Inside
Admissionado

Three things set us apart, and none of them are “our consultants went to fancy schools.”

First, we don’t pre-qualify clients. A lot of firms quietly cherry-pick applicants who are near-locks, then claim sky-high success rates. We take on candidates who need real strategic work — lower stats, unconventional backgrounds, complicated narratives — because we believe that’s where great consulting actually matters. It’s riskier for our numbers, but it’s more honest and more interesting.

Second, we run a team-based model. Every client works with a lead consultant on strategy and a dedicated essay specialist on writing. Most firms give you one person doing both, which means they’re either great at strategy and mediocre at line-editing, or vice versa. We split it intentionally so you get depth on both sides without anyone burning out by application number six.

Third, our hiring process is brutal. About 5-6% of applicants make it through. We don’t hire based on alma mater or former admissions committee experience — we hire based on demonstrated ability to diagnose and coach. We test that blind, with no résumé attached, because a credential can be seductive and we’d rather trust the work.

It means we’ll tell you the thing the other firm was too polite to mention. If your essay reads like a LinkedIn post, we’ll say so. If your school list is built on wishful thinking instead of strategic logic, we’ll restructure it. If your “leadership story” is actually a story about showing up, we’ll push you to find the real one.

This isn’t about being harsh for sport. It’s about respecting the stakes. These applications determine where you spend the next two to four years and who you’re surrounded by while you’re there. A consultant who tells you everything is great when it isn’t is stealing your money and your time. Our clients consistently tell us that the direct feedback — the moments where we challenged the premise of what they thought their story was — produced the biggest breakthroughs. Comfort doesn’t get people into competitive programs. Clarity does.

Students who want to be coached, not coddled. If you’re looking for someone to validate choices you’ve already made and polish essays you’ve already written, we’re probably not the best fit — and we’ll tell you that on the consultation call. But if you want a team that will pressure-test your thinking, find angles you didn’t see, and push you to produce work that genuinely represents your best self, that’s where we do our best work.

Our strongest outcomes tend to come from clients who show up with some combination of intellectual curiosity, openness to feedback, and a willingness to put in the reps. We’ve worked with straight-A students at elite prep schools and first-generation applicants from under-resourced high schools. The common thread isn’t the profile — it’s the posture. If you’re coachable and you care about getting this right, we’ll meet you where you are and get you somewhere meaningfully better.

No. And you should be suspicious of any firm that does. A guarantee in admissions consulting is either a lie, a hedge wrapped in fine print, or a sign that the firm only takes clients who don’t actually need help. None of those scenarios serve you.

Here’s the reality: admissions decisions involve variables no consultant controls — institutional priorities, class composition targets, reader subjectivity, yield modeling. What we can control is the quality of the application, the strength of the strategy, and the story the committee encounters when they open your file. Our job is to maximize the surface area of your competitiveness, apply to a smart range of schools, and make sure nothing in the application is working against you that shouldn’t be. When we do that well — and we have a 96%+ success rate at the comprehensive package level — the outcomes follow. But putting a guarantee on a process with inherent uncertainty would be dishonest, and dishonesty is a bad foundation for a relationship built on trust.

AI can be genuinely interesting and wildly unreliable, sometimes in the same sentence. The honest answer is that it’s a powerful tool with real limitations, and the firms pretending it doesn’t exist are just as misguided as the ones quietly using it to do the actual work.

Our position: if a specific use of AI adds more value to our ability to help a student, we would be fools not to leverage that opportunity. Why wouldn’t you want every possible advantage for your clients? For research, for stress-testing angles, for exploring how a particular school might read a particular framing — if it makes us sharper, we will use whatever tool is effective. AI, a red pen, a whiteboard, a three-hour phone call, a dog-eared copy of a school’s published class profile — we don’t romanticize the instrument, we care about the result.

Where we draw a hard line is the writing itself, and not for the reason you might think. Sure, AI can write convincingly. It can probably mimic your child’s voice with enough samples. But the process of figuring out what to say — wrestling with the story, discovering what actually matters to you, learning to translate your own thinking into clear, persuasive prose — that has profound carryover effects that go far beyond one application. That skill serves our clients for a lifetime: in interviews, in professional writing, in how they advocate for themselves. Shortcutting it with a generated draft doesn’t just risk detection, it robs the student of something genuinely valuable. Our consultants aren’t here for the paycheck. They’re here because they love coaching. And you don’t shortchange the thing you love.

Coaching is helping a student figure out what to say and why it matters. Editing is helping them say it better. Ghostwriting is saying it for them. We do the first two aggressively and the third one never.

In practice, this means our consultants will challenge your thesis, restructure your argument, push you to cut the paragraph you’re emotionally attached to, and suggest a stronger opening. Our essay specialists will tighten your prose, flag clichés, and show you how to make a three-sentence answer hit harder than your original five-sentence version. What they won’t do is write your sentences for you, fabricate experiences, or produce a draft that doesn’t originate from your own words and ideas. Every piece of writing that leaves our process should be something the student can look at and say “that’s mine.” If they can’t, we haven’t done our job — we’ve done their job, which helps nobody when they show up on campus and the writing has to be their own again.

With a raised eyebrow and some math. If a firm claims a 100% success rate, ask them how they define “success” and how many clients they take per year. You’ll usually find one of two things: either they’re defining success as “got into at least one school on a list that included several near-certainties,” or they’re quietly turning away anyone who isn’t already highly competitive. Both approaches inflate the number without reflecting the quality of the consulting.

As for “insider influence” — the idea that a former admissions officer on staff means your application gets special treatment — that’s not how admissions works. Readers rotate, committees change, and no one consultant has a bat-phone to the dean’s office. What actually helps is a smart strategy, a sharp application, and an authentic narrative. If a firm is selling access instead of craft, they’re selling a fantasy. We’d rather compete on the work.