Why Great Experts Don’t Tell Clients What They Want to Hear

“Can you guarantee my son’s admission to Harvard?” For 35 years, our answer at Ivy Coach, a leading college consulting firm, has always been the same: “No.” Then we usually add, for good measure, “Nobody can guarantee your son’s admission to Harvard. And if someone tells you they can, run, run fast, and run for the hills.”

It tends to put some useful distance between us and prospective clients we probably don’t want becoming clients anyway. In our business, the G-word is a major red flag.

The G-word is coming up more often

But over the last few years, we’ve noticed something strange. More parents are coming to us expecting guarantees. And increasingly, their expectations bear little relationship to reality. We used to joke that somewhere out there was a parent of a C student searching for the college consultant who could get their child into Harvard (and not even via the secretive Z-List!). It’s not a joke anymore.

We hear from more and more families whose children simply aren’t remotely in the academic ballpark for the schools they’re targeting, yet they still ask some version of, “Can you guarantee it?” No. The C student is still not getting into Harvard. Although, for the record, we once helped a student with Ds earn admission to Stanford as a transfer. But that was hardly a normal admissions case.

He had been deeply depressed at West Point under the military’s then-existing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, and his grades suffered badly as a result. Stanford’s decision to admit him sent a rather unmistakable message about what it thought of the circumstances and that discriminatory policy. So, yes, sometimes even the D student gets into Stanford. Just don’t build a business model around it.

Of course, where there are extraordinary exceptions, there will always be people looking for a way to manufacture one. You might think the 2019 Varsity Blues scandal would have permanently disabused people of the notion that college admissions consultants possess some secret lever they can pull. William “Rick” Singer’s operation involved bribing coaches and facilitating cheating on standardized tests. But apparently, yesterday’s scandal has become today’s ancient history.

Paying for expertise doesn’t mean buying an outcome

So why do expectations of some prospective clients, parents navigating the highly selective college admissions process, seem to be getting more unreasonable? Maybe it reflects something larger happening in American culture. We’ve become more distrustful and more adversarial. Pew Research Center found that 84% of Americans believe political debate has become less respectful, while social trust has declined considerably over the decades. Perhaps some of that mentality has seeped into business relationships, too. “I’m paying you, therefore I expect the outcome I want.”

But expertise just doesn’t work that way. You can hire the world’s best oncologist. The doctor can’t guarantee a cure. You can hire the world’s best financial advisor. The advisor can’t guarantee the S&P 500 will skyrocket tomorrow. And no ethical college admissions consultant can guarantee a student’s admission to Harvard.

What expertise can do is improve decision-making and maximize the likelihood of a favorable outcome. Every year at Ivy Coach, we tally the families who work with us but choose to ignore our advice on perhaps the single most consequential strategic decision in the process, which is where the student applies Early Action or Early Decision.

When families ignore this critical advice, we’re still of course happy to help them craft the strongest applications possible. But we tell them they’ll be excluded from our statistics because they chose not to follow the strategy they hired us to provide. We disclose these exclusions alongside our admissions results so there’s no ambiguity about who is, and isn’t, included in our track record. For years, we could count these families on one hand in any given year. Now we’re getting closer to needing three hands.

Some clients want validation, not expertise

Maybe that doesn’t sound dramatic. But the trend matters because it illustrates something every entrepreneur eventually learns. Some clients don’t actually want expertise. Instead, they want validation. They’ve already decided what the answer should be. Their child with C grades deserves admission to the most selective universities in the world, and they’re hiring you simply to confirm it.

The trouble is that the most valuable thing an expert can sometimes tell a client is precisely what the client doesn’t want to hear. And, occasionally, the expert will be wrong. Recently, we worked with a largely B student who had their sights set on MIT. We repeatedly told the family that we did not believe the student would be admitted. MIT admitted the student. We were thrilled.

Every now and then, Ivy Coach’s crystal ball is wrong. We’re not usually wrong, but when we are, we’re delighted when our own work helps prove us wrong. And therein lies the difference between expertise and a guarantee. A guarantee tells clients what they want to hear. Expertise tells them what they need to hear, even when what they need to hear is that Harvard still has a big problem with Cs.

“Can you guarantee my son’s admission to Harvard?” For 35 years, our answer at Ivy Coach, a leading college consulting firm, has always been the same: “No.” Then we usually add, for good measure, “Nobody can guarantee your son’s admission to Harvard. And if someone tells you they can, run, run fast, and run for the hills.”

It tends to put some useful distance between us and prospective clients we probably don’t want becoming clients anyway. In our business, the G-word is a major red flag.

The G-word is coming up more often

But over the last few years, we’ve noticed something strange. More parents are coming to us expecting guarantees. And increasingly, their expectations bear little relationship to reality. We used to joke that somewhere out there was a parent of a C student searching for the college consultant who could get their child into Harvard (and not even via the secretive Z-List!). It’s not a joke anymore.