What is your track record of student admissions to top schools?

Our success rate exceeds 96% for clients who work with us at the comprehensive level. Our acceptance rates run 2.5 to 3 times higher than the schools’ own published rates. We’ve maintained roughly a 32% acceptance rate at HBS over the past five years, against their average of around 12%.

Here’s what we actually think about that number. When you’re shopping firms, you’ll see 95%, 98%, 94% — numbers that look roughly comparable. But our 96% is not the same as another firm’s 96%. If you were to weight for the risk we take on — candidates with lower stats, unconventional backgrounds, ambitious target lists — that number should be significantly higher on an adjusted basis. We don’t lock clients into fixed packages with built-in minimums. We don’t turn away applicants aiming for top schools. We don’t reject less competitive candidates to protect our metrics. That happens across this industry, constantly, and it means the firms posting similar numbers are often playing a fundamentally different game with a stacked deck. We would honestly take a 50% success rate built on the risks we take over a competitor’s 96% built on pre-selected, handpicked clients with all the difficult cases quietly turned away at the door.

If that rate dipped next year, it wouldn’t mean the quality of our work declined — it could mean our clients that cycle were swinging at more ambitious targets, or a demographic shift made one pool more competitive. The consultant is the same. The craft is the same. Success rate as a metric has unfortunately seeped into how buyers evaluate this industry, so here we are. But the stat we’re most proud of isn’t a percentage — it’s the number of clients who came to us convinced they couldn’t compete and ended up somewhere they didn’t think was possible.