Whether you’re a freshman or a senior, it has become practically impossible to survive a day at school without hearing the word “college.”

With multiple college representatives on campus each day, a Freshman Focus and a “C Day” meeting for college discussions each week, as well as college interviews, meetings with college counselors, and college fairs popping up from time to time, the subject is virtually unescapable.

Yet, collegeconfidential.com, a Web site dedicated to college discussions, is proof that thousands of high-school students across the nation feel the need to spend even more time pondering the various aspects of the admissions journey.

In addition to being home to what is possibly the Web’s most popular college discussion forum and source for articles on college-related topics, collegeconfidential.com also offers college-counseling services.

The discussion forum allows prospective college students, parents of these students, college students themselves, and practically anyone else interested (that’s over 13 years of age) to post and reply to threads, or message boards.

Membership in the College Confidential “discussion community” is free, but isn’t required to view the forum and discussion threads, whose topics range from “Xiggi’s SAT Prep Advice” to “Interview Etiquette” to “Ivy League Deadlines.”

Before taking a two-month physics course at Washington University in St. Louis this summer, senior Nick Abramson logged onto the site and found a thread that was created exclusively for the program he was planning on attending.

“It was cool because I was able to talk to four or five of the kids that would be [in the program] before I actually got there,” Abramson said.

One especially popular forum is called “What Are My Chances?” High-school seniors, and even some juniors, anonymously post threads that list the schools they are applying to, their weighted and unweighted GPAs, their standardized test scores, their personal backgrounds, their extracurricular and athletic activities, and any awards they have received.

Then, other site members view the thread and evaluate whether or not they think the student has a chance at getting into their listed schools.

Though this may be an interesting way to assess one’s selection of colleges, it’s probably not the most accurate.

As one thread pointed out, the people that respond to the “chances” threads are often “equally uninformed high school peers” or “random people on the Internet.”

Occasionally, site members also get into disputes with each other, Abramson said.

“Some parents on the site get a little out of hand,” he said. “I’ve seen a thread [in which] a mother of a student at one school went out of her way to embarrass a student who went to a different school because of competition between the schools.”

But, according to the site, conditions like these are rare, and it firmly states in the Terms of Service that “flames, insults, and personal attacks are not tolerated.”

Alex Quinn, ’06, who used the site to learn more about the two schools he was ultimately choosing between called the site “definitely” useful.

“I visited both Berkeley and UCLA and took tours at both, but that only gives you one point of view. On the site, you can get the opinions of a lot of different people—some that like the school and some that don’t,” he said.

Though many SCDS students admit to using the discussion forums and articles on the site, so far, none have used it for college counseling.

Yet, with 13 different college-counseling services available, they are rather wide in scope. Some of them, such as the “Stats Eval”—in which a College Confidential counselor evaluates a student’s GPA,

standardized-test scores, extracurriculars, and writing samples to determine what schools would be good matches—are one-time services, meaning that a college counselor performs only a single task for the student.

Another one-time service that the site offers is the “Essay Service,” in which a counselor helps a student find a meaningful essay topic and follow through with writing the essay.

But these aren’t free—far from it! A “Stats Eval” costs $89, while the “Essay Service” is $250 per (250-500 word) essay.

Many of the other counseling services are more comprehensive, such as the “Senior Package,” which allows a senior to have their own independent college counselor online for 12 months. The site claims that the counselor is an “expert” and will respond to all e-mails and questions that the student has promptly so that “it’s just like having a counselor oncall!”

The “Senior Package” is priced at $4,000, which may seem expensive at first, but when compared to another counseling service the site offers—the “Ivy Guaranteed Admissions Program” (IGAP), which costs $15,000—no longer seems so bad.

For IGAP, collegeconfidential.com claims “that if the student isn’t admitted to his or her first-choice or second-choice school, our counseling fee will be refunded in full.”

But, of course, there is a catch: to make sure that the student’s schools are feasible, before the counseling service begins, the student must be “accepted” into the IGAP program for his or her first- and second-choice schools.

If you think that college counseling exclusively online is a little awkward, you’re not alone.

“My students (along with their parents) hire me because they believe that my personality and character are a match to their own,” independent college counselor Margie Amott said in an email. “[They] trust that my experience, knowledge and style would be instrumental in helping the student.  I think it would be difficult to decide to work with someone that you have never met.”

There is also no way of knowing for sure if the counselor is experienced or trustworthy, Amott said. This is especially true of the counselors of College Confidential because they are not members of the National Association of College Admissions Counselors, which requires its members to uphold a Statement of Principles of Good Practices (SPGP).

In fact, “guaranteed” admissions programs like IGAP are prohibited under the SPGP.

But whether collegeconfidential.com offers a legitimate form of college counseling or is just a scam, one thing’s for certain—the site is a gold mine for students who want to find out everything there is to know about college.