In The Press

My family’s business, Ivy Coach, now includes personnel from a third generation. It began three-and-a-half decades ago when my mom, then a high school counselor, recognized that families navigating America’s highly selective college admissions process needed guidance that schools simply didn’t have the capacity to provide. She saw a need before there was an industry.

“In elite college admissions, there’s no courtroom standard of ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ Students will not get the benefit of the doubt,” Weingarten wrote.

As managing partner of Ivy Coach, my family’s generational college admissions consulting business, I’ve spent years helping build one of the most widely read resources on college admissions. Our blog has chronicled virtually every major shift in admissions over the past three decades. We’ve invested countless hours researching, reporting, writing, editing and refining our work. Unfortunately, we’ve also spent years defending it.

“Admissions officers don’t want to see that you went to fancy sleepaway camps. They want to see that you participated in meaningful activities related to your academic passions and goals,” says Skaran, who works in Chicago for Ivy Coach. “Summer camps signal privilege.”

After graduation, Jager-Hyman worked as a Dartmouth admissions officer (she admitted Taylor, a fellow Roslyn native). After they both graduated and returned to New York, they became friends and professional competitors, running two of the most prestigious college admissions consultancies in Manhattan. Jager-Hyman, whose hard-charging style found its way into HBO’s And Just Like That…, was at College Prep 360; Taylor, whose side hustle is working with celebrated writer James McBride on screen adaptions of his novels, at Ivy Coach. 

When a compelling speaker is announced, admissions teams will often “shout it from the rooftops” in their marketing and outreach to prospective students, said Jayson Weingarten, a senior admissions consultant with the Manhattan-based Ivy Coach.