In The Press

More than 58% of UChicago’s Class of 2029, the most recently reported cohort in the Common Data Set, identifies as male, up three percentage points in a year and from 52% for the Class of 2025. UChicago hasn’t welcomed an incoming class this male-skewing since 1987, when “Dirty Dancing” hit theaters and nobody put Baby in a corner. But it seems UChicago is putting women there.

“The extraordinary value and prestige attached to their names, it feels like it gives them a certain insulation from scandals,” said Charis Ralko, a senior admissions consultant at Ivy Coach, a college admissions consulting firm. “Students and families often just aren’t that quick to walk away,” Ms. Ralko, a former associate director of admissions at Washington University in St. Louis, said. “And people forget, unfortunately.”

It’s become fashionable to declare that college isn’t worth it. As a senior admissions consultant at Ivy Coach, I’ll say something that might surprise people. Sometimes, it isn’t. America has more than a thousand colleges, and not every degree is worth today’s extraordinary tuition. But lumping MIT, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, Williams and their highly selective peers into a generic debate over whether “college is worth it” misses the point entirely.

As a former University of Pennsylvania admissions officer who now serves as a senior admissions consultant at Ivy Coach, a leading college consulting firm, I saw an unmistakable contradiction. How could America’s most selective universities continue favoring children of alumni after the Supreme Court prohibited them from favoring underrepresented minority applicants?

Nevertheless, for many prospective students and their families, U.S. News is still considered “the king of college rankings. Every other ranking lives in its shadow,” said Jayson Weingarten, a senior admissions consultant with the Manhattan-based Ivy Coach. “In some corners of the country, and the world, it’s treated almost like the Bible.”

At Ivy Coach, a leading college consultancy, we’ve been in business for three and a half decades. Increasingly, we’ve noticed something we never expected to become a business problem. Our prospective clients don’t read.