It’s all sad. Introducing a transactional aspect to activities at such an early age is a surefire way to breed ennui, ego, imposter syndrome, resentment, what have you.
Whatever value-add this kind of service brings will eventually be counterbalanced by therapy fees.
Don’t parents realize the actual price they pay for buying into this nonsense? Kids whose parents buy their way onto this conveyer belt of achievement - and we all know many of them I’m sure - tend to come out as sad and soulless, and filled with self-doubt.
How many world-changing entrepreneurs, artists, doctors, writers, thinkers do you know whose road to success was paved with an overpriced college consultant at age 11?
“Some critics said Crimson’s success is exaggerated because its student clients are highly motivated and already at the top in academics and activities, and would likely be among the students to get into Ivy Leagues anyway. One admissions official said the chances of many of those students being admitted, with or without Crimson, “are probably pretty high.””
I suspect this to be true. Like every service that brags about its success rate, they are already working with highly accomplished and motivated kids and families. But if they can or are perceived as being able to give that edge to get a student in that circle of 2,000 admits from the 10,000 “finalists”, people will pay up for that, and smart money like Tiger sees that.
We also see the normal consultant strategy of emphasizing the desirability of “pointy” kids. IMO, this is in part motivated by the fact that this is something the consulting firms can help deliver. No doubt many successful candidates are “pointy”, but many of the successful interviewees I have had, my kids and their classmates have generally been rounded but with very strong achievement across many areas (academic interests, EC’s). I do agree that schools are looking for indicias of empathy, and a kid would be well served to have some type of meaningful community service on their resume, and I think working a soup kitchen or homeless shelter is more meaningful than starting some for show non-profit that is funded by their parents/relatives.
I keep thinking of the kid who is great at something at age 11, be it a sport or an instrument, or whatever, and the consultant and parents decide to focus on that and stop other activities that would interfere. Then, at age 15, kid decides that he doesn’t want to do the chosen activity anymore. Do the parents force him to continue? I have a hard time believing that parents who are so invested in college admissions at an early age are going to allow the kid to quit. I can see this ending very badly.
Well, there is the added fact that many of these kids are coming from wealthy families which doesn’t hurt. Even most UMC parents are going to pause before spending $200k on a college consultant. The friends I have that have used one haven’t paid anywhere near that, nor was their goal to get junior into an Ivy.
Starting that early is obviously a very personal choice, but I feel sorry for the child who will spend years 11 through 16+/- with this kind of shadow hanging over their head. The part in the article mentioning how the owner of the company had thought that social activities were a ‘waste of time’ says all one needs to know about this particular operation.
Zero. But these parents aren’t hoping to produce the next break through thinker/artist/entrepreneur – they are hoping to produce the next quant jock or hedge fund manager.
I also wonder if relatively more kids/Crimson clients fall out because they can’t continue getting only A’s at some point along the jr high/HS continuum? As rigor increases, some kids do start getting non-A’s. Does Crimson refund the parents money once the kid gets a certain number of non-A’s, or ‘only’ a 1450 on the SAT?
Yeah, I’d be lying if I said I did not believe going to a “good college” is often (not always) a good idea. I just have a flexible idea of what a good college can be.
Similarly, I don’t have an inherent problem with getting professional help figuring out how to navigate college admissions. Indeed, this is part of what I knew we were paying for when we chose a private HS, and I thought our college counseling staff did a great job. If you don’t have that built into your HS, and you have the means to hire someone to do a similar job, then that seems fine to me.
But I am extremely skeptical that should be beginning at age 11. And I am equally skeptical it ever has to cost $200K.
And if the pitch is less, “We’ll help you explore the very rich and complicated variety of colleges that may work for your kid and be affordable for you,” and more, “We’ll give your kid the best shot at getting into Harvard [unspoken: if they follow all our advice and never fail],” well, that ain’t good.
But I gather that sort of pitch is what it takes to get someone to hire you when your kid is only 11, and be willing for you to run up $200K in bills.
Reading between the lines, a lot of their clients seem to end up at other selective colleges that are not as selective as the Ivies. Like it says this:
In total, the company works with about 8,000 clients across six grades. Another 50,000 students come to the company for tutoring. To start this fall, Crimson had 1,636 students apply to U.S. colleges. Beaton said 294 applications from Crimson students to Ivy League universities were accepted. Since 2016, Crimson students have received 1,003 Ivy League offers.
So if 1636 students applied to US colleges, and 294 were accepted to Ivies, that means 1342 were accepted . . . not to Ivies. I don’t know how many it has had apply since 2016, but again presumably it is a lot more than the 1003 accepted to Ivies.
Frankly this all sounds pretty similar to what, say, a very selective private school might achieve among its higher-income families. Hence the people wondering whether there is really much value added here.
But in any event, it does not appear they offered refunds to those 1342 non-Ivy clients. I suspect they just told them, “Hey, without us, maybe you would not have even gotten admitted to NYU, or Wisconsin, or wherever you ended up. And it is not our fault you were not Harvard material, we did our best.” Or words to that effect.
The folks I know in real life are mostly mildly satisfied or mildly dissatisfied with their experience with paid coaches (and nothing like the folks in the article).
Mild satisfaction when your kid more or less lands where you think he/she should be but with a lot less yelling and dish breaking than if the parents had been in charge of the calendar and project management. Money probably worth it, but a little regret that you ended up paying for the result you suspected you’d end up with. Mild dissatisfaction when the kid ends up “under-matching” (according to the parents who say things like “who pays a private counselor to get their kid into Hofstra for god’s sake”).
So my takeaway is it’s like any other service business. Nobody is getting your Hofstra bound kid into Harvard no matter what they tell you- but if you were worried that your kid would have been lost at a huge public U, getting some hand-holding for the kid to end up where she/he can get a solid education is probably an OK result.
