Should I look for U.S. college admission consulting service in Taiwan?
- Xiang
- Aug 19
- 5 min read
(Question from 網友: Feilee949831)
Before we delve into this question, I would like viewers of Xiang Digest to watch the following videos:
To be honest, you can find many people who have shared their negative college consulting experiences through YouTube and Dcard. I am just listing a few to get my point across. While these experiences were unfortunate, they do draw an overarching view as to the current landscape of US college admission consulting industry in Taiwan.
To give a responsible answer, I would borrow an important skill that I learned from a respected professor, Dr. Ron Bayer, who taught History of Public Health at Columbia University. He often likes to use guiding questions as a reflective exercise to think about how we should address an issue or dilemma. In this case, here are my guiding questions for Question 2 (Should I look for a U.S. college admission consulting service in Taiwan?).
Let’s piggyback on the last sentence of my response to Question 1: While we can definitely know the merits of your hard work from the perspective of numerical data—GPA, SAT, TOEFL, AP exams, and the number of hours devoted to volunteer work and other extracurricular activities—how do we “define” whether your personal statements, interview, and responses to short-answer questions stood out in the eyes of Yale’s admission committee, considering we are using Yale College admission as an example for this article?
I think the biggest problem when people seek a college admission consulting firm is largely attributed to the fact that they do not know (what, why, which, when, and how) to start or handle their personal statements, short responses to questions on applications, and interviews.
So, here are the guiding questions:
Does this college admission consulting firm understand “Yale”? I guess I should go a little further with this question.
a. If the consultant or agent says, “I helped applicant(s) in the past apply to Yale College,” does that mean he or she understands “Yale”?
Notes: Helping someone to apply does not mean he or she knows Yale very well. It only stresses the point that he or she helped someone. What was the result of that application? What was that applicant’s profile when applying?
b. If the consultant says, “I have successfully helped a student get accepted to Yale,” does that mean he or she understands “Yale”?
Notes: In any research study (qualitative or quantitative), it is difficult to convince someone that you know something well with just one case.
c. If the consultant says, “I (we) know Yale very well. In fact, we got 30 people accepted to Yale 5-45 years ago,” does that mean he or she understands the ‘Yale Now’?
Notes: If the response to the first question already proves that admission to elite colleges went from hard to harder, the consultant only justifies that he or she understands Yale from 5-45 years ago. The competition to get into Yale in the last three years is in a completely different stratosphere.
d. If the consultant says, “I graduated from Yale College, so I know Yale really well,” does that consultant know the Yale of the past very well or the Yale of the present very well? For someone who graduated from Yale 10 years ago, I would not doubt his credibility and knowledge of Yale during that period. However, the Yale that we know today is very different from the past. This does not only apply to Yale but apply to everything in life. Can we say Apple during the days of Scott Sculley was the same as the days under the return of Steve Jobs at Apple? Can we even say Apple during the days under Steve Jobs was the same under Tim Cook? Needless today, even when we compare Apple under the days when Steve was fresh out of Silicon Valley as a startup could not have been the same Apple under during the days when Steve returned to Apple. If everything changes over time, how we rank schools change over time, how can we definitely say that the Yale we know 10 years ago is the exactly the same Yale that we know today? Indeed, certain legacy of its history and achievement would never change, but admission policies that cater to many disrupted forces (geopolitical conflicts in different regions around the world, a new cold war that is taking place between U.S. and China, the emergence of AI, and a U.S. deficit of 1.8 trillion (Bogage, 2024),
Notes: The response to this question only proves that he or she withstood the selectivity process (hard) from 5-45 years ago, depending on when he or she graduated. It does not mean he or she would still stand a chance to get admitted to Yale in today’s competitive landscape.
e. If the consultant says, “We have staff with more than 30 years of college consulting experience. We have established a strong brand,” does Yale admit students based on which college admission consulting service you choose?
Notes: Yale admits students based on meritocracy and its institutional needs. If getting into Yale involved finding a college admission consulting firm as the backdoor, then the meritocracy system would not exist. Would Yale risk its brand and legacy over a college admission consulting firm?
So, my response to Question 2 is yes and no. I would say yes only if the consulting agency or firm can respond and prove that they have a consultant who not only graduated from Yale but was also a successful student at Yale.” How do we define success? The Yale alum should have graduated with one of the Latin honors: Cum Laude, Magna Cum Laude, or Summa Cum Laude. The person should not only have succeeded at Yale but also helped numerous cases (more than one or two applicants) get into Yale during application years 2022-2024, when these incoming Classes of 2026-2028 faced the most selective admission processes in U.S. history, as illustrated in Figure 1.
Please See Fig. 1
Before I wrap up my response with this article, I would like to conclude with an important fact: If elite college admissions have inclined (intentionally or unintentionally) under the principle of exclusivity due to the supply-and-demand landscape that we discussed in response to Question 1, finding a college admission consulting firm with someone who successfully gained admission and graduated from Yale and has helped applicants get admitted over the last three years would only help you increase your “odds.” In the game of probability, where the selectivity for the Class of 2028 is 3.70%, someone who fits those criteria can only guide you in the right direction, but that does not necessarily ‘guarantee’ your admission to Yale or any other highly selective college. So, when you are willing to pay a premium for that service, you are essentially buying yourself a coach who can increase your odds ONLY.
References:
Tracinski, R. (2024, July 8). The unnecessary crisis of Elite College Admission. discoursemagazine.com. https://www.discoursemagazine.com/p/the-unnecessary-crisis-of-elite-college
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