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Recent Press Coverage
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Get Smart, then
Smarter
"Kids who would have been taken
off the market in the early admissions process, those
kids are competing in the regular pool," Shaw said. "If
they are qualified enough for Harvard or Princeton, it's
just as likely that they're qualified for the other
Ivies." |
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College
coaches can help kids make the grade
Last
year, a Maryland high school student had an all-too-familiar
problem: He had good grades and test scores, but he didn't
stand out from his peers. So in his junior year he and his
family approached Ivy Success, a small company in Garden City,
N.Y., that helps students get into America's most competitive
colleges |
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Opting Out of
Private School
"There's no point in spending
all that money if your kid is going to be in the middle of the
class," says Robert Shaw, a partner at IvySuccess, an
educational consulting firm in Garden City, N.Y. He counsels
students to consider switching if they aren't in the top 10%.
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The New
College Gurus
"The eight-person team at Long
Island-based IvySuccess boast of their experience in
management consulting, which may explain why they advocate
strategic positioning and reverse-engineered perspective. The
team's techniques include briefing students on the tastes and
quirks of regional admissions officers who are likely to
review their application." |
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Will
Others Follow Harvards Move?
"This will cause
more anxiety, not less," said Robert Shaw, a partner at Ivy
Success, which has steered many North Jersey students into the
nation's elite schools. "Students will now have to work
harder, because colleges like Harvard will be able to factor
in their performance from the first half of senior year.
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Study: Women
Outnumber Male Undergrads
Even at Harvard,
females overtook males for the first time in the number of
admitted students to the Class of 2010, according to
IvySuccess.com |
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Secrets of the Ivy
League
Cleveland Ivy hopefuls, this is your
wake-up call: High school students nationwide are showing more
initiative and passion, according to Robert Shaw, partner of
Ivy Success, a New York-based company of former Ivy League
admissions officers. |
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Climbing into the Ivy
League
"An admissions officer is not going to
be impressed with a kid who went to a rigorous private school
and had a 1450 on the SAT because the student had every access
to educational resources." |
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For High Schoolers,
Summer Is Time To Polish Resumes
"These days,
just having perfect grades and perfect SAT scores does not
guarantee anything," says Victoria Hsiao of IvySuccess. "It's
the complete package that colleges are looking at." |
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Learning to
Stand Out Among the Standouts
"As admissions
strategists, our experience is that Asian Americans must meet
higher objective standards, such as SAT scores and GPAs, and
higher subjective standards than the rest of the applicant
pool,".
Victoria Hsiao, who works with Shaw at the admissions
strategy firm Ivy Success, said that when she attended
Stuyvesant High School in New York, "my Asian friends and I
all tried to make ourselves stand out, as we did not want to
be stereotyped as Asians with good grades, playing the piano
and doing scientific research." She joined the debate team
instead of the math team and got into Cornell. |
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The Secret World of
College Admissions
With a huge pool of
outstanding applicants, admissions at the top schools long ago
stopped being about the numbers.
Shaw helped the family play the admissions game. The
ethnic, geographic and racial profiling that goes into
assembling classes at the nation's top-tier colleges and
universities is the worst-kept secret in American higher
education.
"It's a very well-known thing but colleges don't want to
talk about it,'' Shaw said. "It is certainly not a
meritocracy, it's about being the right type of kid."
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College
Admission Counselors
"It's not enough to have
good grades and scores - you need to consider university
politics, ethnic and regional demographics, and other things
beyond control of the applicant", says Robert Shaw, a partner
and co-founder, whose team of consultants is staffed entirely
by former Ivy League admissions officers.
The proof is in the pudding: "We have been 100 percent
successful in getting every single one of our students into
their reach schools for the past five years," says Shaw.
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The Multiple
Choices of Prepping for the SAT
Many parents
are finding their children's entry into the junior year to be
an increasingly nerve-racking rite of passage. That is when
parents are confronted with the cold reality of the SAT
reasoning test and its power over their children's future.
Parents should not shop for a tutor based solely on the
number of hours in a one-on-one package. "It's really about
how the teacher is able to convey the material," said Robert
Shaw, a partner in IvySuccess, an individual tutoring and
admissions strategy company in Garden City, N.Y. Mr. Shaw's
company requires instructors to be Ivy League graduates with
SAT scores of 1,500 or higher and at least three years of
teaching experience. |
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Princeton Has Its
Pick of the Brightest
"There is no set
formula for admission, but the secret is how politics and
policies at a given institution affect admissions," Shaw said.
"To most parents, it's random, but to admissions officers,
it's very carefully crafted."
With few signs that the desirability of an Ivy League
education will wane, Shaw says students will face stiff
competition for many years to come. He advises them to start
preparing early.
"High schools should be preparing students for college
sooner," Shaw said. "If you wait until junior year, you will
be too stressed out. The whole landscape of admission has
changed so much in the last five to 10 years, and parents and
high schools haven't caught up with it." |
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Hell Hath No
Fury Like Alumni Scorned
At Ivy League
schools, "legacy admissions have been under attack in recent
years," says Lawrence Lamphere, a former Cornell admissions
official and a principal at IvySuccess, a company of former
Ivy admission officers and graduates who advise students
applying to top schools. The Ivies have noted the public
outcry over preferences in admissions, Lamphere says, and
they're so popular and their endowments so big that they can
brush off large numbers of alumni kids with little fear of
repercussion.
Ivy League schools in recent years appear to be accepting
more legacies on the condition that they defer for a year,
says IvySuccess's Lamphere. But they don't always try to mend
bridges with alums whose children have been spurned. After one
Princeton legacy was rejected, his mother wrote a thoughtful
letter to the school noting the many Princeton connections in
her family tree. She never got a response. |
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