College admissions are in a disastrous state. The 2019 “Varsity Blues” scandal showed just how easy it was to buy and sell access. Lawsuits that challenged, and put an end to, race-based admission preferences illuminated how elite colleges sell seats to deep-pocketed donors and favored children of alumni. Meanwhile, most colleges have dropped requirements that students take the SAT or ACT.
Through all the self-dealing, social tension, and scandal, the cottage industry of grifters who pass for “college admissions consultants” has quietly prospered. This says much about the state of higher education. After all, there are few fields of endeavor as untroubled about enabling such unapologetic parasites. Even ventures often denounced as “inequitable,” such as medical concierge practices or the merchants of high-occupancy toll lanes, are usually selling time savings, better service, or an improved experience.
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Admissions consultants are in the business of helping their clients buy access. Period. They help manufacture a persona for students seeking to cadge a spot at the elite colleges that specialize in giving their students a leg up in the world. This is a lousy deal for pretty much everyone, except the consultants: It puts a heavy thumb on the scale for wealthy students. It leaves participating parents feeling extorted. It infuriates those other parents who see their hardworking children get the shaft. This $3 billion industry is bad for meritocracy, democracy, and parents’ pocketbooks.
The consultants themselves can be remarkably frank about what they’re doing. The big-dollar influence peddlers at Ivy Coach have explained, “Over the years, many folks have been surprised by our fees. Some have derided us. … [But] as the adage goes, ‘You get what you pay for.’”
Is there some discernible benefit from all this, other than helping clients poach seats from nonclients? Well, here’s how Command Education, one of the biggest players in the space, markets itself. Command Education’s website brags about how the firm’s “in-house design team” helped a would-be Ivy League student “create a website where she displayed her art portfolio” and launch a YouTube channel.
And it was just getting started. “Equipped with her new graphic design skills,” the site explains, “she and her [Command Education] mentor created and executed a business plan to offer her graphic design services to local artists and small businesses, redesigning logos and creating promotional and sales materials.” In short: The consultant built this student a website and a business plan so that she could fiddle with PowerPoint and then brag about her entrepreneurial streak.
Command Education cheerily reports the student wound up at Yale University.
How much does all this “assistance” cost? The Independent Educational Consultants Association reported in 2018 that the average “comprehensive” consulting package cost between $4,000 and $6,700. Those already substantial averages, though, obscure the truly eyepopping figures pocketed by the industry’s big players.
Command Education reports that its most popular package costs $85,000, with other fees ranging from a “few hundred dollars per hour” to more than $100,000 for its “all-inclusive multi-year package.” Top Tier Admissions charges $13,800 for 15 hours of “writing guidance” (Read: We’ll write your admissions essay for you). Ivy Coach reported charging “up to $1.5 million” for a five-year “full-service package” in 2018 — fees so exorbitant that it was actually kicked out of the IECA.
At these prices, companies obviously are doing more than tweaking application essays or prepping students for the SAT. They’re tailoring clients to be the kind of Stepford applicant who will pass muster with the liberal tastes that prevail in college admissions offices. Command Education boasts that it turns its clients into “award-winning nonprofit founders, community organizers, [and] political activists.”
That’s why the consultants offer a line of high-priced opportunities designed to pad a resume. San Francisco-based IvyMax offers “Global Philanthropy Leadership Programs,” which allow students to “travel to a desert in Mongolia to build sustainable-energy sources, or to Ningxia, China, to work on microfinance lending outreach.” The firm explains that the 15-day programs include time “each day for writing ‘reflections,’” designed to serve as “fodder for college essays upon returning home.”
Comprehensive packages frequently begin in eighth grade. Top Tier Admissions touts its ability to help 13- and 14-year-old middle schoolers “pursue high-impact activities, deepen their scholarly profile, prepare for standardized tests, maintain strong grades, and plan out classes to maximize course rigor.” This can all have troubling, if predictable, consequences. Former Stanford University Dean of Freshmen Julie Lythcott-Haims has observed, “I knew a large number of college students who had lived fully scheduled lives year-round as children and who, as young adults, couldn’t really tell you why they’d done most of it.” It turns out that being formfitted to the specs of college admissions staff may not be great for maturation, well-being, or sense of self.
It would be a problem even if this practice was just an affectation of the ultrawealthy, who can afford these eyepopping prices. But as selective colleges deemphasize testing and embed notions of social justice in “holistic” admissions, all while selling fast-pass access to Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and elite graduate schools, more middle- and low-income families feel pressed to play this toxic game.
