• Recently, a prospective client said to Mark, “Why are you charging less than half of the other college coach we are considering, who is asking for over $7,000?” Last year, a client said to me, “I want to refer you to a lot of people I know in New York City, but you have to raise your prices or people are not going to think you are any good.” Finally, one of our own test prep partners has encouraged us to increase our prices so people will think that we are good at what we do.
  • We are aware of the fact that the average college coach with 10+ years of experience charges $224/hour, and the average yearly fee for college coaches with 10+ years of experience is $5,508 according to a 2022 College Planning Pro survey. These college coaches usually have much less experience than Mark Stucker. Dr. Lisa Rouff’s almost three decades of professional counseling are priceless. It is easy for a family to justify this expense because it is not hard at all for us to save families thousands and even tens of thousands by providing scholarship coaching. This saved money has to be multiplied by four to reflect the savings for all four years. The question that you may be asking is, why are we charging so much less than others? The reason is simple: we passionately care about access, and we don’t want to only help people from one income bracket. We love helping families of all incomes, including several from modest incomes who are able to utilize our services with a payment plan. School Match 4U only hires college counselors who are extremely passionate about what colleges refer to as “DEI” or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Every week we produce a college admissions podcast, Your College-Bound Kid, to help people for free. Dr. Lisa Rouff and Mark invest over 20 hours per week for free to produce this podcast so students of all incomes can get free quality information. Mark wrote the book 171 Answers to help people who need this information but who can’t afford to hire any college coach. Our clients are almost equally divided between White, Black, Asian, and Latinx. They come from every region in the country. We are currently working with students in 26 states. They work on dairy farms, and they are CEOs. There are some that make under $60,000, and there are some that make over a million dollars, with the majority being closer to 60K than seven figures. While we need money to pay our bills, we don’t primarily counsel for the money. We do this to help people. We LOVE what we do, and we love the variety of who we can serve. We are probably losing business because someone thinks that if we were any good, we would charge at least the national averages for our services. This may be true, but if someone doesn’t respect the fact that we love helping people from a variety of incomes, and we do not want cost to be a barrier for people being able to use our college coaching services, then they probably are not a good match for our philosophy and our worldview. We also want to acknowledge that we are very sensitive to all of the expenses that families have with the college process. Below are just some of the expenses that you may incur just for college; this is in addition to all of your other numerous bills:
    1. SAT, ACT fees
    2. AP exam fees or IB exam fees
    3. Test prep fees
    4. Academic tutoring fees for a subject your student may need extra help with
    5. College application fees
    6. CSS Profile fees
    7. Travel fees to visit colleges, including airfare, lodging, car rental/Uber, and meals
    8. AAU sports fees
    9. Visual and performing arts fees
    10. Private school tuition
    11. Senior year fees such as proms, graduation photos, rings, etc.
  • The point is we do NOT believe that quality college coaching should cost you another mortgage, especially when you already are incurring so many other fees. If you have additional questions about our pricing philosophy, we certainly welcome a conversation so we can answer your specific questions.