A Booming Business in MBA Coaches ZZ from BW

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Consultants are doing everything from advising to writing essays for B-school applicants. Admissions officers beware

by Jane Porter

More and more these days, MBA applicants are paying big bucks to counselors to help them get into the business school of their choice. Growing numbers of applicants—including, increasingly, foreign students—and a relatively static number of slots make hiring a coach a way to stand out.

Admissions officers are less than thrilled. "If someone else has done the work, it's almost like you are admitting an impostor to the program," says Liz Riley Hargrove, assistant dean and director of admissions for Duke University's Fuqua School of Business.

The concerns aren't dampening demand. Consultants estimate that about a quarter of applicants to top-tier programs pay for help on their applications (see BusinessWeek.com Video Views, "Tips for Finding an MBA Program").

No Help Allowed

That has enabled firms such as Stacy Blackman Consulting to flourish. What began seven years ago with one coach today employs 30 consultants across the country with "the phone ringing off the hook," says Blackman, who charges up to $3,250 per application. The Los Angeles firm helps applicants pick programs, craft the perfect essay, and master interviews. While many admissions officers wish coaches would disappear, they acknowledge that they generally advise MBA hopefuls rather than writing their entire applications.

The same can't be said for all coaches. "The [consultant] I worked with had a Master's in creative writing," says a recent 26-year-old applicant starting at Harvard Business School this year. "The stories were my ideas, but he would bring all the color to the page." He recalls a friend at New York University's Leonard N. Stern School of Business who paid $9,000 to have an essay written from scratch. "The type of help varies widely," says Mae Jennifer Shores, an admissions officer at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. "Our concern is when consultants are used to write essays."

Many top programs have explicit policies against outside help. The Web site of the Stanford Graduate School of Business warns that applicants "cross a line when a piece of the application ceases to be exclusively yours in either thought or word." At Harvard, admissions officers interviewed 15% more applicants this year in an effort to "get to the authentic person," says Deirdre C. Leopold, managing director of MBA admissions and financial aid. At Fuqua, a rigorous in-house system of background checks will be in place for next year.

Between Borat and Hemingway

Graham Richmond is quick to defend consulting firms like Clear Admit, which he founded with a fellow Wharton grad six years ago. His goal, he says, is to "perfect the admissions process, not pervert it." He helped launch the Association of International Graduate Admissions Consultants this month to help legitimize the field (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/27/06, "Détente in the Admissions Office").

Meanwhile, admissions committees will keep scrutinizing applications for a giveaway, such as writing that outshines the candidate's verbal skills. The best coaches, of course, are all over that. "You can't fool an admissions committee if you write like Hemingway and you sound like Borat," says Alex Chu, founder of MBA Apply, a one-man consulting service.

Adds Blackman: "We've definitely had some successes where clients have been big stretches, and they've been accepted." Consider the 25-year-old Blackman client with a 2.82 college GPA and a wish list of top schools. Some $5,500 and three acceptance letters later, he says: "Every penny was well spent."

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Will there be a thaw in the icy relations between B-schools and for-hire consultants that help with applications?

Business School admissions officers and for-hire B-school admissions consultants have always been uneasy bedfellows. Although no school explicitly bans the use of consultants, in recent years officers at top schools like Stanford, Harvard, and Wharton have spoken out against them, as well as added specific language to their applications to clarify how much help they consider to be too much.

And while there remains little consensus among admissions officers and consultants about much of anything beyond "selling essays is wrong," the consultants have made one thing clear: They're not going away. On June 16, at the annual Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC) conference, about 100 admissions officers and other B-school administrators had a rare face-to-face meeting with the other side, at a panel titled "Admissions Consultants: Love 'em, Hate 'em, Use 'em," presented by four consultants and moderated by Beth Flye, Director of Admissions at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

The forum may have opened the door for more open discussion between admissions officers and consultants. "In the past, it was more: You stay away from us, we'll stay away from you," says Rose Martinelli, associate dean of student recruitment and admissions at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business. Yet neither group says it wants an antagonistic relationship.

GUILT BY ASSOCIATION. "I'd call it a love-hate relationship," says Everett Fortner, interim director of admissions at University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business. "Many of them are our friends and former colleagues, who we have a lot of respect for and who we think can add a lot of value to the process. But many of them don't have that same level of integrity."

One problem, say consultants, is that admissions officers don't always know who is who. "They don't know which companies are behaving ethically and which companies are more fly-by-night, selling essays," says consultant Graham Richmond of Clear Admit (see BusinessWeek.com, 8/16/05, "Applications that Get a 'Yes'").

To help solve this problem, the admissions consultants on the GMAC panel announced plans to form an association to promote honesty and integrity within their field by setting a standard of principles and best practices—an idea that went over well with admissions officers. "If you had a code of conduct and a board of accreditation for consultants, then we'd know exactly what type of assistance they're giving, and that would be a wonderful thing," says Linda Meehan, executive director for admissions and financial aid at Columbia Business School . Richmond says it's still in the planning phase.

