gap. No one is really helping them on the academic side and the athletic side at the same time.”

This year Accelerations launched its $900 SAT Prep For Athletes course that provides three weeks of test prep followed by a series of miniworkshops on NCAA rules, how to get exposure and contact coaches, and other fine points of college recruiting.

Moanalua High School football player Micah Kim was taking the course in between spring training workouts.

“Micah’s been really good with his grades; he’s really buckled down a lot. He knew that his athletics would have to match up with his academics,” said his mother, Jill Kim. “We wanted him to get a 1350 on his SATs so that any school he was fortunate to get an offer from, he’d be able to get in.

“He’s taken two SATs and has a 1000 baseline, so it’s totally doable,” she said.

Micah made the varsity squad at Moanalua as a freshman and is aiming for a post-college career as a pediatric nurse. He’s been playing football since he was 6 years old.

“We aren’t the kind of parents who think, ‘My son is the best,’ even though others say he is a star,” Kim said. “Football is hard and it can get political, and we just had hopes. We are not rich people by any means but we knew he has a high work ethic and we wanted to give him what tools we could.

“We just hope someone will see him and what he does on the field. Still, there are so many things stacked against him to try to get these scholarships.”