Do you hire former admissions officers, and does that actually help?

We don’t prioritize it, and here’s why — even though we completely understand the appeal. “This person sat on Stanford’s admissions committee! If anyone knows what they’re looking for, it’s them!” It makes intuitive sense. Who better than the gatekeeper?

But think about it this way. A food critic who’s reviewed hundreds of restaurants knows exactly what makes a great dining experience. That doesn’t make them a great chef. The skills are adjacent but fundamentally different — one evaluates, the other creates. A former admissions officer can tell you what they used to look for at one institution during the years they served. That’s a data point, and it can be interesting. But the job of an admissions consultant isn’t to evaluate your application from behind a desk — it’s to sit across from a seventeen-year-old who doesn’t know their own story yet and coax it out of them. To build strategy across twelve schools, not just the one where they used to work. To coach, not just judge.

We’ve worked with former deans. Some had valuable perspectives. But we found the value of those insider insights to be ephemeral — useful as background knowledge, not as a consulting superpower. Meanwhile, the skills that actually move the needle — diagnostic instinct, emotional intelligence, the ability to adapt coaching style to wildly different personalities — those are things a former dean may or may not have. We’d take a better consultant pound-for-pound over a former dean of Harvard any day of the week. The dean credential helps you make more sales. It doesn’t automatically produce better work or better outcomes for the client. And that’s our standard.