Guide to Evaluating Admissions Consultants

Question

Long time reader, infrequent poster here looking to share my experiences and that of some of my friends who applied with admissions consultants over R1 and R2 applications and interviews over the last 2 years. I have masked the names of the firms because I am not looking to wreck anyone's business. PM if you are thinking of hiring someone (is Firm A ___?) and want a second opinion on them.

The decision to hire a firm should be a no brainer. Regardless of whether you are targeting a top school or are struggling just to get into a school, I think the investment is worth it. I spoke to but did not hire any admissions consultants a couple of years ago because of personal finances and the results were not terrible but not great on my own. After saving up this past year, I hired one for R1 and switched to another one for R2 for reasons that I will discuss later. I received interviews at all of the schools I applied to and have been admitted to all of my R1 schools. Still waiting to hear back for R2. I attribute that increased success to the work of the two admissions consultants I worked with as well as some hourly work I did with a few other consultants.

I worked with one firm for R1 (let's call it Firm J) and then a different one for R2 (let's call it Firm W) not because I had money to burn but because I thought the switch would increase my chances of getting in. Firm J was one of the large firms and excelled in overall application and process strategy but was abysmal in responsiveness, organization and trustworthiness. Firm W was a medium sized firm and I got along very well with my consultant who was extremely responsive, opinionated and confident but the level of strategy was clearly not as good as Firm J.

CONSULTATION

The first thing to do when considering working with any firm is to have a consultation. They are free. Ask for writing samples. Ask for references.

You need to talk to the consultant you will actually be working with. The person who does the initial consultation, unless it is a solo practice, will not be the person you will work with. They are a gatekeeper whose barely enough to be dangerous and whose main qualifications are their ability to sell, be friendly and talk quickly. You need to push to talk to the person or people you will work with. Otherwise you have no basis for determining if you can work together. Big and little details like personality and how they like to communicate and what hours they are available and whether you like how they think or they have nothing but disdain for your candidacy. You have to talk to them to figure all of this out. You are interviewing them.

Figure out how consultants like to communicate and how responsive they are. Everyone emails but some people such as my Firm J are tremendously unresponsive. It is not that they don't know how to use email. They do but they are disorganized or they are too busy. Almost everyone will get on the phone with you because there is little substitute that almost live interaction. It enables a conversation. If you want to see how much you can trust your firm. Ask them for a direct line and a cell phone in case of emergencies. My Firm J didn't provide either and actually blocks all its numbers so that clients cannot call it. Only they can call clients. Should have been a huge red flag for me but I was blind at the time. Some firms will do in person or Skype for interviews, which makes sense. You want to simulate an interview environment. An acquaintance told me one firm likes to do in person meetings for non-interview stuff which is a tremendous waste of time. Worth asking a reference. This a point where firms are most likely to lie. How fast a firm will respond is something that differs dramatically when they are trying to sell you and when you have paid them. For me, I had emails responded to immediately in the sell period and then it dropped to one response for every 3 emails and then usually only if I called an assistant. Figuring out responsiveness is of utmost importance. Also figure out fast they can turn materials around. Replying "ok" means they are responsive but if they take days to turn materials around that is not good.

Find out when people are actually open for business. Every firm claims to work all the time. This is absolutely not true. The only people that I believed when talking to them were those who said that they take it easier on weekends or don't take calls on weekends or only work on weekends for emergencies. I worked with Firm J. They lied about working on weekends. Flat out lied. I wish I had known that before I forked over any money. Guess when you will have the most free time to work on your application. I also worked with Firm W. We never talked about how responsive my consultant would be, but before money ever changed hands, my consultant had already demonstrated that she was in the running for most responsive human being on earth. Worth asking a reference. This a point where firms are most likely to lie.

Ask for limits on things. Hours of the day that they will respond. Number of mock interviews. Firm are either 1 per school, a small set number like 2 or 3 total or unlimited but in practice they don't want you to take that many so they'll you throujgh scheduling. Very few firms can conduct a true Wharton interview. Not all firms do all things. There are also commonly limits on essay drafts. Many firms will say they don't have a limit, but they all do internally. And in practice, essays come together in 4-6 drafts but if you start off in the right direct. But if you don't and you have to start all over, that's when the essay draft limits hamper you. All things worth asking a reference. This a point where firms are most likely to lie.

