“It was just a lot of criticism that was not helpful,” he said.
Professor Redding of Harvard said she worried that the attention on the case this week would cast a negative light on the entire college consulting industry, which, she added, had taken strides in recent years to police itself.
“There are lots of good actors here who get overshadowed in a case like this,” she said.
The education consultants industry has tens of thousands of practitioners, serving both students and schools, according to the research group IBISWorld, which estimated the sector’s annual revenue in 2018 at $1.9 billion.
Stefanie Niles, president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, said the allegations were an “extreme response to the commodification of the college admission process.”
The growth of private consulting has been driven, in part, by a shortage of guidance counselors in public schools. During the 2015 to 2016 school year, each public school counselor was responsible for an average of 470 students, according to the group.
There is a wide range of prices in the field. In Boca Raton, Fla., Naomi Steinberg runs a “super premium boutique” where the yearslong college planning process often starts in ninth grade and can end up costing families $10,000 to $15,000.
“You’re trying to make sense of a system that can’t be made sense of,” she said.
Mr. Mercer, the Santa Monica consultant, works within the mainstream of the field: He charges between $300 and $7,000, depending on a student’s needs and how early in the process he is hired. He previously worked in the admissions office at the University of Southern California, and said he was shocked that the school was included in the federal indictment.
While the extreme behavior detailed by federal prosecutors this week could breed concern among families who intend to play by the rules, Mr. Mercer says his message to clients will remain the same: that the name brand of a college is far less important than finding a good fit for a student.
Still, he acknowledged, “Such outrageous amounts of money and the persons involved and the schemes? It isn’t just a little blip. It’s embarrassing to those of us in the field.”
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