College Admissions Advertisements

A key objective of Ivy Coach’s college admissions blog is to demystify the college admissions process. To do so, we often speak truth to power and call out high school administrators, admissions officers, private college counselors, press outlets, and more who don’t tell it like it is. Today, we call out The New York Post, a paper we love for its salacious headlines and laud for its tongue-in-cheek, often subversive humor. So why are we calling them out? Well, we believe the paper is often masquerading advertising as journalism. Allow us to explain.

When perusing the news feed of The New York Post, there are frequently articles about college admissions and how students can improve their cases for admission to top universities, including the Ivy League schools. But upon closer inspection, these are not articles. Rather, they are advertisements — from one college consulting firm in particular: Command Education. Readers of The New York Post are supposed to know that a “Dispatch from Command Education” as The NYP dups it are self-serving ads touting the supposed benefits of working with this firm rather than actual journalism? Please.

Editors of The New York Post, we appreciate you. We appreciate the niche you’ve carved in the world of print and digital journalism. We appreciate the snark. We appreciate the flavorful headlines. We appreciate your own original, always unique spin. But we don’t appreciate you regularly masquerading advertisements as journalism, as we see it. It’s beneath you. So either stop posting these supposed “articles” or make it much more clear that these are advertisements by a college counseling company that is likely paying good money for the placements. Your readers have a right to be able to clearly distinguish what we believe to be the self-serving propaganda of a private company from truth.