The Ivy Coach is suing a Vietnamese mother over breach of contract claiming she’s only paid half of the $1.5 Million she agreed to pay for helping her daughter apply to 7 boarding schools and 22 universities.
$1.5 Million Dollars. I am in the wrong business. $-)
Wow. Thanks for sharing the article.
My eyes popped out too, and well, I am in the SAME business! I don’t help with boarding school admissions, but the rest is the same, and for about 1/5 of 1% of what she charged that family. Mind boggling. 
The 1.5 mill may not all be to the college consultant, some of that money may be “donated” to desired colleges for special consideration. Those college consultants have ins with college development offices to pave the ways for parents to donate in order to get special considerations for their kid. Sometimes they have bonus structure where the consultant gets paid based on what tier of school he/she could get the student into.
@oldfort,
Wonder if Dartmouth, which allegedly admitted the girl, was to be one of the recipients of the “donation”…
Bev Taylor of Ivy Coach is by her own admission a broker. She gets the kids into one of their top schools by communicating with admissions reps/ regarding donations. Most likely a good portion of this is the donation. A blog post on prep scholar quite candidly discusses the practice, quotes Bev Taylor/Ivy Coach, AND mentions the percentage of development cases at Darmouth. Google ‘prep scholar and how-much-do-college-donations-help-college-applications’
I think the word for that is “bribe”.
We all sense that this is happening–or know about cases such as Kushner–but it’s interesting to know that someone talking about the “donation” practice so openly. And then there’s the added moxie of turning that practice into a business. . . .
@2mrmagoo, Thanks for the tip to the blog. Interesting read.
$500,000? Though it is a huge sum to me, I thought a donation to an Ivy would be in a seven figure. 
I thought I read somewhere that that the number was in the range of $20 million for an acceptable donation.
Dartmouth may get more excited about a half million than Harvard does.
Well, in the prepscholar blog, even Stanford would consider a donation of $500,000 or more. The bar is lowered than I thought it was
Holy cow. All I can think of are the hardworking and extremely intelligent low income kids who don’t get in because certain other kids have parents who essentially buy the available spots. I know, it’s the way of the world, but it stinks.
Even higher income kids miss out on this advantage. It takes a lot of wealth to be able to hand over 500k bucks.
A lot of that wealth is coming from overseas. Amount to donate is depending on one’s stats. It is also not the case of a parent writing to the development office and admission office to say if I give $X then my kid would be a shoo-in.
I learned a lot when I hired a private consultant for D2. It opened my eyes quite a bit. I opted for a straight forward ED option (the only hook D2 took).
Gives legit, hard working consultants a really bad name.
If I understand correctly, the mother agreed to pay a bribe that got her kid in but then refused to pay the full actual bribe. Therefore the consultant is on the hock, may lose all her precious contacts in Development, and if no action were taken could pass for a person that’s easy to con.
Oxbridge must be smugly laughing.
Colleges only admit a handful of development applicants, they do not fill the whole class with such applicants. It is no different than admission based on sex, race, legacy, EC, social economic…etc. I don’t think those consultants are any less legit than consultants who only help out on essays, test preps, college selection or FA. In my opinion, a private consultant should know things like Princeton may be looking for more performing arts students or Rice may be more interested in students from the NE, and likelihood of my kid getting into a school.
I’m not so sure that there’s a donation included in that $1.5M fee. (But my eyes were opened by that prep scholar blog post. I thought you had to donate millions.) If you look at some of The Ivy Coach’s stuff, they mention an “unlimited” package with a fee that is way more than $200,000. In fact it’s “our fee is actually substantially more than the fee we’re made fun of for charging — if only they knew!” They say most people who contact them about that package don’t do it once they hear the price.
It would be a kiss of death for any consultant to say part of their fee was given as a donation to any school.