Ivy Brothers in Gulf News: Inside the High-Stakes World of Elite Admissions Consulting

Gulf News published a report on 10 March 2026 on how elite admissions consulting works and what families are buying when they hire it. Two of our counselors are quoted through it. The piece ran in the paper’s GN Focus section.

At the top of the pool, perfect is ordinary

Grades and scores open the door and rarely decide who walks through it. In the final rounds at a university admitting a small single digit percentage of applicants, almost every file still in the room has the transcript, the scores and the titles. What separates them is whether a reader can say in one sentence what this student is about, and whether the file proves it.

Margo Kozinn, a former Stanford admissions officer and now a senior counselor here, told the paper that the students who earn real advocacy inside a committee are the ones whose choices visibly connect. Volume is easy to produce and easy to discount. Coherence is the thing a committee can argue with.

Committees are looking for what they do not have

Natalie Lee, an admissions consultant with us who read files before she advised on them, gave Gulf News the clearest line in the piece. A committee, she said, is “in the business of finding what they don’t have.”

She illustrated it from her own reading years. A student who was genuinely excellent at Slavic languages held the room’s attention all the way down to the recommendation letter from the language teacher. A student with a comparable record who was interested in economics did not produce that reaction, because the pile already held more economics applicants than the class could use.

There was nothing wrong with the second student. There were simply many of them. That is the mechanism, and most families never hear it said plainly.

Which means the work starts earlier than families expect

The report makes a second point that carries more weight than it first appears. Much of what decides a file happens in ninth and tenth grade, when a student chooses what to commit to and what to drop. Kozinn’s advice to Gulf News was to “look outside the walls of the school.” A student who turns an interest into research, a paper, a program that serves real people or a project with actual users gives an admissions officer something to remember. Another club title gives the AO nothing to work with.

That is why depth over breadth is a plan rather than a slogan. A small number of commitments carried further will compound. A long list will not.

The full report is on gulfnews.com.