Fascinating article from the WSJ re the methods of an "elite" college counseling firm

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Perhaps I'm slow (because I only attended a state school after all!), but I would love to understand the parents' thought process here.

Is the expectation that the student will transform from someone who requires 23 tutors and curated hobbies into a young adult who can function independently? Or how is that supposed to work out? Do they not think beyond the Ivy admission?

Parents doing that simply do not think that way. They will do anything to get their kid to HYM and consider them a failure if they don't. They typically have so much money they will continue to pay to prop their kid up. Rather sad way to live IMO

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Interesting quotes from the article:

This year, Beaton’s clients made up nearly 2% of students admitted to the undergraduate class of 2028 at several elite schools including Brown, Columbia, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. Among his clients, 24 earned admission to Yale, 34 to Stanford and 48 to Cornell. The acceptance letters were certified by PricewaterhouseCoopers and a list of students admitted were provided by Beaton to The Wall Street Journal.

At Harvard, 23% of freshmen who started in fall 2023 reported working with a private admissions counselor, up from 13% in 2017, according to an annual survey conducted by the student newspaper. Last year, for freshmen from families with incomes over $500,000, 48% used one.

Data from the Crimson applications accepted at Ivy Leagues have refined Beaton’s understanding of what it takes to get in.

The average score on advanced-placement exams was 4.8 out of 5. The accepted students took an average of 8.4 AP classes—and those admitted to Harvard, Yale and Princeton took an average of 10.1 AP classes.

The average SAT score for an Ivy acceptance was 1568, and grades were as close to perfect as possible. A’s and A minuses are acceptable, but “B’s are bombs,” Beaton said.

Beaton said he advises students to aim for 10 activities connected across one or two themes, and that at least one should have a social-justice component. Leadership falls into two categories, institutional positions such as captain of sports teams or class president, and entrepreneurial positions.

One of her students has 23 tutors helping her on academic subjects and test preparation. The student is also writing a novel, editing an essay for a competitive journal and working on a research paper that looks at the linguistic patterns in Taylor Swift songs.

with 23 tutors, she isn't writing, editing or researching anything - her tutors are, but they're tutors so it isn't plagiarism

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Well, we didn't spend a dime and kid got in unhooked to an Ivy. What a racket.

+1

As off-putting as this business model is, the vast majority of admits do not come from Crimson et al.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Just posted a few minutes ago in the comments of the article. Probably not legit, but who knows. This article is getting some traction in WSJ comments!

Stephen M
21 minutes ago

Application Mentor here at Crimson. I assure you to the depths of my soul that Crimson is engaged in outright, wholesale application fraud. There are no official editorial guidelines whatsoever, so tutors end up writing parts or most of student essays on their behalf. It is the opposite of pedagogically informed feedback a professional English teacher would provide.

Many Crimson students are absolutely abysmal writers. There is literally no way to get them to construct even halfway decent responses than by providing the language ourselves. Crimson administration turns are completely blind eye to this practice and even tacitly encourages it.

This is a criminal-level consultancy every admissions officer in the US should be aware of.

"Stephen M" is either an imposter or out of a job now.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Clearly we need a new checkbox on the Common App: Did you work with a college counselor other than the one at your school on this application?

And then what? Colleges have no interest in removing these students from the applicant pool. There’s a host of reasons people use counselors: maybe parents are from abroad and find our system confusing. Many a kid is first gen and getting free counseling from a CBO. Maybe a kid has learning differences and searching for a special college that fits well. Maybe students are looking for merit and a counselor is advising them on list building?

Using a counselor isn’t problematic. But using someone who writes your essay & creates a false profile is. Big difference

Yup! A good CC (by my definition) helps you over the 4 years (if needed) to create a list of courses to be ready for college (someone first gen may not have parents who understand this fully), helps you know that you need some EC activities in HS and that it's good to find a few that you like and pursue them for all of HS (dont' just bounce from 1 activity to another every few months---they like to see 4 years of band/orch or 4 years of drama club or 4 years of a sport), encourage you to find volunteering that is meaningful and does more than just check a box, help you find a few EC activities to supplement your academic interests, help create a great list of potential colleges for your intended majors (they are highly skilled at this and will help you have a great list of ones you can afford as well as true Reaches, targets and safeties that your kid actually likes), help with test prep, and help with essay development (brainstorming, but the kid does 99% of the work, CC just guides and makes them think and revise). And most importantly, it saves your sanity senior year so you do NOT have to nag your kid to stay on schedule.

Yes, it's a privilege to be able to afford that. Yes, you can do most of it yourself. Aside from the essay writing, I can do the rest. But our CC helped find some hidden gems for my kid---ones I may not have found. Then they let us know the top choice really wants you to do an "interview" so after the visit if we liked it, you schedule an interview immediately. My kid did, did the interview the next week over the Summer and is attending that school. But I wouldn't have know just how important that interview/expressing interest is to getting admission. o it's the little things that help Make the process easier.
But our CC told me I could do 95% of her job, as I demonstrated (did it all with my first kid). But My kid was much more receptive to hearing about schools from the CC than from me, and listening to suggestions of small things to do. So it made my life easier and less stressful. A nd I figure if I'm willing to pay $90K/year for college, the least I can do is pay $1K/year in HS (or 4K total) to assist

I would not pay $20K+---not worth it

Agreed...but if you run Tiger Asset Management (I assume that guy probably used Crimson for their own kids which is why he is a major investor), earn easily $100MM+ per year and have a multi-billion NW, do you care if you pay $20k or $100k or $250k?

What schools have interviews that are driven by the student reaching out to schedule the interview "immediately," as opposed to the school reaching out to offer an interview?!?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is why no one will hire students from these colleges ever again. They are all fake people who have done nothing real on their own. They will be terrible team players on projects.

