Siblings in College Admissions

These particular siblings are not former clients. We just figured we’d put up their picture. We’re not sure why.

We love siblings. One of our long-running sayings here at Ivy Coach is that we rarely get referrals of friends. And why? Because nobody wants to admit that they had help in the process of their child earning admission to the college of their dreams. BUT we almost always get the siblings. And we usually get the cousins. Because when it comes to even distant family, people usually hold back their pride to help their loved ones achieve their dreams. Although sometimes they don’t even want to tell the cousins. It all depends on family dynamics. Naturally.

There is something we struggle with when it comes to siblings. Sometimes, parents come back to us years later to help their next child and they’re surprised when our fees have gone up, often significantly. Our fees go up annually. And while we develop relationships with our former parents (we quite often really like them as we’ve gone through a stressful process together!), it’s hard to tell them that our fees aren’t the same. Sometimes they ask if we can honor our fees from years before. But we can’t. That would be an opportunity cost for us, in simple economic terms. And, frankly, clients pay our fees having never worked with us. These returning parents have been shown proof of concept. So they know how effective we are at helping their children earn admission to their dream schools.

It fills us with angst when these former clients reach out to us because we want to help them, we do. It’s just, well, we needed to vent because we absolutely don’t like not taking on former clients who wish to work with us again. It’s something we vent about every now and then. We feel badly about it but, at the same time, we can only work with so many students each year and we are, at the end of the day, a business.