“Every student we took on last year got into one of their own three top choices.”
Leo Cao, The Scholar’s Bureau
Past results
Where the 2026 cohort got in
Top-25, or a top-ranked program
92%
Offers of admission in hand
20
Students we took through the cycle
12
The philosophy
Top colleges want a well rounded student class.
We take our philosophy directly from admissions officers and directors of admissions at Stanford, the UCs and other top 20 schools. A class needs a cellist and a classicist, so the work is finding the one thing your student is already undeniable at and building the file around it. Everything we do across the year runs off that one decision.
Know who is actually reading you
An officer reads forty applications a day in March. When the reader deciding is on their eighth hour, your writing must slow down a speedreader.
Build one thing to an unusual degree
Insiders call it a point of excellence: the thing a reader describes you by. Four activities around one identity hand a reader that sentence, and every student has one to find.
Submit fewer activities on purpose
The form gives you ten lines and most students fill all ten. Admission officers are speedreaders; don’t waste their time with three good extracurriculars and seven fillers.
Write an essay that teaches them something
The strongest personal statements hand the reader an idea they did not have. An officer who finishes yours having learned something argues for you in the room.
This is our own research: two years interviewing admissions officers at Stanford, Berkeley, USC and NYU.
Contact
Tell us about your kid.
One call, and by the end of it you will know what we would do for your student and in what order. We will tell you where we think we add the most, and if the right answer is somebody outside this roster we will name them.
Forty-five minutes, no charge, and nothing is decided on it. You will hear the number for the whole cycle on that call, in writing afterwards, and it does not move later.
Step 1 of 4
Admission counselors
The people we would hand your student to
Every counselor here is trained using inside admissions knowledge and earns a College Board admissions certificate. Each is someone a highly selective university chose for itself, a top-tier writer who knows the extracurricular record and the admissions process cold. The strip below is the kind of university this work is aimed at.
Physics Student, Stanford
Tristan Cao
Best with students aiming at the most selective schools, whose file does not yet sound like anyone in particular.
Business Student, UC Berkeley Haas
Leo Cao
Best with students whose transcript understates them, and whose file has the rest of the story.
Sixteen families a year get all of this.
If yours is one of them we will know your student’s teachers by name before October, and you will have our number on the March night the decisions land. There is a full year in front of the 2027 cycle, which is the whole of what this work needs.