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Last week I visited my 77-year-old mother who lives in Tiny, Ontario, on the beautiful shore of Georgian Bay. She was excited to tell me about the successful anniversary party she helped organize for the local senior center where she takes line dancing lessons. In the years since she moved from Toronto to Tiny, the senior center has become increasingly central to her social life. All her close friends are members, participating in activities like yoga, quilting, euchre, and line dancing to keep minds and bodies sharp. Then she recounted how nearby Casino Rama was donating a portion of winnings to select charities, including the senior center, but in return required greeters at the door. So one day last month, she put on her senior center shirt and worked a greeting shift.
I was a bit surprised that my mom – a retired community college professor – was working as a greeter at Casino Rama. But that wasn’t the most remarkable part. “You also have to see what I was taught to do with my name tag,” she said. She brought out the shirt, which read “Georgian Shores Swinging Seniors,” and showed me how she placed the magnetic name tag right over “Swinging.” “My friend worked a shift the week before and was propositioned by a man looking to swing,” she explained.
Apparently before there was a center, there was a club. And at the time of its formation, swing dancing was all the rage, hence Georgian Shores Swinging Seniors. But as should be clear from the list of current activities, my mom’s senior center may be the least prurient organization from Wasaga Beach to Penetanguishene.
It turns out that the senior center recently refreshed its web site. The member who took charge of the neglected site – www.georgianshoresswingingseniors.ca – reported that nearly all the hundreds of submitted inquiries were from individuals and couples seeking to swing. With this vital information, a special meeting of the board was called, and a name change to Georgian Shores Seniors Club passed with unanimous consent. Although the brand new site looks terrific, vestiges of swinging seniors remain in social media, Google Maps, and the swinging shirt my mom will continue to wear to Casino Rama.
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Marketing a line dancing and euchre club as swinging is one way to attract depraved interest. Another is to claim a secret path for gaining admission to elite colleges. That’s what admissions consultants like Crimson Education do, and not inadvertently. Crimson boasts that it helps “students gain admission to the Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and other top colleges at a rate that is 5x higher than the general applicant rate.” The firm posts a whirling counter showing 992 offers to Ivy League universities and 293 offers to Oxford and Cambridge, as well as a banner congratulating “Crimson’s Class of 2028, who have already received more than 289 acceptances to the Ivy League.” (More than 289? So 290? 291?) Lucky for Crimson that not even Harvard can trademark a color.
Christopher Rim of admissions consultant Command Education generates client interest through a weekly Forbes column on subjects as varied and search-engine-optimized as 3 Things To Consider When Hiring An Ivy League College Consultant, Five Ways to Maximize Your Academic Summer Program For Ivy League Admissions, and The Personal Statement Topics Ivy League Hopefuls Should Avoid. This last column sagely counsels high schoolers to avoid writing cliché essays like the trauma dump, the pandemic sob story, and the travelogue. That’s common sense advice, although there may be some value to paying for it in a process where emotions reign and judgment can be as spotty as putting “swinging” into the name of a Canadian seniors club.
Crimson and Command are just two of thousands of admissions consulting firms – some large and international, most sole proprietors – marketing prestige to parents with means and touting the ability to help students find what makes them unique, wrap it, and tie it up in a bow for Bowdoin. It’s an industry as American as they come: helping students climb the socioeconomic ladder for profit. One industry participant estimates that over 50% of applicants to highly selective schools hire consultants. And because parents who hire consultants are also keenly attuned to rankings, several clever marketers have put out rankings of admissions consultants, which could be a sign of the apocalypse.
What do these firms do? Services seem to fall into four buckets:
1) Guidance and planning: helping select high school courses, assembling lists of college targets (safety, target, reach, extreme reach), and tricks to signal real interest to get around colleges playing at yield protection
2) Shaping: advising on – or matching to – extracurricular activities to “shape” applicant
3) Standardized test tutoring
4) Writing personal statement and essays
Costs vary wildly. Some firms charge $5-10K for essays, others are $100K+ with meetings beginning in ninth grade. As I learned from a June issue of the New York Times Magazine, one of the latter is a former classmate of mind who seems to sit near the industry’s apex. Benjamin Bolger has attended all eight Ivy League schools, plus Stanford, Georgetown, Brandeis, Boston College, Skidmore, William and Mary, Ithaca, Michigan, Georgia, Oxford, Cambridge, and a few more. With 14 graduate degrees, Bolger is the most credentialed American under age 50. To fund his burgeoning collection, Bolger began working as adjunct faculty but had trouble making ends meet until – like Superman in the Fortress of Solitude or perhaps, given the amount of debt, like Batman watching his parents get killed – he grasped his true superpower: getting admitted to elite universities. And that’s the origin story of Dr. Benjamin Bolger Consulting. The self-titled “world’s leading expert in admissions,” and “world’s best education and admissions consultant” charges six figures and makes millions a year.
