The product-placement admission strategy

I got inspired to start researching and sharing information on college admissions after doing a lot of reading about a culture that looks pretty unsavory — a world where applicants are branded and marketed like commodities.

I don't think the applicants immersed in that culture are the target market for this blog, so I considered ignoring it completely. But this Business Week article gives a quick look at that world, and it's pretty riveting. This consultant's name came up early on in my research, and she is indeed highly controversial.

Luckily, it sounds to me like normal, healthy kids and families can do just fine without engaging in marketplace strategies. You have to wonder about the colleges that admit applicants who have paid big bucks to re-image and product-position themselves. Too bad that can't be factored into some ranking or other.

Business Week Oct. 22, 2007
IN DEPTH
By Susan Berfield and Anne Tergesen

I Can Get Your Kid into an Ivy
Michele Hernandez boasts that 95% of her teenage clients are accepted by their first-choice school. Her price: As much as $40,000 a student

As I listened to my 8th period English teacher drone on for the third time about how Finny, a character in A Separate Peace, was indeed the main character although he was not the narrator, it finally dawned on me that this was not the exciting world of high school that I had hoped for.

This is how Andrew Garza began an essay in his application to Haverford College. It was a 1,200-word piece that established him as an intellectually curious young man. It was crafted to appeal specifically to the admissions officers at the small liberal arts school. And it was the idea of his high-priced college admissions coach, Michele A. Hernandez. Garza attended a private school in Switzerland, and that worried Hernandez: She thought he might appear to be a privileged teenager without much substance. So she advised him to write about why he had left his public high school in suburban New Jersey. "We had to make it seem like he didn't want to be around so many rich kids. We spun a whole story about him taking the initiative to leave in order to broaden his experience," Hernandez says. "It was his initiative. But he wouldn't have written about it."

Today Andrew is a senior at Haverford, studying sociology and economics. His father, John, paid Hernandez $18,000 for 18 months' worth of advice. "It is a lot of money," says Garza, a manager at Abitibi-Consolidated (ABY ) in New York. "But if you look at it as an investment, it's not a bad one."

A DIVISIVE FIGURE

Hernandez may well be the most expensive college coach in America, charging as much as $40,000 to get a student into an elite college. As one of this fast-growing industry's most visible practitioners, she uses methods that are publicly scorned by rivals but are nonetheless becoming part of the profession's standard operating procedures. She is a divisive figure in an already controversial field, regularly drawing condemnation from admissions officers who say she is selling advantage to people who least need it.

If the notoriety sometimes bothers her, Hernandez is not about to let on. To her critics, she says: "I'd be an idiot to charge half of what I can. Parents can always hire a lesser person." That might sound arrogant, but she is clearly proud of turning her one-woman operation, Hernandez College Consulting, into what amounts to a luxury brand. Her clients, mostly people of some means and great ambition, rave about the personal service: the regular phone calls to their kids (you have to go above and beyond); the academic help (read the book Poetic Meter and Poetic Form); the "brand" positioning (classics would be a great angle); the advice about which colleges to consider and where not to bother; the hours she devotes to each application.
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