In my role at Elite Admissions, I often consult with prospective graduate school applicants, and the one piece of advice I give them – over and above whether they select Elite Admissions as their service provider – is to perform the same due diligence upon the admissions consultant they choose that they would upon the graduate programs they would like to attend.

The admissions consulting industry is a crowded field, with both virtuous and villainous providers vying for your business. Almost all of them purport to offer the “highest quality” editors possible; by definition, most of them cannot actually do so.

Unfortunately, most applicants overlook the fine print, and can be taken in by deceptive advertising practices. For example, in a past life, I once edited essays for one of the larger providers of essay editing services. They advertised that they only hired editors from five schools: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Stanford, and they did a very good job.

Soon, however, they were acquired by a much larger company, who decided that their editors were earning too much money. In order to increase their gross margins, they fired every single one of the editors that had created their reputation for quality, retaining only those that agreed to work for what worked out to roughly a $10 hourly wage. As you might expect, the number of graduates of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Stanford willing to work for such wages is next to zero, because talented editors can invariably find more rewarding employment. As a result, the editor in chief of this essay editing service provider admitted to me “We say that we have Harvard and Stanford editors, but you don’t have to be one anymore. You can go to Rutgers and work for [us].”

All of that is fine, and one could argue that an editor with an education from Rutgers is no less qualified than one from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, or Stanford. However, the problem arose when the company made only the slightest change in the marketing text on its website, such that it continues to imply that all of its editors come from those same five schools, when in fact nearly all of them have moved on due to the reduced compensation structure. This subtle change masks the fact that the company has essentially turned into an essay mill, one that advertises a customer satisfaction rate achieved by editors who have since moved on, leaving significantly less qualified editors in their stead.

Look, I would love to advertise that every one of Elite Admissions’ admissions consultants was a Rhodes Scholar, had a 4.0 at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Stanford, perfect SAT, GMAT, LSAT,  and MCAT scores, wrote speeches for Obama with no editing, and served as the dean of admissions at all of the top ten business, medical, and law schools in the country.

I don’t do that, and I don’t attempt to imply it through some subtle turn of phrase, either. Instead, I simply advertise the truth and stand behind it: Elite Admissions counselors attended a top 10 U.S. university, and in the case of Elite Expert or Elite Mentor services, also attended a top-10 program in the field of the applicant’s choosing and worked or volunteered in that program’s admissions process. Just as I tell my clients with respect to their essays, honesty is the best policy.