<p>Have you read this? I did not subscribe to it, but I have an excerpt of it in the newspaper.</p>
<p>In the article, it was mentioned that the “outfit” will guarantee Harvard admittance for 1.1MILLION dollars and they also have a case for a wealthy family who paid them 600K to have thier underachieved son to be admitted to Syracuse.</p>
<p>Guarantee is that if the kid cannot be admitted to X Uni, they will refund the total amount. Of course, the kid must be screened before the outfit will take on the task.</p>
<p>I watched the 6 minute interview with the CEO. The $600k was a unique, one off, situation where getting the kid into Syracuse sounded like a minor miracle. The firm also refunded something like $300k for the service, which clearly was purchased by a family that doesn’t have cash flow problems. The typical fees are $20k - $40k per child. </p>
<p>It does sound crazy, on the surface. But after watching the interview it appeared to me that the company provides a service to those that choose to purchase it. Capitalism. It is a relatively small company, based in San Francisco, so they are not filling all the available Ivy slots with rich kids from across the country.</p>
<p>Quite frankly, after watching the interview, I think this company is going to get a lot more business.</p>
<p>Frankly, I know the founder of the company(or the interviewee) very well. He was my D’s math tutor 10 years ago. At the time, he charged me $58/hour for one on one tutoring. He was nothing but a math teacher in the San Mateo Union School District. From the start, he advertise a guaranteed admittance to Ivy for only $15K, time changed, and his company grew from a small tutoring place renting a classroom for after school tutoring in a local high school to a huge, high profiled organization spamming several continents.</p>
<p>Any thoughts to start a company like that? You Ivy Graduates?^^^ :)</p>
<p>Its a scam of sorts. You just charge enough and select your clients so that you don’t have to give many refunds, and you’ll come out ahead. The key to it is to find someone who can be convinced to pay that amount if the kid is admitted to one of the target schools. I don’t think I’d like to try to make that sale. :)</p>
<p>It sounds like he took some of the same concepts from quant work to this. Good for him.</p>
<p>Now, I question whether this is good for the schools in question. Could go either way. Do these schools admit based on what they want, or based on proxies for what they want? Do they want people with the best SAT scores, or do they want smart people and SAT serves as the best proxy they have for such? All this company helps students do are improve these metrics such as SAT scores and the right extracurriculars to get into the schools they want, but is that who the school wants to admit or do they really just not know who they want to admit and use this as their best guess? If they are indeed just using these metrics as proxies, how do they feel about these coming up more unnaturally, becoming worse proxies for what they want?</p>
<p>I don’t think I explained my thought well, so if someone who did understand it wants to rephrase it more clearly that would be appreciated.</p>
<p>So stupid. If you have the kind of money where a million is to you what $20 is to me, you already are successful enough and have enough connections that it doesn’t really matter much if or where your kid goes to college at all.</p>
<p>After reading “The Price of Admission,” I’d say you should just donate your $600K to the Ivy of your choice prior to your child’s senior year and watch the magic in the admissions office. </p>
<p>Connections and very large sums of money can help kids into Ivy league schools. It is done much more subtly however than hiring a well advertised service.</p>
<p>It makes a LOT of difference. If you were a owner of Billion dollar private company, would you hand the company to a heir that is a HS expelled drop out? What will your customer look at your company once the heir took over?</p>
<p>By spending $400K, the service “rescued” the kid from no school to go to a 3.8 GPA student at Syracuse, when he graduate, he could attend a Higher profile graduate school and at that time, he is ready to take over the enterprise without a image problem. A small fee to pay.</p>
<p>Spamming several continents might be correct. Similar stories appear about every yeat when the sordid details emerge in a lawsuit filed by an unhappy client. The family of a puppet dictator in one of the Stan countries or a glorified dentist of a billionaire family who fabricated entire backgrounds for father and sons. The list goes on, and it only addresses the one that went bad. All in all, there is no surprise that someone is exploiting the insecurities of a population that has gotten more money than sense in the past decade. </p>
<p>The long term survival of such outfits is mostly based on the continuing availabilty of cheating and scamming. As far as his algorithm, that is crooked at he appears to be. . </p>
<p>Why is it crooked? Algorithm just helps him evaluate risk and set prices accordingly. I like his idea. A bunch of other companies do the same thing - candidate tutoring, packaging and coaching - minus algorithm.
Many years ago in my country there was a crook who advertised the same thing - he promised admission to the most prestigious university and if result was negative - you would get all money back. All he had was some low level clerk working for the university who would get him admission results one day earlier before they were publically announced. He pretty much did nothing but he did select candidates carefully. Not sure if he tutored them as well.</p>
<p>"It makes a LOT of difference. If you were a owner of Billion dollar private company, would you hand the company to a heir that is a HS expelled drop out? What will your customer look at your company once the heir took over?</p>
<p>By spending $400K, the service “rescued” the kid from no school to go to a 3.8 GPA student at Syracuse, when he graduate, he could attend a Higher profile graduate school and at that time, he is ready to take over the enterprise without a image problem. A small fee to pay."</p>
<p>If I’m the owner of a billion dollar private company, I can hand the company to whoever I want to. And if my company produces goods that other companies or people want to buy, no one will care whatsoever whether the leader has a degree. You don’t need to have an elite degree when you’re standing on your wallet. Who d you have to impress? The bank? </p>
<p>Thats what those “socialist” authors would like you to believe… and they have an audience. But for many, if not most, the observation is “If only it were that easy.”</p>
<p>Eh, if you read the BBerg story, he was doing life coaching and cheeringleading for the $600K kid (who needed it) as well. From that perspective, you can argue that it was money well-spent as the dad seems to have been too busy to actually act as a parent.</p>
<p>"If I’m the owner of a billion dollar private company, I can hand the company to whoever I want to. "</p>
<p>I am not sure if you are there or not, if you are not, how do you know that? I advise less than 100 million dollar companies, they even care the CEO education background, their employees care as well. My business is to package those companies so they can be acquired by Private Equities. Same theory, different audiences.</p>
<p>What do you think investment banker do? They package large companies to be sold on the public market. We small potatoes package small private companies to sell to the private investing companies. We are “business intermediaries”.</p>