What's your success rate?

​I was recently chatting with a parent whose child had gone through the college application process a few years ago. He was, like many people, fascinated by the constant evolution of college admissions. He was also somewhat familiar with the work that I do after hearing of a very popular independent counselor in his area. “Everyone wants to work with her because she has the highest success rate,” he said. That’s a very normal way to evaluate an athlete, or a lawyer; how often do they make the shot, or win their case? But applying to college is a lot more abstract. I started thinking about my own “success rate.”
 
This question doesn’t come up that often, but when it does, my immediate thought is, “What do you mean by success?” One way to define success is getting into a highly selective school, like the Ivies. But what about students who don’t apply to any of those schools, or apply and, like 90% of the students who apply, aren’t accepted. Does that make them, and their counselors, unsuccessful? 
 
In California, success is often defined as getting into a UC school, specifically Berkeley or UCLA. But the nine undergraduate schools in the UC system are remarkably similar in terms of size, location, and campus culture. So students looking for a different kind of college experience might decide that the UC system is not a good fit for them. Does that make those students, and their counselors, unsuccessful?
 
The only universal definition I have been able to reach for success in college admissions is: to get accepted to a school you can afford, where you can pursue your academic interests, participate in or implement activities that interest you, and leave college prepared to do whatever it is you want to do next. That definition holds true for engineering, poetry, and math majors, for A, B, and C students, for future CEOs, Fulbright scholars, and nurses. So when someone asks me, “What’s your success rate?” I want to tell them, “100%,” because every single one of my students has been accepted to a school they loved, where they could thrive and excel.