Finding a parking spot in the Back Bay took forever, and we were already late due to an impromptu dash to CVS to grab the notorious #2 pencils.
But my son and I made it on time. Once he was sequestered in his windowless SSAT testing room, where initials of earlier victims had been carved in the desk drawer, I sunk into the couch in the waiting room. The only reading material was the current Independent School Magazine, Fall 2008 edition.
I heard footsteps coming out of another office, and caught a whiff of smoke.
“We should talk about you and Sarah taking over as Michael and I wind down,” came a raspy, contralto voice.
It was Faith Howland, whose educational consultancy work had intersected with ours during our 20+ years at independent schools. Those of us in the school world considered her a legend – a force of nature who tirelessly advocated on behalf of her students. Seeing 617-536-4319 on the caller ID signaled that you better pick up. We all viewed Howland & Spence as the pinnacle of the educational consultancy world, the polestar for students seeking the right educational fit.
Faith had joined Bob Parsons around 20 years after he founded the original educational consultancy in the country, in 1955, two doors down from the Beacon Street office where I had rushed for the fateful SSAT. It was in that same office where, in 1976, Parsons and Howland – the firm’s original name – summoned a small group to create the Independent Educational Consultants Association. The industry’s overseer, the IECA now consists of 2,800 educational consultants who follow this principal of Good Practice, which echoes our firm’s ethos: Understand each student’s special strengths, values, and needs, while striving to include all family members in the educational planning process
Though Sarah and I dearly miss mentoring students in the classrooms and dormitories and on the playing fields, we’re grateful we took the plunge 16 years ago to continue the Howland & Spence legacy. “Michael” was the “Spence” in the company name: he brought his “college knowledge” to the practice in 1983, often picking up students Faith had placed in prep school to guide them to the right university fit. And she passed along to Michael extraordinarily detailed profiles of her former students. During one of our transition meetings in 2008, Faith rattled off from memory the profiles of two students she had sent to St. George’s in the late 70s, where Sarah and I met. She described our former classmates exactly as we nostalgically remembered them.
Indeed, since 2009 – when we updated the name to Howland, Spence & McMillan – we’ve been able to deepen both the school and college practices, and expand our reach more broadly to serve students of all ages and profiles. We’ve grown the practice from three consultants to 18, and formalized the educational values left to us by Parsons, Howland and Spence, into a set of Core Values that serves as our North Star. Our commitment to Courageously Advocate for the Whole Child has led us to become the industry leader in the field, and find the right school and colleges, graduate and therapeutic programs for students from over 35 states and 65 countries in the past 16 years.
Sarah and I planned our growth incrementally. In 2010, we added graduate school planning, since many students would return after school and college.
That same year, Sarah leveraged her background as an educational psychologist to work with an even greater range of learning differences, and to add a critical new area of educational planning: therapeutic boarding schools and wilderness programs for the increasing number of students suffering from anxiety and depression and other behavioral issues.
In 2011, we added an expert in athletic recruiting, a two-time All American and National Champion who still anchors our college practice, Kim Chorosiewski.
Between 2012 and 2018, we greatly expanded our international reach. After speaking to schools in Canada and Bermuda, I was invited to give talks on American schools and colleges at international schools across Europe, as well as in South America and the Middle East. Our international students relished the idea of attending boarding schools with stunning facilities where teachers also served as coaches and dorm parents, and going to colleges where they could focus on more than one subject at once and enjoy the residential and extracurricular programs.
After several years of research, we launched a groundbreaking platform in 2020: our trademarked WISE Method scaffolds our best practices by breaking down the complex school and college process into manageable steps, all highlighted in a boldly colored, state-of-the art online portal called the Owl’s Nest. By following a developmentally sequenced process, the WISE Method both fosters healthy childhood and adolescent growth and simplifies the admissions labyrinth for our families.
Finally, in 2021, we began to crisscross campuses in Europe to more thoroughly research English-speaking university options beyond the borders of the US. For Americans, they could try a new culture and save some money. For our European and Middle Eastern families, they could stay closer to home and still benefit from the American model, replete with vibrant residential life and a range of multidisciplinary studies. We now have consultants in France and Italy, and often work with families looking simultaneously at the US, Canada, the UK, and Europe for both universities and boarding schools.
Sure, we’ve sent dozens to the Ivy League, and the top prep schools, but we are most proud of the incredible range of our students’ matriculation, including institutions that specialize in learning differences, and the arts, as well as international schools and service academies. This tailored matching can be attributed to a passionate reliance on another of our Core Values: Wisely Guide Students Towards the Best Fit. This month we are speaking to over 104 independent schools on behalf of our students, and in the past five years our college applicants have been accepted at over 400 different institutions.
Ultimately, it’s the consultants who work the magic, so we are grateful for the remarkably seasoned educators who joined us along the way. A final Core Value espoused by our group calls for all of us to Proactively Embrace Industry Leading Practices. We are proud to follow up in the footsteps of Faith and Michael, who led IECA, as we have served on Boards of IECA, The Association of Boarding Schools (TABS), the SSAT Enrollment Management Association (EMA), and the Small Boarding School Association (SBSA). Each year we lead presentations with admissions professionals at national educational conferences, and we constantly share our insights about industry trends through blogs and social media postings. We’ve also begun what we hope will be an enduring commitment to community service by offering pro bono consulting to military families, and to the amazing underrepresented students at Boston’s Beacon Academy, whose repeat 8th graders go to become leaders at independent school then college.
Though the admissions landscape has undergone seismic shifts these past two decades, we still honor our company’s 70 year history in many ways. Though Faith Howland, sadly, passed away in 2021, her original owl logo has lived on. We’ve colorized, updated and named it, and Bubo (Latin for owl), now soars in a number of different outfits – as Odysseus for our international newsletter, as a scoop journalist for our school mailings. And Michael Spence’s passion for golf manifests in our attendance at the annual spring admissions conference – The Risley Proctor Round Table – he helped found 36 years ago, an event that revolves around a round of golf on the Cape.
And as we look ahead, Sarah and I are committed to the same fundamental value that has guided the company since its formation in 1955, and since we started working together as educators in 1987, 10 years after we met at boarding school: to provide the North Star of educational excellence to as many children as possible.
