FAQs

It isn't a question of talent. It's a question of time and scope. Most high school counselors carry caseloads in the hundreds and split their days between course scheduling, transcripts, recommendation logistics, and student crises. They're serving the whole senior class at once, and they can't build a strategy around one student's particular strengths.

Our work starts earlier and goes deeper: figuring out what your student is genuinely good at and interested in, shaping extracurriculars and summers around that, choosing courses that strengthen the transcript, building a college list matched to both fit and merit money, and then making every piece of the application (essays, resume, interviews, portfolio, demonstrated interest, SAT/ACT scores) tell one coherent story. Your counselor handles the school's side of the process. We handle your student's.

One-on-one packages for 11th and 12th graders range from $12,997 to $24,997. Packages for 8th through 10th graders range from $3,497 to $26,997. SAT/ACT prep and academic tutoring are handled by a trusted independent partner and billed separately, from $225 to $3,600.

The range reflects how much runway we have and how much ground there is to cover. A junior who needs a college list, ten applications, and a full set of essays is a different scope than a ninth grader building a four-year plan. A student presenting an arts portfolio or auditioning is different again. On your Admission Strategy Session we'll tell you honestly which tier fits, including if the answer is the smallest one.

Not everyone needs one-on-one though. We built our group coaching program to deliver the same frameworks, the same timelines, and the same standards at a fraction of the cost. Families use it across all four years of high school, and siblings enroll at a discount. Packages range from $1,497 to $3,997.

Neither. They're just different jobs.

The ideal window opens in 8th through 10th grade, because that's when the decisions that quietly shape an application are still open: which courses to take, which activities to commit to versus drop, how to spend three summers, whether to sit the SAT or the ACT. Start there and you're building a profile rather than packaging one.

That said, many families come to us in 11th grade, and there is still real leverage there: summer planning, the college list, the merit strategy, the essays, and the application itself are all ahead of you.

In 12th grade there is still a lot we can do to ensure your son or daughter submits the strongest possible essays and applications. Book the call and we'll guide you on the 12th grade process to maximize admission and scholarship results.

No, and you should be wary of anyone who says otherwise. No independent consultant has influence over an admissions decision, and any firm implying they do is either misleading you or doing something you don't want associated with your child's file. We're members of IECA and hold to its ethical standards on exactly this point.

What we can do is control everything that's genuinely controllable: a college list built on real admission and merit data rather than name recognition, a profile developed over time instead of assembled at the deadline, and applications where every piece is doing deliberate work. To date, 100% of our students have been admitted to at least one of their top-choice schools and every one has received scholarship money. Those are our results because they're what a well-built strategy tends to produce.

For many of our families, it has. Our students' merit and talent scholarships have ranged from $12,000 to $343,000, and 100% of them have received an award. And in 2026, our families on average received $95,000 in merit scholarships per school.

Here's the part most families don't know: merit money is largely an institutional-fit problem, not a "get better grades" problem. The same student can be an ordinary applicant at one school and exactly the profile another school is trying to recruit, and that second school will pay for them. We've tracked which colleges are consistently generous to which kinds of students for over a decade, and that research became our proprietary Merit Vault™ matching system. You get a report explaining precisely why each college is on your list and what it's likely to offer.

This matters most for middle and upper-middle income families, who are often told they earn too much for need-based aid and assume that's the end of the conversation. It usually isn't.

Your student is paired with a dedicated advisor who becomes their person for the whole journey. Every advisor on our team was chosen and personally trained by Anjali in the Talent Development 3D Process™, the method she built over fifteen years as a Princeton alumna interviewer and a decade of guiding families to the results you see on this site. They aren't working from a script. They were taught how she reads a student and how to leverage past admission and scholarship data and that is what shapes your student's plan.

Anjali no longer works with students one on one, but nothing consequential happens without her. Every decision that actually moves the needle still goes through her: the college list, the strategy behind it, how your student is positioned, and the judgment calls that come up along the way. Your advisor is the person you'll talk to week to week. Anjali and her team have eyes on each student's strategy, so you get the best of both worlds: one point of contact but the collective wisdom of a small, elite team of advisors working in the background.

Around that team sits a bench of specialists brought in wherever they add something a generalist can't: an athletic recruiting specialist, a UK and European college expert, master SAT/ACT tutors, a film professional for media-bound students, a gap year advisor, and arts mentors for portfolio and audition work.

We're based in Austin, Texas, but the work is done online and our families are spread across the U.S. and abroad. We advise on Canadian, UK, and European applications alongside U.S. ones when that's part of the plan.

We never write your student's essays. Admissions readers are very good at spotting adult writing, and an essay that doesn't sound like a real seventeen-year-old costs more than a rough one that does. What we do is brainstorm, ask the questions that surface the right story, structure it, and give sharp feedback across multiple drafts, the same way a good writing teacher would. The words stay your student's.

Your role is smaller than you might expect, and that's intentional. You get ongoing parent guidance, a personalized timeline, and prompt answers to your questions, so you always know where things stand. And you have access at any moment to your child's progress on our application tracking platform as well as through the updates you receive from the advisors after each meeting. But the deadline-nagging and essay-negotiating largely move off your plate and onto ours. Most parents tell us that's the part that changed their household: the process stopped being something they had to enforce.