WISH LISTS. Yet the information asymmetry between admissions officers and consultants can run both ways. Some admissions officers say what concerns them is when consultants don't spend enough time seeking out current information about schools and what they have to offer, instead falling back on old shorthand and stereotypes.

Admissions consultants, in turn, say they wish admissions officers came to them with information more often. "There are hundreds of MBA programs," says Richmond. "We can't possibly be on top of everything that happens on every campus." Yet Martinelli says the onus remains on the consultants. "I'm not the one making $200, $300 an hour," she says.

Admissions officers at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business have taken a different approach from most. Rather than keeping consultants at arm's length, for two years in a row Tuck has invited groups of them to campus to learn about the school and about MBA programs in general.

ETHICAL ISSUES. "People who have worked with consultants know they serve a purpose," says Christie St-John, senior associate director of recruiting and enrollment at Tuck. "A lot of students feel more secure in knowing they've done the best they could possibly do on their applications."

Along with telling the consultants about the application process and what Tuck looks for in its students, St-John says Tuck spoke to ethical issues, informing the consultants that having essays written by anyone other than the student, or recommendations written by anyone other than the recommender, is strictly against Tuck's honor code.

Many schools have specific wording in their applications to that effect. Darden applicants must sign a statement acknowledging the existence of the honor code, and Harvard Business School's admissions policy states, "Your application must be written solely by you without outside assistance."

GETTING SMARTER. Stanford's Web site goes into more detail, telling applicants, "there is a big difference between 'feedback' and 'coaching.' Appropriate feedback occurs when you show someone your completed application, perhaps one or two times, and are apprised of errors or omissions. In contrast, inappropriate coaching occurs when either your essays or your entire self-presentation is colored by someone else."

Derrick Bolton, director of MBA admissions at Stanford, says his office may need to rethink its approach to the consultants. "We've tried to just state our standards and hope consultants and applicants will honor them," says Bolton, "but maybe I've been a little naive."

Bolton said he was unsure whether that approach would mean engaging with consultants more or not, but said, "I think the status quo won't work." Bolton says he'll be speaking soon with Stanford's undergraduate admissions director, who has years of experience dealing with consultants as well (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/19/06, "What Price College Admission?").

SHAKY GROUND. Many admissions officers continue to struggle to identify the boundaries between what's appropriate and what's not. "There's a big difference between serious editing and proofreading," says St-John. "It's like pornography—I can't define it, but I know it when I see it."

Yet in between what's seen as universally acceptable—having a proofreader catch typos and grammatical errors—and what's seen as clearly unacceptable—submitting a canned essay—remains a large gray area. And it's within this gray area that most admissions consultants work.

Essay editing packages at several consulting firms, including Accepted.com, which had a representative on the panel, include an essay outline written by the editor after an interview with the applicant (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/29/01, "Making Your Application Shine").

On their site, Accepted.com states that "the outline is not a euphemism for an essay or an essay draft. The outline consists of bullet points and sentence fragments"—yet it's this type of help that some admissions officers see as too much hand-holding. "Would that be okay on a college English test?" asks Fortner. "To talk about what the answer is, and then have someone outline your thoughts for you? To me, that's crossing a line."

SOUNDING BOARD. Consultants say what they do really isn't that different from the services universities already offer. In their presentation, they quoted the Harvard College Writing Center's description of its services, which says, "We can help you talk through ideas to start outlining, hone an outline that you've started working with, evaluate a draft in mid-composition, or look through a final draft." But part of what admissions officers say they're concerned about is that consultants are making their jobs harder, by making it tougher to determine who is the best applicant, rather than who has the best application.

Consultants say they tried to make clear that their role isn't to change candidates but rather to help them tell their stories honestly and effectively, and Martinelli says she feels consultants are useful when they act as a sounding board, to help students gain focus and give them the confidence to shape a message.

She pointed out that applicants coming from feeder industries like banking and consulting already "get their hands held" throughout the process. "Those folks already have a leg up," she says. "But if you're coming from teaching, from government, from nonprofits, you don't always understand what the admissions committee is looking for."

QUESTION OF EQUITY. At about $200 per hour, on average, getting the leg up that admissions consultants provide doesn't come cheap. Richmond says most Clear Admit clients end up spending between $2,000 and $5,000 to perfect their applications—an amount that shocked many admissions officers at the forum.

And while many consultants dole out a good amount of free advice through their Web sites, online chats, introductory phone consultations, and other types of pro bono work, many admissions officers—some of whom are already exploring ways to make the admissions process less expensive—say they're concerned by how consultants further affect issues of equity and access.

Looking back on the GMAC forum, Richmond admitted that because admissions consultants and admissions officers have different, and not totally complementary, goals, "It's never going to be a love-fest." But as long as the dialogue continues, it's a step in the right direction.