STAFFING: Every year or two, there is a mass exodus of employees. Around seventeen full-time counselors have left HS2 in northern California alone within a little over a year. This effectively hits a “reset button” on the quality of services that the company is able to offer its clients. If a company’s business model is built around a revolving door of young, underpaid employees, there will always be a low ceiling to the kind of expertise that is able to offer. This isn't fair to parents who are charged exorbitant sums of money under the pretense that these kids have specialized or insider knowledge. (Beyond what can be found by one's own internet research, anyway.) The typical incoming employee knows precious little about college admissions counseling, having no previous background or formal certifications. All of their knowledge is acquired on the job, which means that those few senior employees who manage to stick around are responsible for imparting what they know to their juniors. If HS2 is understaffed, moreover, that means they have less bandwidth to train and mentor new employees. Employees are given barebones training and then are thrust into counseling a demanding population of parents and students. Well-informed parents often know much more than a greenhorn “counselor.”
COMPENSATION: There is no additional stipend available to teachers or counselors who have completed an advanced degree in education or counseling. If HS2 wants to keep educated employees, it needs to pay them something at least approaching market value, which varies based on locale, of course. The median pay for counselors and educational consultants in 2017 was around $55,000. True that this type of job usually requires a Master’s degree and state license and thus one could justify paying the average HS2 counselor less on account of that. However, this is a national figure, not adjusted for the local cost of living, where a household joint income of $100,000 is considered “low income.” HS2 counselors aren’t even paid the national average for this kind of work. HS2 rewards only a core group of middle-managers who are willing to overlook glaring ethical problems, demonstrate a certain irrational allegiance to the company and who have no sense of work-life balance. This core group isn’t a kind of united cabal, though; they often undermine and gossip about one another behind closed doors and divide junior counselors into competing cliques. Gossip and backbiting are the scourge of Cupertino branch in particular.
HUMAN RESOURCES: The human resources at this company doesn't exist, by all accounts. They refuse to respond to employee queries in a timely, respectful fashion. Rather, HS2's approach to conflict resolution is "ignore it and it will go away." It has been my experience that unless a question or concern has to do with some sort of routine, a simple thing like payroll or sick time, emails are usually dismissed outright. Questions about things like salary, scheduling changes, reduced bonuses or benefits or employee conflicts are never answered in a timely manner, if ever at all.