Still, Bolger isn’t the very top of the market. That would be Ivy Coach, charging $1.5M for a five-year package, touting early acceptance rates north of 90% for Harvard, Stanford, and Penn, and maintaining that since all early applicants were admitted to Dartmouth for 14 years in a row “they don’t call us The Dartmouth Whisperer for nothing” (although I’m pretty sure no one outside of Ivy Coach ever called them “the Dartmouth Whisperer”). Perhaps the only thing worse than colleges overcharging for 4+ years is college counselors overcharging for 4+ years, although given the socioeconomic status of Ivy Coach’s clients, it’s probably a victimless crime.
Like a virus, admissions consulting appears to be mutating into new forms. Taking advantage of the lesson learned by Bolger concerning the compensation of young, well-credentialed academics, programs like Lumiere Education and Eureka connect college applicants with Ph.D students and junior faculty at elite universities “to undertake high-quality, personalized research projects.” And while Eureka posts a disclaimer not guaranteeing reference letters from faculty – “it is at the faculty’s discretion whether to provide student reference letters” – faculty (and families) understand that providing letters that can be submitted with college applications is a requirement for more work.
Apparently the most elite consultants make students “apply,” which begs the question, is there a market for consultants to help students get accepted by the most elite consultants?
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Unlike the guy who approached my mom’s friend at Casino Rama, I don’t have any questions about swinging seniors. But I have two about admissions consultants. First, how effective are they? Second, how do we stop them?
Companies like Crimson which compare admissions success to the “general applicant rate” expect families to overlook the fact that paying clients are quite different in terms of wealth and parenting (helicopter or snowplow). Self-selection may go a long way to explaining any admissions advantage. I also question whether application readers can’t see through much of the shaping and packaging effected by consultancies and research mills. It’s hard to mass-produce authenticity. As repeat players, admissions offices should be well versed in distinguishing between authentic passion and branding.
But I’m more concerned about the human and social toll. Coaching a 14- or 15-year-old to identify what Ivy Coach calls “a singular hook” is stressful and likely developmentally detrimental, as is sending the message that figuring out who you are requires a service provider. As the “help” provided on essays (producing, per New York Times Magazine, “stories so compelling that they stand out from the many other compelling stories of the teenagers clamoring for admission”) includes idea generation, structuring, and line editing, students may infer it’s acceptable to pass off collaborative work product (or someone else’s work) as their own. And to the extent admissions consultants like Ivy Coach or Dr. Benjamin Bolger are effective, they’re fueling inequality.
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There’s no point blaming parents with Ivy League dreams for wanting to pay for help. But I don’t understand why colleges put up with it. Why don’t they require students to disclose whether they’ve paid an admissions consultant or any service provider to help with their applications? An honor code of sorts, with admission offers subject to rescission for misrepresentation. Disclosure could be broad, covering SAT and ACT tutoring. Or it could be limited to the personal statement. I’d imagine most admissions officers would find any disclosure of paid assistance valuable in assessing authenticity.
One objection is that students attending well-resourced private and public schools already benefit from college counselors with caseloads as low as 30. At the typical high school, the ratio is closer to 1,000: 1, leaving little to no opportunity for meaningful counseling, let alone essay line edits. Another is that parents sending their children to wealthy schools tend to be better educated and are already active participants at all stages of the process.
But while top colleges will never succeed in establishing a level playing field for admissions, in the spirit of not letting the best be the enemy of the good, demanding disclosure could make it less uneven. That and directing application fees to fund nonprofit college counseling organizations and making sure applicants are aware of such services. Both would help take some of the money out of applying to college and make the case to disillusioned Americans that college is part of the solution. Because unlike swinging, the problem of inequality in elite college admissions isn’t something that can be covered up with a name tag.