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[quote=Anonymous]I have posted about our experience with Crimson before, but I'll share again -

We engaged Crimson when we were living in a rural area where a lower percentage of kids attended college (and then it was the local state college). The area also had limited extracurricular opportunities, so we wanted to use a counselor to get/ keep DC on track for a broader college opportunity. Not Ivy, but one of the many "good" schools.

I think the package was $12k over 4 years (9-12), and included X hours for SAT tutoring, X hours for essay review, X hours for AP tutoring, and a team of people, including a strategist and different coaches (one to brainstorm ECs and summer programs). It seemed reasonable for what we needed. And it started off pretty good.

The challenge, as others here have mentioned, is that most of the people working at Crimson are recent graduates, working PT earning some extra $$ while applying to grad school or law school. On the one hand, it was great for DC to have an opportunity to talk to all these young adults. But the turnover was very high (we had 3 different strategists in 18 months), and many sessions were wasted on intros/ "getting to know you" over and over again.

They had a terrible app/website where you were supposed to keep all communication, but it didn't have parent access, and it didn't have alerts. And even the Crimson team didn't use it very often, so lots of conversations and messages got lost. So again, instead of building upon previous conversations and moving the strategy forward, it was a lot of repetition. It was like we had to keep them organized.

And then, when we did want to use our "tutor" hours, it would sometimes take a while for them to find a tutor, and I didn't have the confidence that we were getting the best tutor.

And finally, our team wasn't really "cohesive" - ie, they were spread out across the world and didn't know each other, so sometimes we got conflicting advice on which math track to pursue, or which summer program.

It just felt like a messy startup with a good idea, but very poor execution.

Ultimately, I felt like I got the gist of what they were trying to do and could manage the process better myself, plus we moved to a bigger city, so we just dropped them completely (did not get any money back).

I read that WSJ article and agree that a very tiny percentage of people are paying top dollar and getting all the best resources Crimson has allocated to those students. Anyone in the $12-30k range would be better off just hiring individual tutors/coaches as needed.

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