And they’re not wrong to feel that way. This summer, Harvard University researchers Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman released a damning study making clear that “holistic” admissions practices at selective colleges actually amplify the massive advantage enjoyed by students from the wealthiest families. The more opaque the admissions process, the more it’s driven by networks, resume padding, and social capital. And this is what the admissions grifters are selling.
Chetty et al. found that outliers such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which emphasizes test results more than essays and interviews, were more likely to enroll a socioeconomically diverse student body. But fewer and fewer four-year colleges put a lot of weight on those kinds of arm’s-length measures. More and more emphasize the kinds of things that are easy for students to manipulate. Indeed, more than half of four-year college students report lying on their college application, with 39% misrepresenting their race or ethnicity and 34% writing untrue stories in their admissions essays.
The result is fear and confusion among collegegoers and their parents, emotions on which the admissions consultants feed. A few years back, the New York Times depicted the experience of immigrants who’d spent $15,000 on college consultants they’d found “advertised in Chinese-language magazines and newspapers, offering an Ivy League entry to immigrant parents.” The fee covered a three-day workshop and a consultant who “recommended which extracurriculars to pursue and which to discard to build a personal narrative for his applications.” That “personal narrative” looms so large because there are shibboleths required by elite colleges and parents can be desperate to find out what they are.
Educational consulting in the United States is a burgeoning industry, with 400% growth between 2005 and 2019. By 2019, there were more than 8,000 people in the college admissions counseling industry. While hard numbers are scarce, a 2006 report by Lipman Hearne found that 26% of students who scored 1150 or above on the SAT reported using an admissions counselor. The IECA commented that the results showed a rate about triple that which had been generally assumed. Ivy Coach asserted that the study “grossly underreported the percentage of high-achieving students using private college counselors.” And the racket has grown, by leaps and bounds, since 2006.
Are colleges troubled by their role in enabling and encouraging all this? After all, in 2020, admissions leaders from over 360 American universities airily proclaimed their “commitment to equity and to encourag[ing] in students self-care, balance, meaningful learning, and care for others.” After the Varsity Blues admissions scandal, in which it turned out that colleges were cheerfully engaging in or turning a blind eye to corrupt dealings, over 140 college admissions deans insisted they weren’t really looking for students who “started a new project or conducted service in a far-away country” and that they “value students who are authentic and honest in their applications.”
Experience and admissions data suggest that college officialdom doesn’t mean any of this. In the aftermath of the FBI’s Varsity Blues sting, college presidents blamed American decadence for the corruption, not their own personnel and practices. And especially following the more recent striking down of race-based preferences by the Supreme Court, college officials have signaled that they intend to put even more weight on “impressive-looking” activities and narratives that feature tales of deprivation and oppression, giving applicants ever more incentive to be inauthentic and dishonest.
Given the opportunity to design application processes that are less opaque, secretive, and susceptible to manipulation, colleges have consistently opted to push the very behaviors that enable the consultants to flourish. Consider that three of the five experts touted on the “Ivy Coach Leadership” webpage were formerly admissions counselors at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and Dartmouth College. Top Tier Admissions founder Michelle Hernandez previously worked as an admissions counselor also at Dartmouth.
These grifters have helped craft selective admissions systems that are stuffed full of paeans to “equity” but rigged to reward affluent, connected applicants. Then, after they tire of selling seats to wealthy donors, they go work for firms where they can sell their insider “expertise” at a hefty price. They make those Beltway bandits who do the government-to-lobbyist shuffle look like pillars of integrity.
And, of course, the college consultant class feeds on an elite college admissions racket that is increasingly disconnected from any straightforward conception of academic merit and shaped by social engineers with particular agendas. If colleges instead had clear, transparent admissions requirements, there would still be a market for tutors and test coaches, who are at least glancingly interested in academics and learning, but far less opportunity for influence peddling.
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Yet the college consulting racket is not a matter of a few thousand bad actors preying on hapless, defenseless colleges. Rather, it’s just another iteration of the same self-dealing that characterizes so much of elite higher education. As selective colleges auction admissions slots to deep-pocketed donors, reserve seats for the children of connected alumni, and favor those who’ve learned to mouth politically correct sentiments, they’ve corroded the kind of merit-based admissions process that might keep the influence peddlers at bay. Confronted with misconduct, college leaders have denied responsibility and vaguely blamed America’s innate sins. While we’ve tended in recent years to focus on the way these pathologies play out on campus, it’s crucial that we not forget the remora that feed on the doorways into and out of the college system.
It may not make sense to regulate this unsavory racket, but surely colleges concerned about either merit or “equity” should wish to do all they can to downsize the demand for it. And all of us, left, right, and center, should see the value in shaming the members of this anti-democratic, anti-meritocratic cabal.
Frederick M. Hess is the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Greg Fournier is a research assistant at AEI.
