The College List Is a Deliverable. The Person Is the Work

The research is the easy part to replace; the human judgment is what families pay for, and it grows more convincing, not less, when you let them watch you reach it.

There is a particular kind of nervousness that comes from showing someone something you made.

You perform, for the first time, a song you wrote, or watch your child on stage for a school play. In your heart is both pride and terror. The joy of watching your creation come to life, combined with the fear that your kid will forget their lines, or that your song will be met with polite, uncomprehending applause.

After months of building Soar, a college and career-planning assistant for IECs and school counselors, I've shown it to counselors and IECs in many demos. As much as I love showing off, there's always gnawing anxiety. Software is never finished, and people are always surprising; and sometimes, the gap between what you intended and what someone sees is wide.

But the words I've heard from counselors who've watched demos have been not just heartening, but educational. We have hundreds of students and over a dozen IECs and school counselors now using Soar, just over a month after a version went into private beta. And in the questions people ask, there are reflections about how the work of counselors is changing.

The Big Question

The biggest, most meaningful underlying question is this: "What are the risks of creating a shared workspace, where it's not just that I can see what students did, but they can see what I did too?"

Most tools counselors use are back-office tools. They help you do your work, privately, and then you bring the polished result to the family. That's the model we're used to, and it's comfortable for a reason. The research, the spreadsheets, the comparisons: that's the part of the job you do alone, and it's where a lot of us have quietly located our value. It's the expertise we don't show, or that we show only as a finished product: a summary, not a research session.

Soar works differently. It's a shared workspace. When a student does research, the counselor and the parents can see it. When the counselor conducts research on a student's behalf, the student sees that, too. Many counselors see the value immediately: the ways it can improve their process, not just make it more efficient. But underneath the words of others, you can hear some hesitation.

I understand the hesitation. But I think it has the value backward.

Research is what can be most easily replaced, and every counselor who has spoken to a student who says, "I asked ChatGPT and here's what it said," knows that. What can't be automated, what families are actually paying for, is the human judgment, and judgment is more convincing, not less, when you're willing to show how you arrived at it. Our value was always meant to rest on the human-ness of what we do, not on the research we kept to ourselves. The confidence to work in the open, to let a student watch you think, to let a parent see the reasoning behind a recommendation, isn't a threat to your value. It is your value, made visible.

Why Not Just Use ChatGPT or Claude?

A more practical version of the same worry comes up, too: "How is this different from just using ChatGPT? Or, why wouldn't I just give students access to Claude?"

A general-purpose tool will happily generate a list of colleges for anyone who asks. But students ask vague questions, not knowing what to ask, and don't always know how to follow up. And these tools don't know the student: their activities, goals, college lists, and so on. Soar incorporates reliable data sources like the Common Data Set and IPEDS, and tens of thousands of words of context that tell it how to follow up and prompt students. In one demo, that let a student and counselor compare pre-med programs across six very different schools and actually weigh the tradeoffs, rather than reading off a generic ranking.

And in another one, we discussed the kinds of careers that a degree in sociology leads to. College planning, after all, isn't just about college: students have questions about majors, careers, financial aid, and so much more.

At one webinar, we discussed the case of a student whose parents — both Aggies — wanted her to apply to Texas A&M. The student didn't like sports culture or tradition, and Soar suggested alternatives that fit, schools like UT Dallas and WPI. Recommending the school that actually fits the student, even when it isn't the school the parents are comfortable with, is about as close to the heart of this work as you can get. It takes knowledge, yes. But mostly it takes nerve: the willingness to gently tell a parent that the place they love might not be the place their kid belongs.

A student typing into ChatGPT on their own gets none of that. Soar built the recommendation around what it knows about this specific student, and it did it in a shared workspace, where the parents could see the reasoning laid out. Transparency like that is uncomfortable, but it builds trust, precisely because the family watches you arrive at the answer.

What This Means for Families

Then there's the conversation with parents: "How do I talk to families about this? How do I explain why I use AI tools? Won't some families be concerned?"

Parents who meet with counselors these days increasingly ask, "How will you prepare my child to be successful in this new age of AI, when the entire educational and career experience will be shaped by a new technology?"

Parents already know their children are using AI. Some uses are clearly wrong — doing one's homework, or outsourcing work that develops genuine skill.

Soar offers an alternative model: teaching students how to navigate these tools thoughtfully, in a context where a trusted adult can see what they're doing and guide the process.

When I tell families that part of what we do is teach students to use AI wisely, people nod. The premise makes sense to parents who have been living with this anxiety.

But Will the Dogs Eat the Dog Food?

"Will students actually use this? How do I get them to engage between sessions? What happens when they ask it something I haven't thought about?"

This was a central question when I built Soar. Traditional college planning tools are built as forms and buttons. Students look at them and feel like they're doing homework. They're accustomed to chatting, and Soar meets them there. One of our students pulled out Soar while sitting with his friends at lunch, had a college question, and just asked it. That's the use case I was building toward. That's what engagement looks like for this generation.

Writing: The Topic That Brings the Most Anxiety

"Will AI teach my students to write, or replace human writing altogether? What's the line between helping and writing? How does the Writing Hub work?"

The essay is where a counselor's value is most visible and most personal. We built Soar's Writing Hub around the belief that humans coach students to write, not AI. Since we launched, our coaches have tried to circumvent our restrictions to have Soar write a student's essays. They haven't succeeded (yet, anyway).

Our Writing Hub is centered around carefully constructed writing practice exercises, self-discovery tools, and personality and values assessments. The idea is that effective essays are built, not just drafted, through careful analysis and research.

The assignments built into Soar are structured and guided by counselors. Counselors assign work, students write and reflect, counselors respond. Soar surfaces observations about what a student has written, but those observations go only to the counselor, never to the student. The feedback a student receives is always the counselor's feedback, in the counselor's voice.

Efficiency vs. Effectiveness

Many counselors, when they think about tools, think about efficiency: "Is this all about efficiency? Is it a tool to help me do the same job, but in less time?"

Claire, one of the counselors on LifeLaunchr's team, tells a story about a student who wanted to study psychology, and then, suddenly, in one session, asked about becoming an occupational therapist. In a traditional session, this would have consumed the meeting, talking through a path the counselor didn't know cold. Instead, Soar laid out the full path in minutes, and the rest of the session was spent on the student: how she felt about what she'd just learned, whether it still excited her, what it meant for how she was thinking about her future.

The goal is to broaden and deepen our knowledge, explore unfamiliar areas in collaboration with students, and make the process *better*, not just more *time-efficient*.

The Human-ness Is the Point

The counselors who do this best have spent years learning to hold the space between what a student wants and what's actually possible, and to do it honestly. None of that got easier. What changed is that there's now less reason to do any of it behind a curtain.

In the end, when your child goes on stage and nails their lines, or when you sing the song you poured your heart into and get a standing ovation from the crowd, there's a particular kind of pleasure. It comes from the realization that hard work combined with a precise vision for success pays off. So, to all my colleagues, I say, show your work. The college list is a deliverable. The person is the work.

Want to try Soar? Send me a note, or request an invite at withsoar.ai. You can also check out our tutorial videos.