+1 It is odd karma but the backlash against “hot house flowers” is levelling the playing field for normal kids with manners and great EQ.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Just posted a few minutes ago in the comments of the article. Probably not legit, but who knows. This article is getting some traction in WSJ comments!

Stephen M
21 minutes ago

Application Mentor here at Crimson. I assure you to the depths of my soul that Crimson is engaged in outright, wholesale application fraud. There are no official editorial guidelines whatsoever, so tutors end up writing parts or most of student essays on their behalf. It is the opposite of pedagogically informed feedback a professional English teacher would provide.

Many Crimson students are absolutely abysmal writers. There is literally no way to get them to construct even halfway decent responses than by providing the language ourselves. Crimson administration turns are completely blind eye to this practice and even tacitly encourages it.

This is a criminal-level consultancy every admissions officer in the US should be aware of.

"Stephen M" is either an imposter or out of a job now.

If you've read other articles on Crimson from parents who have used them, it's kind of a revolving door over there. Lots of people talk about being assigned one mentor and getting shuffled to another one or two others because people who work as their mentors don't stay in that position for very long - some go on to other jobs and the good ones realize that they are giving too much $$ to the house and they could make a lot more money by hanging their own shingle. Talk about a job that has low barriers to entry - just graduate from a top school and you can work from home anywhere and set your own schedule and pricing scheme.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Perhaps I'm slow (because I only attended a state school after all!), but I would love to understand the parents' thought process here.

Is the expectation that the student will transform from someone who requires 23 tutors and curated hobbies into a young adult who can function independently? Or how is that supposed to work out? Do they not think beyond the Ivy admission?

Let's see, the parent could pay for the fancy apartment + help to get the fancy job, then continue to pay for the cleaners/food delivery/anything else until the kid makes enough money to take over those bills. I thought this was crazy but it's actually the plan of some parents I know. They are very wealthy and have told me they/and their kids don't like discomfort.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is why no one will hire students from these colleges ever again. They are all fake people who have done nothing real on their own. They will be terrible team players on projects.

+1
Everything about these kids is manufactured and "packaged." Surely, colleges can tell by now who is being managed and formed into a product and who is not? Honestly, using college counselors should be forbidden in the application process. What a joke.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Perhaps I'm slow (because I only attended a state school after all!), but I would love to understand the parents' thought process here.

Is the expectation that the student will transform from someone who requires 23 tutors and curated hobbies into a young adult who can function independently? Or how is that supposed to work out? Do they not think beyond the Ivy admission?

Let's see, the parent could pay for the fancy apartment + help to get the fancy job, then continue to pay for the cleaners/food delivery/anything else until the kid makes enough money to take over those bills. I thought this was crazy but it's actually the plan of some parents I know. They are very wealthy and have told me they/and their kids don't like discomfort.

Whereas other kids enjoy discomfort?

[Anonymous]

[twitter]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is why no one will hire students from these colleges ever again. They are all fake people who have done nothing real on their own. They will be terrible team players on projects.

+1
Everything about these kids is manufactured and "packaged." Surely, colleges can tell by now who is being managed and formed into a product and who is not? Honestly, using college counselors should be forbidden in the application process. What a joke.

What makes you think that the AOs don’t know about this or they care to end this?

[Anonymous]

There are only 2,000 admissions letters for about 50,000 applicants. When you exclude, legacies (10% of admits), athletes (15%), internationals (10-12%), FGLI (15-20%) then there are probably only 1200 seats up for grabs.

When it's that competitive, they are going to take the most compelling applications. At this level, they can be ultra-picky. If your kid's goal is a T10, then they should pick a niche very, very early and try to be the best in the country at it.

It's simply much easier to be the best linguistics or Russian language applicant than the best CS, pre-med, or Econ applicant. Remember that colleges want to fill up the humanities and there are very few applicants looking to study that.

[Anonymous]

Someone posted Crimson’s activity description for a bunch of students recently.

It’s eye-opening how they quantify the impact. I thought it was a too in your face, but it clearly works, given the below results.

These are dozens of times better than Sara H. - even for her clients who were spending upwards of eight or $10,000 on her individual essay edits (1-2k per school) and application reviews (1K) and activities review reviews (2k) and interview prep (1K) and one on ones (1.5k).



“This year, Beaton’s clients made up nearly 2% of students admitted to the undergraduate class of 2028 at several elite schools including Brown, Columbia, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. Among his clients, 24 earned admission to Yale, 34 to Stanford and 48 to Cornell. The acceptance letters were certified by PricewaterhouseCoopers and a list of students admitted were provided by Beaton to The Wall Street Journal.”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Well, we didn't spend a dime and kid got in unhooked to an Ivy. What a racket.

+1

As off-putting as this business model is, the vast majority of admits do not come from Crimson et al.

X100! Better to get in on your own than to do whatever this article is describing

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There are only 2,000 admissions letters for about 50,000 applicants. When you exclude, legacies (10% of admits), athletes (15%), internationals (10-12%), FGLI (15-20%) then there are probably only 1200 seats up for grabs.

When it's that competitive, they are going to take the most compelling applications. At this level, they can be ultra-picky. If your kid's goal is a T10, then they should pick a niche very, very early and try to be the best in the country at it.

It's simply much easier to be the best linguistics or Russian language applicant than the best CS, pre-med, or Econ applicant. Remember that colleges want to fill up the humanities and there are very few applicants looking to study that.

Nothing niche just all around super bright top of the class student, unhooked, at an ivy in engineering, and got multiple t10 offers. It is completely BS that this nonsense is needed.