Ask for writing samples. A lot of these admission consultants actually cannot write and very few can write well. I do not see as that big of an issue because you are going to put in your own voice. Also, the strategy is where they contribute the most. Help with writing you can get from colleagues, friends, family and even essay specialists. Not ever firm will give you writing samples and the most common excuse will be privacy concerns which is BS.

CONSULTANTS

Consultants seem to come from one of three common backgrounds. They are creative people, people who went to bschool or former admissions people. I don't have direct experience with the latter group so I cannot comment but I can say that the firms that do employ them and tout it prominently I did not think were not that great. Between creatives and bschool people I didn't think there was a big difference although some of the creative people were a little more flamboyant and out there in a good way.

The number of clients that an individual consultant will take on should scare you. 100 seemed to be the upper limit across 3 rounds. Unclear to me whether those were all clients with multiple schools and full application packages. Only a couple of consultants that I meant seemed truly capable of handling that workload and still providing high quality service. Just remember that you may work with 1 consultant but that person will work with dozens. A gold sticker for those who can keep track of all of those applications but for most consultants, they won't remember your candidacy that well and if they are not organized and take good notes, you're in trouble.

The founders of these firms are generally the most knowledgeable about admissions consulting. But they are not necessarily the people you want to work with. These founders in general are more likely to focus on business development, training and managing the consultants who work for them and giving one last look to applications. Their name brings people in the door but then other people handle the work and that's how it should be. Many have an every application must pass through my hands once before being finalized. How much room you think there is for them to answer your detailed questions, hop on calls at random times, provide meaningful feedback on essays, hold mock interviews and the like? Not much. They certainly have the talent and the aptitude to do the admissions consulting themselves but they usually don't. It is a double edged sword if you work with one directly. It is like having a star player but not knowing when they will play rather than having an average player that you know will play everyday.

I find that older women are generally better at admissions consulting. Younger folks will jump into admissions consulting because they are between jobs, need to supplement their income or need a job that they can do on a flexible schedule. The older women who have done this for a long time have the experience and it shows. Of course not all of the best in the business are older women. A couple of them are men.

Reach out to admissions consultants in the spring for R1. You will get a discount and they won't be as busy so they can spend more time with you.

FIRMS

There are three kinds of admissions consulting firms. There are one person or solo firms, medium size firms which range from 2 to 12 people and large firms. I worked with a large firm and a medium size firm but I really liked some of the solo practitioners. They seem to be more thoughtful as a group. Some of them are workhorses and do take on a lot of clients. The problem is that if they get sick at the wrong time, you are absolutely screwed. At least with a larger organization the work can be distributed.

Not every firm focuses on bschool admissions. All the firms I talked to had this as a core competency. I am conflicted on this point. There are two ways to look at this. One is that the focus helps. The other is analogous to someone who comes to bschool with international experiences stacked up against someone who has lived in one country all their life. No question who bschools like to choose.

There are specialists out there. There are firms and individuals that only edit essays or only conduct mock interviews. I wanted help with everything but if there is an area that you want to focus on, there are specialists. They are not necessarily better than the generalists who will work on specific areas for you on an hourly basis.

Some firms have a model where you work with multiple consultants. I think that is just silly. Stuff will just fall through the cracks because each consultant will think another consultant is doing the work. It requires a lot more communication which is really important in this process and the less these consultants have to communicate, the better because that means less opportunities to screw up. It is fine if a firm has you work with a consultant and then asks other consultants or its founder to take a second look. That's the preferred model.

Use disorganization to your advantage. I worked with Firm J and it was an unpleasant experience except for the results, the brilliant strategy and their process which I didn't appreciate until much later. They wasted a lot of my time, caused unnecessary stress and were generally unresponsive. Given the high level of disorganization and assistants who felt like they were on my side, I just had the assistants slot me in with random consultants at the firm when those consultants were free. I got extra looks at my essays and far more mock interviews than I would like to admit because there was no central accountability and the founder who I was working with had no clue what was going on. Maybe that's how it's actually suppose to work, this good cop-bad cop setup.

