Admissions consultancy is an excellent hustle

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a managing director at JPMorgan with an Ivy League pedigree, and your son is a senior at elite private school Horace Mann applying to different colleges. Acceptance letters are mailed out, and his classmates, as well as the children of many of your coworkers, are accepted to Yale, Harvard, MIT, and Princeton, while your son is going to, I don’t know, Villanova. How embarrassing! You would do anything to avoid that fate!

For most American families, having your child attend an Ivy League school is a dream. For the wealthiest American families, having your child attend one of America’s best schools is a necessity, and anything less than that is a categoric failure.

Now, imagine that someone comes along and says, “Hey, listen, we’ll drastically improve your kid’s chances of getting into a top college, but you’re going to have to pay us, like, $120,000 per year.”

From New York Mag:

For the past nine years, Rim, 28, has been working as an “independent education consultant,” helping the one percent navigate the increasingly competitive college-admissions process — the current round of which ends in February. He started by editing college essays from his Yale dorm room for $50 an hour but now charges the parents of his company’s 190 clients — mostly private-school kids, many of them in New York — $120,000 a year to help them create a narrative he believes will appeal to college-admissions officers. That company, Command Education, currently has 41 full-time staffers, most of whom are recent graduates of top-tier colleges and universities. The pitch is crafted to appeal to the wealthy clients Rim courts: a “personalized, white glove” service, through which Command employees do everything from curating students’ extracurriculars to helping them land summer internships, craft essays, and manage their course loads with the single goal of getting them in.

The beauty and supplement industries have been monetizing consumer insecurities for years, but the college admissions advisory business might be the most effective monetization of anxiety that we’ve ever seen. And you couldn’t ask for a better customer base.

Rim says that over the past five years, 94 percent of Command clients have been accepted to one of their top-three schools, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, Cornell, Brown, Stanford, and MIT — a statistic that appears in bold on the company’s website. It’s an impressive number and one that’s impossible to verify, leaving just enough cushion to give prospective clients confidence without making guarantees. (Although since Command helps clients pick their schools, those lists also reflect what their mentors think is within reach.) Many of Rim’s competitors post similar statistics, despite the IECA’s advice against making such claims.

Student success is also hard to verify because so few people who use a consultant are willing to talk about it.

Rim’s setup is just fantastic: Command only works with students from high-income families in the most expensive city in the world. These students attend high schools with nation-leading university placements. You help those students create a shortlist of schools that match their interests and, most importantly, are within their reach. And, because the use of admissions consultants is taboo, none of your customers will ever mention that their child didn’t get into their school of choice because it would reveal that 1) you hired a 3rd party admissions counselor and 2) your child still didn’t make the cut.

Unlike in the Varsity Blues scandal, where parents were bribing standardized test administrators to let “SAT experts” correct students’ answers and university officials to secure athletic-recruitment status for their children, there’s nothing illegal about Command’s business (as far as we know, anyway). Rim found a lucrative market of willing (and anxious) customers, and he is providing a service that they’ll pay top dollar for.

It’s the educational equivalent of an asset manager charging 2 and 20 on a $500 million fund that they invest in an S&P 500 ETF during a bull run: people are paying you for results that they likely would have gotten on their own.