Why We Don't Track Our "Stats" (And How Admissions Consultants Fake Theirs)

Many families ask for our admit rate, and we're upfront about our numbers: we don't have them. Our students are admitted to top colleges every year—this Fall's round of early admits brought Caltech, Stanford, UPenn, and Northwestern, among others—but we've never kept a running tally, and we don't intend to start. The reason has less to do with modesty than with something broken at the core of this industry: the way consultants have learned to dress up marketing as data, and the way families, understandably anxious, have learned to trust it.

There is no independent verification in college admissions consulting. None. Companies select their own clients, choose which ranking systems to acknowledge, and publish only the results that flatter them. Many prescreen applicants before taking them on, though they would never use that word. What happens is more subtle: a student with a 3.2 GPA and a complicated transcript inquires, and somehow the consultant is fully booked, or suggests they might be "a better fit for next year's cohort," a waitlist that never quite materializes. Meanwhile, the student with a 1540 and a legacy connection is welcomed warmly, and when they're admitted to Penn eight months later, another tick goes in the win column. The math looks great, but the game is dirty, and it makes it nearly impossible for families who are trying to get help with the application process to evaluate their options objectively.

We don't prescreen. That choice makes our work harder and our numbers, such as they might be, messier. It also keeps us aligned with the only thing that actually matters, which is whether a student has grown—as a thinker, a writer, a person who understands their own story well enough to tell it.

Consider, for a moment, the strangeness of what an "admit rate" is supposed to measure. In the ledger of most consulting firms, a student with a 1580 SAT who lands at a Top 20 counts the same as a student with a 2.5 GPA who claws their way into UC Irvine after rebuilding their entire relationship with school. It counts the same as an international student who needs full financial aid and somehow gets admitted anywhere at all.

That last case is worth pausing on. The vast majority of U.S. colleges are not need-blind for international applicants. Most won't even consider a student who cannot pay. The handful that do offer full rides receive thousands of applications for a few dozen spots. Helping such a student find a path is not a matter of polish—it demands strategy, creativity, and, frankly, luck. None of which shows up in a conversion rate. And most consulting firms won't even consider taking this type of student as a client.

The first case, the well-credentialed domestic student, often requires little more than editorial refinement and strategic positioning; the scaffolding is already there. The second and third demand months of work on habits, confidence, and context—sometimes a wholesale reinvention of how a teenager sees themselves as a learner or what they believe is possible for their life. One of these outcomes will look better on a website. The others represent something closer to what education is supposed to do.

Stats that flatten this difference aren't insight. They're advertising copy with a numerical sheen, and the families who find them reassuring are often the ones who least need reassurance in the first place.

What We Do Instead

We are a small operation by design—two people, a handful of students each year, no plans to scale. We work with students across the full range of academic backgrounds and interests, from engineering to the humanities to passion projects that don't yet have names, and we build a custom curriculum for each one. What we teach is not how to game an application but how to think clearly about who you are and what you care about, and how to write with enough precision and honesty that a reader might actually believe you.

This means we need to know our students, and not in the way a consultant "gets to know" a client by skimming their transcript and activities list. We ask about the book that changed how they see the world, the argument they can't stop having in their head, the thing they do when no one is watching and no one is giving them credit for it. We let students lead, because the goal is not to hand them a strategy but to teach them how to think about their own life with enough clarity that a strategy emerges from it. Every session should feel like progress, not vague encouragement, not a checklist, but the tangible sensation of having articulated something that was previously stuck. If a student leaves a conversation with us and doesn't feel sharper than when they walked in, we have failed at the only thing we are here to do.

We don't do contracts. No six-month commitments, no packages you have to buy upfront and hope will be worth it. We've found that locking families into long engagements tends to benefit the consultant more than the student, and we would rather earn your trust session by session than extract it in advance. If what we offer is valuable, you'll come back. If it isn't, you shouldn't have to.

You might reasonably ask what assurance we can offer, if not numbers. The honest answer is that we are teachers, and good teaching is hard to fake. A student knows when they're learning. They know the difference between a coach who is trying to technically improve their essay and one who is trying to help them figure out what they actually want to say. We have worked with students who came to us after months with other consultants, still holding drafts that felt hollow to them, still unable to answer the basic question of what their essay was about. That hollowness is what happens when the goal is to produce a product rather than to develop a writer.

What we want—and what we work toward in every session—is for a student to finish their application and feel that the essays are genuinely theirs. Not "good enough," not "probably fine," but actually representative of how they think and what they care about. That requires teaching, not editing. It requires asking harder questions than "what else can we add here?" It requires the student to lead, and for us to be honest when something isn't working, and to stay with a draft until the student believes in it.

This is, admittedly, a strange pitch. We are telling you that we have no numbers to show you, that we cannot promise outcomes, that we don't lock you into anything, and that we are suspicious of anyone in this industry who claims otherwise. If you're looking for guarantees, or for a consultant who will project confidence about things that cannot honestly be known, we are probably not the right fit. But if you want to work with people who will take your story seriously, who believe that the point of this whole exercise is not the credential but the capacity to articulate a life that feels like your own, we'd be glad to talk.

Ready to transform your educational journey? Sign up for a free intro session with us today to discover our unique teaching philosophy and how we can help you achieve your academic dreams.