After an hours-long conversation with Patrick and his parents about what Ivy Leagues look for in a student, what AP classes he should take next year, and how to plan his extracurricular activities, it’s time to talk about how much it will cost to hire me as a private college consultant. Patrick leaves the room with another consultant to talk more strategy. It’s just me, Patrick’s parents, and a saleswoman. One year of consultation with us will be $10,000. Cheaper if you buy multiple years including the application process. Silence. More questions on price and service before we shake hands and part ways. Half the time they come back to pay for the service and the other half, I never hear from them again.
On Harvard’s website, they write that they are committed to a community of Inclusive Excellence, “one that fully embraces individuals from varied backgrounds, cultures, races, identities, life experience, beliefs, and values.” In Stanford’s diversity statement on its admissions page, it is written that “the Stanford community embraces a broad range of racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, gender, sexual orientation, religious, cultural and educational backgrounds.” Similarly, many colleges have gone Need-Blind in their admissions process (meaning they don’t consider an applicant’s ability to pay in the admissions process), and emphasize a holistic review of the applicant’s merits (grades, test scores, extracurriculars, essays, and so on) to decide whether to offer admission or not. With so many colleges claiming to be bastions of diversity, equality, and social mobility, it’s worth asking if those claims are true.
Evan Mandery, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal College, points out that at Harvard, “more students come from families making over $500,000 per year than under $40,000…Roughly speaking, for every poor kid Princeton promotes out of poverty, it keeps 40 kids rich.”
I also help kids with boarding school applications, and there are plenty of families out there looking to get their children into feeder prep schools to get children into the Ivy Leagues, never mind the actual resources these schools have to offer, and are prepared to pay upwards of $60,000-$70,000 per year just in tuition. Yet, Caitlin Flanagan writing for The Atlantic points out that, “Less than 2 percent of the [United States’] students attend so-called independent schools. But 24 percent of Yale’s class of 2024 attended an independent school. At Princeton, that figure is 25 percent. At Brown and Dartmouth, higher still: 29 percent.” And as Mandery writes in his article, the average family income of an incoming freshman at Stanford is $427,000, yet Stanford boasts that they only admit students that truly deserve to be there.
The numbers don’t lie. Kids from wealthy families can afford to buy every advantage. And yet, most families are like Patrick’s who don’t have the resources to pay for the private, individualized guidance that he deserves in the college application process to really make his application stand out. These are the circumstances under which RateMyApp was born. As college consultants working around the world, we’ve come across innumerable students doing amazing things, but don’t have the guidance to navigate the byzantine college application process (imagine trying to apply to US colleges in your second language). We believe that college is a transformative experience that everyone should have an equal opportunity to experience, not just the wealthy.
Instead of locking away expert college counseling behind an exorbitant price with lavish promises of growth and change, we at RateMyApp aim to democratize our expertise by offering low-cost video evaluations of a student’s college application. The truth is that most parents are trying to make ends meet and support their family and don’t have the time or energy to understand the ins and outs of the college admissions processes like we do. There are thousands of passionate, hard-working students with inspirational ideas, and their chances at a top college might be out of reach because they don’t know how to craft their activities list for maximum impact, choose the essay topic that reveals their true character, or even aim for the right schools. These are the students we aim to serve.
Rather than just believing in diversity in name, we believe in its benefits. By giving more students access to expert college consultants, our goal is to increase the diversity of these elite college campuses. And with more of these changemakers on campus, we hope these students will go on to uplift their communities. In turn, these students can help nudge colleges toward the missions they purport.
