<p>Again, the CN says aid. There is nowhere the word “need-based.” There are local grants that are merit based, and even need has many levels, eg for TX state aid, the TEG requirement is AIG $95k. Institutional aid can mean mean anything. H has bequests that have geographical restrictions and define the student as a “well deserving student,” so one can put their own interpretation what this means. Personally, real need means less than $60k income, and those students according to H are less than 20%.</p>
<p>What I do not understand is why is there such resistance to believe that many families use admissions consultants in order to gain an advantage for their children to be accepted in top schools. Whether it is fair, or not, that’s another issue. The questions is do many people use them? The answer is affirmatively, and it is a folly to think that when families use admissions consultants to gain entry from kindergarten to all the top MBA/MD/JD programs, they would not use them to get admissions to a top college. I can bet that there is an informal relationship in the college level among schools with consultants, exactly as it is starting to come to the surface about the mba programs. (Actually at the chronicle of higher education one of the consultants has admitted that undergrad colleges have also organized similar tours.) Unfortunately, MBAs are the only schools/students who have been willing to admit their usage. But the process si the same, the consultants belong to the same companies and charge similar fees for both undergrad and grad school based on the rates I have seen for Hernandez and other companies.</p>
<p>"Last spring, the Harvard Business School quietly took a step that would have been unthinkable only ten years earlier: It welcomed nearly 50 for-hire admissions consultants to its leafy campus, treating them to a private tour of the school’s red brick…</p>
<p>That warm embrace by the most prestigious business school in the land marks a watershed for the business of admissions consultants. Not long ago, Harvard, Stanford, Wharton and other top schools regarded these hired guns with disapproval and skepticism. B-school officials often spoke out against the use of consultants, and some schools explicitly forbade applicants from hiring them. They worried that if the practice became widespread, it would be impossible for admissions officers to know if they were evaluating the work of an applicant—or that of a high-priced surrogate. And even if consultants contained themselves to merely polishing essays and helping clients present the best possible image, didn’t that confer an unfair advantage over students who couldn’t afford a paid helper?</p>
<p>Those concerns have largely fallen by the wayside. The relationship between the top schools and the consultants has gone from chilly to positively cozy. The Harvard visit was part of a three-day conference in June organized by the Association of International Graduate Admissions Consultants (AIGAC). The consultants also met with the dean of MIT’s Sloan School and the admissions officers at the most prestigious business schools in the world including Dartmouth, Yale, and Duke. Columbia, New York University, Michigan and INSEAD even gave a behind-the-scenes look at the admissions process, evaluating three hypothetical candidate profiles for the group…More than that, this new detente is an acknowledgement that any school that wants access to the most desirable applicants had better be extremely comfortable with consultants. Not only do even the top applicants engage them but the consultants, with their vast online reach, often touch more would-be students than any admissions department and wield growing influence over who applies where…The coziness that has evolved between the schools and the consultants also results from the fact that some consultants had once worked in admissions offices at the schools…Exact numbers are hard to come by—partly because students are promised complete anonymity from their consultants, a vestige of the old stigma—but more than a dozen consultants estimate that a quarter to a third of the applicants to the top 10 business schools now use their services. At Harvard, Stanford and Wharton, as many as half of the applicants now pay for advice. These aspiring MBAs pay handsomely for the counseling, often between $5,000 and $10,000 a pop. The top players can charge as much as high-end attorneys. A grad-school essay package from Hernandez College Consulting, for example, costs $900 an hour. Some offer “a la carte” counseling: a Boston consultant named Sanford Kreisberg charges $300 for a mock interview to prep an applicant for a school interview and $900 for a “one-time sanity check” to critique a completed application before it’s sent…By and large, their clients are happy with the results. Applicants who have used consultants say they improve their chances of getting into a top school…The consultants say that students are assisted in a process of deep, critical introspection: the writing, editing, re-writing, and most of all the soul-searching aimed at helping them figure out their long-term goals, ambitions and passions. “It’s about who you are. What you want. What you think. Why something’s right for you. Why you’re passionate about it,” says Duffy. “Then, once you’ve figured all that out, determining whether a particular program is right for you.”…At Hernandez College Consulting, where a five-hour package costs $4,500, Josh Stephens, the company’s essay specialist (and Princeton English major) says he thinks of the process as a collaboration. Stephens smoothes out clunky paragraphs, recommends synonyms and generally bends flat writing into a narrative arc. He also plays snake charmer, coaxing a more compelling narrative out of a basket of whatever facts and snippets the applicant presents. He recently worked with an entrepreneur from a developing country who wanted to hype his big ideas and fantastic goals. Stephens asked him to be more reflective: How might he help his country after graduation? “That wasn’t a perspective he had thought of,” Stephens says, declining to give any specifics."</p>