As a lifelong Bay Area resident, I have grown up equally daunted and thrilled by the prospect of attending an elite college. In kindergarten, I made one of my closest friends by ambitiously proclaiming that we would go to Harvard together. Although I lost a bit of my audacity in high school, gaining admission to a prestigious university remained both a goal and—to a greater extent—an expectation for me. In my freshman year, like many other Palo Alto families with the means to do so, my family decided to hire a private college counselor to guide me through the college admissions process.

In many ways, a private college counselor is an undeniable boon to a student’s development as a scholar and leader. Under my counselor’s guidance, I joined extracurricular activities, entered competitions and explored academic opportunities that I never would have known existed otherwise. Many of my favorite high school memories—such as the time when I flew to Washington, D.C., for a Model United Nations conference or when I explored a rare collection of books with a Stanford University professor—are from experiences I only took part in because of my counselor’s advice. These activities shaped me into a more confident public speaker, effective student and assertive leader.

At the same time, private counselors are expensive. Very few families can afford to pay tens of thousands of dollars each year on top of the already steep price of college tuition. As a freshman, I could not fully comprehend just how much my family was willing and able to spend on my education. My ignorance then—my ability not to have to worry about finances—was a privilege. Over the years, I’ve learned that private counselors and all the benefits they bestow serve only those with the greatest opportunities already at their fingertips: Ironically, the same people who likely have the least need to advance socioeconomically through a college degree. I have never found myself, my family or my private counselor to be intentionally insidious, but we all perpetuate an insidious system: Private college counselors help those at the top of the socioeconomic ladder stay at the top.

That is not to say that having a private counselor or living in a prosperous neighborhood are the only contributing factors to an elite college acceptance. I took full advantage of my opportunities by studying hard and dedicating myself to activities that interested me, but my family’s financial situation and private college counselor made many of those opportunities possible for me in the first place. Private counselors are not automatic tickets of admission into a top college, but they certainly do help.

Due to their status as evident signs of wealth and privilege, private college counselors have become an open secret on campus. I’ve seen many students around me hire private counselors but rarely discuss them. If the topic ever does come up, it is often accompanied by coyness, or even shame. Talking about private counselors also makes people uncomfortable—perhaps because confronting privilege creates discomfort. Still, it is necessary to admit that having a private counselor has given me an advantage in the college admissions process, one that I earned through no merit or achievement of my own. I will not claim that I have been admitted into college solely by virtue of my own hard work when I have had a well-resourced school to prepare me, a supportive, financially stable family to cheer me on and a costly private counselor to guide me the entire time. Shame and secrecy are counterproductive: Refusing to acknowledge that private counselors undermine true meritocracy only further perpetuates the cycle of privilege in affluent, achievement-oriented communities.

It is unlikely that ambitious, wealthy families in places such as Palo Alto will ever stop hiring private college counselors as long as elite college admissions remain the competitive processes they are today. Indeed, provided that they are giving legitimate, honest guidance, most private counselors offer valuable services that prepare their students not just for college admissions but for life. It would be willfully reductive to paint families’ hiring of private counselors as innately unethical simply because the practice overwhelmingly benefits the rich. Private college counselors are not the root cause of inequality; rather, they perpetuate inequality in a system that purports to be meritocratic but still gives students a head start based on their family’s income. Simply telling families to stop consulting private counselors would be as ineffective in addressing the roots of this inequity as advising wealthier students to move school districts or score lower on the SAT. Instead, students with private counselors must begin by having more open conversations about their privilege—perhaps by sharing advice from their counselors with peers to resist the mentality of college admissions as a zero-sum game—researching the implications of this privilege and lobbying for change through petitions and other methods of systemic action. Only then can we ensure a fair college admissions system that benefits all.