- Ivy Link founder Adam Nguyen helps the well-off get their kids into top US colleges.
- He charges parents at least $150,000 to help get their children into Ivy League schools.
If you want to get your kid into one of the best colleges, Adam Nguyen is here to help. The only catch is a fee that can add up to more than five times the average tuition-fee bill.
But if you can't afford to use Ivy Link's services, here are some of the approaches that Nguyen suggests.
A $150,000 ticket to college
Most of Nguyen's clients are high-net-worth individuals who shell out at least $150,000 for years of advice in a bid to get their child into some of the best universities.
He compared the task of steering a child through their formative academic years to securing a merger or acquisition deal for a major company.
"You're getting access to talented people who normally would be servicing Fortune 500 companies or doing private-equity deals, but now they're thinking about your child," Nguyen said.
Ivy Link's team of students and advisors, all of whom graduated from Ivy League schools, are each assigned a group of children and guide them through their final years of high school. The company claims to have a 97% success rate.
While each child gets a bespoke strategy that can be tricky to replicate, Nguyen has a few broader tips.
'Measurable accomplishments'
Nguyen has been working with Ivy Link since 2008, meaning he has worked with both millennial and Gen Z students. In that time, he said he'd built up a clear strategy to help students.
From his time working in Columbia University's admissions office as an undergraduate, Nguyen said he noticed that academic records weren't taken into account until the ninth grade, so performance in tests wasn't an immediate priority.
Instead, he said students should take a more holistic approach from the age of 14. A key phrase he often mentions is "measurable accomplishments," as these are what colleges look for on an application.
That means finding a passion early on, nurturing it, and gaining unique achievements to stand out to Ivy League schools, which have an acceptance rate as low as 3%, he added.
"I think that consistently successful applicants would demonstrate intellectual accomplishments … an intellectual vitality," Nguyen said. "Vitality means that you are engaging, you're curious, you are asking questions, that you have a growth mindset, not a fixed mindset."
For example, Nguyen said one former client took an early interest in psychology, so he carried out an observation of his fellow students' motivation in the classroom — he's now at Stanford.
Another who graduated from Cornell volunteered by giving out sanitary packs to women in shelters after she developed an early interest in public policy, he said.
Competitions in academia, music, or sport also give students the chance to earn measurable achievements, Nguyen said, adding that he would trawl regional competitions to find ones where his students had the best chance of succeeding.
Nguyen added that colleges looked for evidence of ambition, so such activities may carry more weight for students from less privileged backgrounds.
Ultimately though, Nguyen's approach means that ambitious parents probably shouldn't force their kids to take up tricky new pursuits later than the sixth grade.
Neither is there any point if they're just not interested, he says, as there's likely to be plenty of other applicants already way better than them.