According to a recent Gartner study, just over 10 percent of the workforce is “largely satisfied” at work and nearly half are “largely dissatisfied.” Those are sobering statistics when we consider that many of us spend more than half of our waking hours working.

It is no secret that the cost of higher education in the United States is fast outpacing the population’s ability to pay. As a result, independent educational consultants (IECs) are already or will soon be working with increasing numbers of students with need, and many of those who would be considered “under resourced.”

US high school teachers and counselors are accustomed to and often even expected to write glowing letters of recommendation (LORs) to support students’ college applications. However, in the rest of the world, cultural norms about LORs vary dramatically, or don’t even exist.

Will the swell of pandemic homeschooling result in more families permanently choosing home education? Or will a temporary bump give us years of “messy” transcripts as students bounce between different forms of schooling?

For every engineering graduate program in the United States and in most other countries around the world, the Statement of Purpose (SOP) is a vital part of an application, along with letters of recommendation and a resume.

Though it was more than a decade ago, I clearly remember the day when a story on National Public Radio about independent educational consulting and membership in a group called IECA piqued my interest.