PRICING

There are two common pricing models. One model is the one fee model. I like it because neither side has to watch the clock. But at the same time, it incentivizes a consultant to do as little work for you as possible because they are usually paid up front. Pay as little up front as possible. The other model is hourly. While it should be honestly, it actually incentivizes a consultant to drag out their work for you as long as possible. I had a friend who worked with a consultant under both models and he swears something that normally took 20-30 minutes under the first model would take twice as long under the second model.

Pay as little up front if you can. It gives you some leverage when performance isn't what you expect. You can negotiate the payment terms. Some offer financial aid or payment plans.

Don't be afraid of the prices you see. Many firms like to throw up large sticker prices and then discount them in an effort to get you in the door. You can also start with a handful of schools and upgrade to more schools at the original price if you are satisfied with the service. Most firms will allow you to do this.

THINGS TO BEWARE OF

Beware of timezones. If you are in America, working with someone halfway across the world doesn't make sense. But a more likely scenario is being on the West Coast and working with someone on the East Coast. They will go to bed 3 hours earlier than you and you likely won't have time to work on your application until the evening.

Beware firms that have clients that feed into them. I work for a large firm that sends enough to bschool to have an admissions consulting team in house. They are not that good so I went outside. But firms that compete with mine will send their employees to these admissions consultants. Now think about it from the perspective from someone running an admissions consulting firm. They are going to prioritize applications from their feeder clients over people wandering in off the street so to speak. They will never name their feeder clients but they might mention them in an offhand way when they are trying to sell you. Maybe someone more resourceful than me can put a map together of what bschool feeders work with what firms. These relationships have been in place for several years and I will bet they don't change very often. Worth asking a reference.

Beware of your consultant quitting. This is a high turnover business. What recourse do you have if your consultant quits on you the day before apps are due? Your contract needs to cover this point very clearly and you need to be able to trust your firm to respond quickly and staff someone else. This happens a lot more than you think and a lot more candidates get screwed by this than you think.

WHAT IS EXPECTED OF YOU

You have to put in the time. The point of an admissions consultant is not to do the work for you. The point is to bring the best out of you and your candidacy. No one is going to do anything unethical. Let me be very clear. I did not see or hear of any admissions consultant doing anything unethical in relation to the admissions process. Sure some of them have terrible business practices but that is different from unethical. That means no one is going to write your essay. They really should not because everyone has a unique voice as cheesy as that sounds and I found that my consultants had distinct voices that were very different from mine. I still wonder if adcoms read these essays and just giggle to themselves and flag firms. I bet they are smart enough to notice but do not dock candidates because if they did it would drag the quality of the applicant pool down alot.

Do not expect your consultant to spoon feed you information that you can find on your own. Do not ask them questions that you can find out on the internet. It is a waste of your time. They should know all of this and be able to tell you without hesitation but you are wasting your money if this is why you are hiring an admissions consultant. There is a tremendous amount of resources available online, not in any one place. If you take all of the admissions consultants websites together, you can learn a tremendous amount. There is no one single best website and some of them are just filled with marketing fluff. The other half of the piece is the websites of the bschools.

