I Can Get Your Kid Into an Ivy

Andrew and Ben were typical Hernandez clients: bright, eager, and just months away from applying to college. Before long, though, she began to promote her services for younger kids. Hiring Hernandez to work with 14-year-olds became a more tempting proposition for parents as they watched the acceptance rates at elite schools drop. By 2004 she was signing up a new eighth-or ninth-grade student almost every month. She had also moved to Portland, Ore., remarried, given birth to her second child, and begun calling herself "America's Premiere College Consultant."

Finding the 'Selling Point'
What sets Hernandez apart these days is the intensity with which she extends into adolescence the Brand Me imperative. Her approach with these students depends on sussing out and then encouraging their own inclinations. If someone says she likes photography, Hernandez might suggest she take photos of the homeless, then mount an exhibit as a way to raise money. "A kid wouldn't come up with that idea on their own," she says. "They don't know what colleges are looking for." Hernandez advised a student working on a nanotechnology project to e-mail famous scientists and compile the exchanges into a book. "If you did that, I guarantee you'd get into any school," she said to the girl. To another student who enjoys studying Latin, Hernandez suggested learning Greek over the summer, too: "It's a great selling point." When a ninth-grade boy said he might be interested in his school's tech club, she told him: "You can take it over and take it in a new direction."

Today, Hernandez has 80 clients. And yet, unlike Cohen of IvyWise, who now has a staff of 15 providing help with applications for nursery school on up, Hernandez is still on her own, answering every phone call, sending every e-mail. She doesn't want to manage employees and, in any case, doesn't believe her knowledge can be transferred or replicated. That, of course, places a natural limit on her business. In 2005 she hadn't yet reached it but was close enough that she began looking for other ways to expand her operation. She soon came up with an idea that would again be derided by educators and embraced by parents.

Hernandez and Mimi Doe, a parenting expert with whom she had just written the book, Don't Worry, You'll Get In: 100 Winning Tips for Stress-Free College Admissions, announced their first application boot camp. It was a $7,800, four-day summer program for students about to enter their senior year. Doe and Hernandez promised they would leave with completed applications and a strategy for where to seek admission.

All 15 spaces for the New York seminar, held at the luxury Kitano hotel, were snapped up in weeks. In the summers of 2006 and 2007, Hernandez and Doe raised the price, first to $8,200 and then to $9,500, and still filled one session in Manhattan and another at the Shutters Hotel in Santa Monica. Next year they may hire others to help edit the essays so they can open the program to more students. They will charge $12,500.

But is it worth it? There is no way to verify her claims. Even Andrew and Ben, who respect her expertise and dedication, express some ambivalence. "I would like to think that I would have gotten in anyway," says Andrew. "But the reality is, you never know. I think Michele eliminated the risk that I wouldn't get in." Ben, mulling over his college experience in the months after graduation, puts it this way: "I'm thankful to Michele. I didn't think she was indispensable, though. Could I have done it myself? Maybe. Could I have gone somewhere else and been happy? Yes."

Certainly, plenty of kids delight in the opportunities consultants like Hernandez make available to them. Many thrive under high expectations; others aren't undone by the sacrifices called for. Ben, for example, has no regrets about following Hernandez' advice, even if it meant giving up the camaraderie of the track team and summer camp. Andrew's experience led to a job with Habitat in Mexico for one year before he began Haverford. And during college vacations, he worked with microlending programs in Latin America.

But, in general, the intense pressure to succeed is a big reason the incidence of anxiety, depression, and drug use is as high among children of the affluent as it is among children of the inner city, according to Columbia University psychologist Suniya S. Luthar. "Young people perceive that their whole lives are building to this moment of applications, rejections, acceptances. They see it as either you make it or you are doomed to a second-class existence," she says. Even those who do get into top schools may suffer the consequences of their success. Barry Schwartz, a psychology professor at Swarthmore College, says: "Those who excel enough to get into Harvard or Stanford are likely to be less inspired students once that goal has been achieved."

Set aside for the moment the concerns of the affluent, though. There is another fear about expensive counselors such as Hernandez: that they help distort an educational system that can already leave the less privileged at a disadvantage. As Ben says, "It's so not a level playing field to start with, and then you go beyond. I just told friends it was my dad's idea to hire her."

Hernandez, meanwhile, is finding new ways to extend her brand. She and Doe have created a virtual boot camp ($2,999). They have put together a 60-page book, Set Yourself Apart: The Ultimate Guide to Top High School Summer Programs ($189). They have a partnership with two SAT tutors who on Hernandez' Web site offer five hours of help over the phone ($1,600). And Hernandez and Doe are hoping to link up with a travel consultant, someone who could plan family trips to visit colleges. "That will be like Ralph Lauren's Purple Label," Hernandez says. "It won't be for everybody."

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