Admissions are Broke. College Consultants Aren’t.

Ivy League acceptance rates are at historic lows. Fortunately, the number of businesses claiming to know how to get in is at a historic high.

College admissions consulting has ballooned into a multi-billion-dollar marketplace that offers families the illusion of control and a way out of fears of downward mobility. Admissions consultants advertise a road to the promised land of the Ivy League, paved with insider knowledge and industry secrets that many families are willing to pay top dollar for.

Elite admissions anxiety has created an industry selling the myth of a perfect application. But that myth amplifies inequality rather than merit — and both families and Harvard must stop feeding it.

That myth persists despite scant evidence that counselors can meaningfully influence the process, because fear is profitable. These firms benefit from the feeding frenzy that admissions has become, sometimes for the price of a small house.

Worse yet, such services do nothing to level the playing field. They tilt it further.

In the end, privilege masquerades as merit, with families feeling compelled to purchase an edge in a race they were already winning, as if Ivy League admission were a life-or-death referendum.

Parents shouldn’t mortgage their peace of mind on the fantasy that a “perfect” profile can guarantee admission to a fundamentally unpredictable process. It can’t.

And even if it could, the criteria being optimized are hardly neutral to begin with. With or without a counselor, college applications are far from a fair evaluation of student qualification. Raw talent is often inextricable from the innate privileges many applicants enjoy.

Extracurricular cultivation presupposes time, financial stability, and access to equipment, lessons, and transportation. Letters of recommendation, whether from teachers or notable alumni, favor students with abundant social capital. Personal essays and polished projects are often mere indicators of how much support and editing an applicant can afford.

In comparison, high school GPAs and standardized test scores are less biased towards wealth than extracurricular achievements or “personal” elements. They are also clearer predictors of post-college success.

That is not to say that quantitative admissions are a silver bullet. Scores reflect only a small slice of an applicant’s contribution to campus life, and far more applicants have near-perfect numbers than Harvard has seats.

Indeed, to admit a class that is both talented and broad-ranging, holistic admissions remain helpful in identifying niche interests or unconventional strengths that qualified applicants can bring to the Harvard community.

But the value of holistic review depends on its ability to correct for the very inequities that quantitative measures cannot capture. And in the places where holistic admissions once did that work most effectively, its tools have been stripped away.

For students from underprivileged backgrounds, attending an elite institution appears to have a substantially larger impact on later earnings than it does for their wealthier peers. Yet the downfall of affirmative action, the end of the Undergraduate Minority Recruitment Program, and the prohibition on referencing race in alumni interview reports have all struck significant blows to the core model of holistic admissions that once expanded access across backgrounds.

It may never have been a perfect system — but it is drifting further from the ideal.

We know it’s easy for us to say, but it’s true: not every student must attend an elite college to realize their full potential. Granted, attending an Ivy League school can be wonderful academically, career-wise, and for personal development and growth.

But for many students — especially those from families with a financial cushion — attending a less selective college, or following another path entirely, may be a better fit. Parents should think critically about how to invest in their children’s growth and development, not pad their activities lists starting in preschool.

A Harvard application should be one that every student can access — and be evaluated equitably by — regardless of how much they spend on an admissions coach.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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