Ambitious parents are spending hundreds of thousands on consultants to help get their kids into Ivy League schools

Some parents are paying consultants as much as $750,000 to work on their children’s college applications from the seventh grade as acceptance rates plummet.

Acceptance rates have fallen as mandatory standardized testing is increasingly shunned by many elite universities.

Data from FairTest, an advocacy group for equitable testing, suggests more than 1,800 US colleges including Harvard, New York University (NYU), and Stanford are now test-optional, favoring other measures of aptitude instead.

NYU’s acceptance rate plummeted from 15.3% for 2024, with 13,000 accepted from 85,000 applications, to just 8% for its recently announced class of 2027, according to Crimson Education. Just 9,600 students were accepted from 120,000 applications. The acceptance rate for NYU’s class of 2018 was 36%.

That competition’s also upped the ante for parents trying to give their kids a leg up, with consultants starting to advise on students’ academic lives from the age of 12.

“These schools every year get better and better at getting students to apply,” Brian Taylor, managing partner at private college counseling firm Ivy Coach, told Bloomberg. “As an extreme example, more C students applying to Harvard does not make the Harvard applicant pool more competitive.” 

For IvyWise, a college consulting group, the services include refining coursework plans from the ninth grade, recommending suitable extracurricular and summer activities, and identifying suitable teachers to eventually write recommendation letters.