Command Education https://www.commandeducation.com/ You may also be interested in Yelp reviews of the business available here: https://www.yelp.com/biz/command-education-new-york#reviews where one reviewer was quoted a price of $1500/hour or $55,000 per year to work with their child.
Hello there. My name is Leah Derus. I’m an MIT Sloan MBA and Fulbright recipient who has worked in MBA and EMBA admissions for over a decade. This past application season (2022-23) one of my MBA clients shared my contact info with a family he knew. This family told me that they had paid Command Education a $100,000 U.S. to help their child apply to several Ivy League undergraduate programs in the U.S.
According to the parents, their high school student received deferrals across the board in the early decision/round one despite having a near-perfect standardized test score and GPA with many advanced placements. The applicant’s parents expressed the opinion that at the $100,000 price point, the Command Education staff would do a thorough job, treating their child with kid gloves, and that the parents would be freed up to focus on other family matters (their busy careers, other children, etc.).
My opinion of the personal statement and college-specific essays that the parents provided me with was shock. My personal assessment was that they were cliche and did not demonstrate, in my opinion, a sophisticated-enough level of thought to gain entry to a top university. According to what the parents told me, their child had been working on them for months with an employee of Command Education. In one diversity essay (which I fictionalize here for privacy) the Command Education employee had seemingly helped the applicant write about going to a local event and how it was ‘diverse’ because anyone can go. By that logic a county fair would be ‘diverse’ as long as people weren’t actively prevented from attending. This made little sense ot me (and I assume, to you too). The logic appeared to be “diversity=non-exclusivity”. My opinion was that this logic was not very evolved. As a graduate student at MIT, I was a teaching assistant who worked with MIT undergraduate students and had a good sense of the intellectual rigor required.
I ended up working with this applicant and in a matter of two weeks, we had buttoned up a solid essay set. That said, I am not an undergraduate-level essay coach. I am posting my personal experience here to give parents the opportunity to perform their own due diligence before engaging with a college placement consulting firm. My personal opinion (as an essay writer and admissions coach) is that you could do a lot better/just as well by hiring a native English speaker, non-fiction writer off of a platform like upwork.com There’s also an article about where to find writers here https://www.contentgrip.com/websites-hire-a-writer/ Also I do know that Accepted offers college admissions https://www.accepted.com/college I’m familiar with them because of their okay (but not great) MBA admissions work.
Wishing you the best!