And speaking of value-added skepticism–suppose you were really willing to make use of the free advice available here. Approached it with an open mind, answered questions asked thoughtfully, and so on. Would you be any worse off doing that than paying for college advice? Again, no one here is going to promise they know the secret formula for getting your kid into Harvard. But they will do a great job helping you explore options you might not have known existed, and provide some practical guidance on how to apply.
Again, I am not saying it is inherently bad to pay a professional instead. But at a minimum that should be for individualized advice, not some formula.
Bit of an aside, but I do get that in some areas, the “top” private schools are extremely expensive [edit: or simply unavailable!]. Of course living in a “top” public district can also be very expensive, but people often see that as more of an investment than a cost (whether that is the correct financial analysis is a different matter, but I know many people think that way).
OK, so I can see doing this–opting out of paying for the whole private high school bundle, and just paying a la carte for some professional college counseling geared toward private colleges.
That being said, for us, this was pretty low on the list of things we saw ourselves as paying for with our private HS. By far more important were the actual classes available, the facilities, the activities, and so on. In other words, the actual HS experience opportunities. Quality help with college admissions is then a nice thing to get as well, but not the primary reason why we chose such a HS.
But that doesn’t mean I think public high schools can’t be great too. Of course they can.
There are perhaps two things that stand out to me as particularly worrisome (although I might think of more before I finish this message).
One is that our kids are already under way too much stress. There are too many kids in the US who are suffering from stress related health issues. Starting college counseling at a very young age just seems like a way to make this worse.
The other is related to exactly what @Thorsmom66 said. Children should find what they want to do for themselves.
Our kids tried quite a few different things as kids. One wanted to be a musician, and was very good. Then she went on a musical tour across Europe and discovered that you get tired of the same music and also she didn’t like the traveling or the rigid schedule. She also talked to someone who used to be a singer and dancer on Broadway and decide she wanted a different path. Both kids tried skating and skiing and basketball. Both tried a number of other things. Eventually both kids decided they liked animals. One volunteered at a shelter. One got a job at a farm, then another job at the farm across the street. One didn’t figure out what she wanted to do until getting into lab courses in university. The other didn’t figure out what she wanted to do until having spent quite a bit of time working in a veterinary clinic and a bit of time helping out in a veterinary emergency on the side of the road in the middle of the night.
However, they both figure it out. The specifically figured it out because they had lots of experience doing lots of different things, and because those things were the right things for them to try. They did not pick their activities based on what might get them into Harvard or Stanford. They picked their activities based on what they wanted to do.
To me “doing what is right for you” just seems more likely to result in a happy kid and then later a happy adult when compared to “doing what a consultant thinks might get you into Harvard”.
We did have a kid who was great at something at 11. If we had forced her to keep doing it, then we would have a neurotic musician right now instead of a happy almost-DVM.
Me too.
Maybe I am beating a dead horse here. However, we have been pretty successful at getting into highly ranked universities. We did it by doing what was right for us, and doing it well. Then if we changed our mind, we did something else, and did it well also. I think that is what our kids should be doing.
Sounds like my in-laws who had hired one of the “fancy” consultants. They had 1 consultant for the twin who was not aspiring to T20’s and 1 for the other twin who was. From the outside and based upon what my in-laws shared with me, the consultants were very good in helping them navigate the process and putting the girls on a schedule. They also steered them to certain target schools. The twin not aspiring to a T20 ended up at Northeastern and is currently in London – great result. The other twin ended up at one of the “desirable” UC’s. Ironically, the first twin was also accepted there. The second consultant had pulled out the “you need to start a charity” card – so she had lost all credibility with me.
Definitely including those, but many of my professional colleagues just live in “good” districts and send their kids to the main high school. They have lots of advanced classes, nice facilities, lots of activities, and so on. The kids often seem to have a good experience.
I do think there is an observable effect where they send more kids to public colleges, fewer to privates, and particularly fewer to the more selective tiers of privates. And I think some of that is just about test scores and legacies and such, but some may be harder to explain that way.
And at least in my circles, parents using those public high schools but who are interested in private college options for their kids have been the most likely to hire some sort of third party help. Sometimes it is just test tutors and such, but sometimes they hire some sort of consultant.
Anyway, I don’t want to speak for them. I just think what they are doing plausibly makes sense. Their kids have had a great experience in their well-resourced public high schools, but maybe a little help jumping from the public system to the private system, if that is what they want, is warranted.
I have not seen the statistics- I hope someone here who works in pediatric public health has and can chime in.
But from what I’ve read, at a national level, the pediatric and adolescent stressors appear to hit vulnerable families very hard-- food and housing insecurity, parent or guardian with a substance abuse issue, etc. My guess is that the scholars who study stress and anxiety across population cohorts have not zeroed in on “Harvard vs. Yale vs. Doomed to flip burgers her entire life” as a trigger. And for upper income families (substance abuse is still an issue but presumably not food insecurity) the perennials like body image (not bulked up enough for boys; too fat for the girls) exacerbated by social media appear to be problematic.
I think for a very small part of the population, pressuring your kid to start molding him/herself for college admissions at age 11 could well increase anxiety. But I’m going to guess that these are families where there have already been signs of something “not quite right” going on. Certainly some element of perfectionist parenting at a minimum. So maybe by 11 the cake is baked for these kids- if they aren’t being pressured to get into Harvard, they’d be off to the plastic surgeon or taking off-label injections to lose “those pesky 5 lbs. of baby fat”. (Yes, that’s a thing. Parents wanting their pre-pubescent kids on these medications “so we don’t have to deal with it later”. Ugh.)