THOUGHTS ON ADMISSIONS CONSULTANTS

Firm A: One of my finalists. A prominent firm that is smaller than most would think. Very experienced older women. Founder is more focused on business development but #2 was one of my favorite to meet. I imagine it would not have been bad if I worked with her. Website is one of the two best out there but it is very tough to navigate. Worth it if you put in the work.
Firm B: Larger firm. Nothing distinguished it.
Firm C: International firm. Missed our consultation. 
Firm D: Large firm and a prominent one that you will see on P&Q. The slowest to respond except for the one small firm that did not respond at all. I could just feel the inertia holding this firm back. A lot on their website and all of it is useless because all of it is marketing.
Firm E: International firm. Did not think they knew enough about my very common background to present me well.
Firm F: Larger firm. Not sure how to describe it except kind of sleepy. Appears very credentialed but talking to them did not inspire much confidence. Just found myself asking what they could really do for me. The founder seems like the kind of person who would fall asleep during a long or a boring meeting.
Firm G: Another one of my finalists. The founder was the most perceptive admissions consultant I talked to. Just next level eerily good perception. This firm also has other resources that are much more affordable than hiring a consultant. Wish I had known that last year when I applied, but then I think about how this year went.
Firm H: Large firm that partners with a GMAT prep service. I just thought the consultation process was too complicated. Website can be useful and is almost like a lite version of P&Q. Has published a book that is actually pretty good.
Firm I: Large firm that rides on the reputation of its founder. Founder will do nothing for you. Probably focused on business development. Has fast talking gatekeeper who makes you feel like you are just the next person to be processed. Was helpful in arranging a conversation with the consultant I was assigned. She was marketed as one of the most experienced consultants at this firm, which is troubling because she was a bit green.
Firm J: Large firm with intelligent, charismatic founder. Having worked with them in R1, I have a lot to say. I worked directly with the firm's founder who with the exception of maybe the head of Firm M is the best at strategy in the admissions business. Obviously I have not worked with everyone, but I feel pretty comfortable in making that assertion. Strategy is a bigger piece of your application than you think and it is a higher value service than any other. It is positioning your candidacy and figuring out what you want to say in your application. The rest is just execution and while that is not easy, it can be done over time and with effort. Strategy is more art than science and the firm's founder is exceptional at this. Another plus of this firm is the process. It is doubly important once I realized how truly dysfunctional the founder and the firm are. The process is equal parts arcane and infantile but it works. Now for the bad stuff. Working with the founder was probably a mistake. The strength in strategy was negated by the founder's desire to do actual admissions consulting being trumped by the founder's desire to build the top large admissions consulting firm. Worthwhile mentioning here that this firm offers every service under the sun. That means test prep and admissions consulting for any kind of school you can think of. I would not be surprised if they did admissions consulting for elite boarding schools. But the founder has a bschool bground and that is their core competency. The founder's time is spent mostly traveling around the world drumming up business by giving talks, holding webinars and meeting with feeder firms. As a result the applications of the folks who work with the founder, like mine, suffer. Good luck getting a response without sending an email three times and calling up the founder's assistant. We had plenty of calls scheduled but the founder missed fully half of them and had to reschedule the rest. There was maybe 1 or 2 phone calls in all of R1 that started within 3 minutes of the scheduled time. The litany of excuses would impress anyone: traveling internationally, going through a tunnel, having to go on stage to give a speech. I think several of the slots were double booked. But not to worry, all of the calls ended exactly when they were supposed to. So if I had a 30 minute call scheduled, the call usually would just be missed but if it did happen, it would start 10 minutes late, it would get disconnected in the middle, and then pick up with 5 minutes left and then end promptly at the end of the slot. So 5-10 minutes of talk time in 30 minutes total. The poor assistants are always making excuses because the founder is over-extended and trying to do too much. It is the right behavior if you want to build a business but if you are personally also doing admissions consulting, it is irresponsible. It is maddening because the founder clearly has the talent to be one of the best in the business but does not use much of it. Turnover is high at this firm but that is normal for any large firm. I should also note that not many people from my firm use outside admissions consultants because as a feeder to bschools, we have people in house. But that also meant that not many people are clients of this Firm J while competitors of my firm send a lot of clients to Firm J. Whose applications do you think a business savvy person like the founder would focus on? The applications of clients who offer tremendous repeat business or one off folks like me? The writing overall was average, although still better than Firm W which I also worked with. One nice thing about a high level of dysfunction and disorganization is that I could use that to my advantage. Thanks to the assistants, I could sneak in a lot of extra help from several other consultants at the firm at no extra cost even when it was clear from the founder that I would not get an extra look at an essay or a second mock interview because no one had any clue what was going on or what anyone else was doing.
Firm K: Large firm. Very similar in structure to Firm I. Another fast talking gatekeeper but this one was not as useful. Gatekeeper bungled scheduling call with a potential consultant. Talking to firms like this just make you feel like meat in a meat grinder. Has had a lot of departures over time, which is normal in this business but the difference is that I noticed more than a few of its consultants have decided to into business either solo or start their own firms. It is one thing to make people want to quit their jobs, it is another to make them want to quit it so that they can go head to head with you.
Firm L: Another very opinionated firm. Guides make them seem thoughtful and there is some useful stuff, but light on substance overall and the useful stuff will not be clear until you learn the substance anyway. Not a good fit with the consultant I was assigned.
Firm M: Prominent personality in the admissions consulting world and it is deserved. Absolute machine, does a lot solo, very opinionated, very smart and very good at reading the admissions tea leaves from what I can tell. Surprisingly responsive. Almost like a mythical, shadowy underworld figure. Services are demanded more than anyone else's, so hire services early. I could not get a spot because was too booked.
Firm N: One of my finalists. Works solo. Fit my experienced older woman stereotype to a tee. Very similar to Firm O. Eerily similar. They should join forces. They would be unstoppable.
Firm O: One of my finalists. Works solo. Also fit my experienced older woman stereotype to a tee. Very friendly. Maybe too nice. I like a little more cutthroat. Has written a book and it is not that useful.
Firm P: Could potentially be the best in the business. I will never know because I was scared off by the insane number of clients that she takes on. One of those folks that an elite bschool feeder or maybe a few uses exclusively. In hindsight, everyone takes on an insane number of clients. If you really knew how many, you would be scared off too. Has been doing this for a very long time but focus is not just bschool.
Firm Q: One of two firms that did not respond. That was a shame because the founder fit my older woman rule of thumb.
Firm R: Works solo. Young, smart opinionated guy. I have nothing bad to say about him but I just felt that I fit better with other people.
Firm S: One of two firms that did not respond. It may be defunct.
Firm T: Works solo. Had a tough time understanding her due to her accent. I am not good with accents. I have heard a lot of good things about her through the grapevine. Not a finalist for me though.
Firm U: One of the older, experienced veterans of the business. Works solo. Did some hourly work with him in moments of disgust with my other consultants. Very knowledgeable. My knock on him is that he is too nice. A little bit of time spent working with him built up my confidence but also made me pine for Firm J which would largely ignore me or perform in every sub par way possible or Firm W which had a rip your throat out mentality.
Firm V: One man shop. Has some informal consulting relationship with Firm G. Go to consultant for an elite bschool feeder firm. Did not seem like that great of a writer. Pedigreed but seems to suffer from an inferiority complex.
Firm W: Ended up working with a consultant from this medium sized firm in R2. Consultant had strong personality and was highly opinionated. No hesitation to yell, brandish papers or speak bluntly which was fine for me because I constantly travel and work at a no BS firm anyway. A terrible writer though. Not for everyone, but worked for me. Very responsive. Probably the most responsive person I encountered during the entire application and interview process. Seemed like my consultant just sat at home and answered my emails and turned things around because I would get very fast responses whether at 3 am or 7 am. Founder comes from Firm K.
Firm X: They assumed that I would work with them because I contacted them. They were wrong.
Firm Y: Essay specialist so not helpful for going through an entire application and interview process.
Firm Z: Hub and spoke model. I do not even know what that means after over a year but I am guessing that I means I would have worked with multiple people for different schools and different parts of my application. Perfect for stuff falling through the cracks. No thanks. Pass.
Firm AA: The first firm I talked to, a larger firm. Kind of regret not following up with them but the consultant I would have worked with overstated his knowledge of my background. Fantastic interview resources available for free online plus some paid resources which are not as useful.

AmrithS · Answer

Man that's a load of information you have there

I appreciate that it's all first hand. Congratulations on your admits. Regards, Amrith

dtse86 · Answer

Wow, very thorough reviews. I'm surprised that you looked so deeply into so many consultants. Reading through your descriptions I feel like I can almost pick out who's who. I think I had some similar experiences, but perhaps with not as many.

Congrats on the admits!

Congrats on the admits!

aelric · Answer

Then I have done my job. Here is the other half of this guide.