How Admissions Pushes Families to Choose Prestige Over Purpose (and What We’re Doing Instead)

I was 17 when I realized the college admissions system wasn’t built to help students find themselves.

In the fall of my senior year of high school, my parents and I sat down with a sought-after college admissions consultant. They were polished, persuasive, and promised the Ivy League was within reach. They had helped students get into schools like Yale and Columbia. But something felt off—and over time, that feeling proved right.

With a 4.0 GPA, multiple AP courses under my belt, and a record-breaking career in one of the nation’s top high school speech and debate teams, I had all the right elements for a successful outcome. Even then, the counselor’s recommendations left me uneasy. When I asked about a strategy for letters of recommendation, I received generic advice that didn’t address my real questions. When I expressed concerns about my Common App essay, the response was ambiguous—and sure enough, not one university I applied to with it sent me an acceptance.

I had three saving graces: an essay I believed in enough to send to Duke, an AP Biology teacher who recognized me in unexpected ways, and a feeling that even though no one told me who I was, that my uniqueness was the key to not only the acceptances I needed, but the future I wanted to build. At Duke, I did well, graduating with honors and receiving recognition from leading professors across departments. I later published research at Harvard, wrote speeches delivered at the UN, led initiatives at Samsung and Intel, and coached executives in various industries.

Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was very wrong—not just in how college admissions affects individual students, but in how it shapes the world we’re trying to fix. When students are given the wrong guidance, it doesn’t just delay and derail their personal paths; it distorts the kind of leaders, thinkers, and citizens they become. The college process, misaligned, trains young people to perform instead of reflect, to conform instead of connect, to chase prestige at the expense of purpose.

If I’d received guidance from someone who truly saw me, I would’ve made different choices. My essays, programs, and even the arc of my career might have been more direct. Instead, like so many others, I had to find my way through misaligned mentors, expensive missteps, and the long road back to clarity. When that becomes the norm, the damage doesn’t stop at the gates of a university. It ripples into workplaces, institutions, and our culture at large—until the systems our students inherit begin to reflect the same misalignment that shaped them.

How College Admissions Corrupts Students for Short-Term Gain and Distorts Their Futures

By the time I returned to the admissions world as a consultant, things had become worse. Admissions consultants now charged $50,000 or more to help families and students gain coveted admissions, while the advice remained generic. You might as well have bought a new car well before you ever sent your student to college.

From my view, this kind of service would be justified if it were truly life-changing. But every time I looked at what was happening to students in admissions consulting and in college, I wanted to hurl. In too many places, the process bends students into someone they’re not—their voice diluted, their spark slowly managed out of them. They become “impressive” on paper because the packaging is flawless. Their applications win praise. But the authentic person inside them? Barely recognizable.

The industry has become predatory. It capitalizes on fears of what happens if students don’t achieve their dream, rather than beginning by understanding the student’s unique potential. The parent or family walks in and says, “We’ll do whatever it takes to get him/her/them into Harvard,” and the response is often a clever positioning tactic: “With me, you can.” I wonder if many students and families have the same feeling I did when I went to see the admissions consultant, thinking, “maybe they know something I don’t,” yet never quite finding that confirmation that they really understood the student or knew how to help them get where they need to go.

That’s the trouble I’ve seen happen to students in traditional consulting spaces. Once the admissions result comes in, there is momentary relief. But then what? The anxiety returns. The student has an existential crisis, drops out, and ends up with a fraction of the success or happiness they could’ve had—true stories with students in my orbit who were bent out of shape and dropped out of prestigious colleges, from the University of Pennsylvania to Carnegie Mellon. When families revisit the counselor years later, the counselor says, “That’s not my job.”

That’s what I see repeatedly in admissions. The process ends as soon as the admissions results come back. Thank-yous are exchanged. Payments are processed. People move on with their lives, unable or unwilling to acknowledge that, in far too many cases, they were sold a shiny object at the expense of long-term, whole-person success. Whether the student or family was prepared for success is “beyond scope.” The essay was accepted. The destination was reached. The rest? Not their problem.

These experiences mirror some of the students I met at Duke who had “made it” but spent their college years floundering: struggling to keep up, belong, and sometimes, \to stay. When a student is shaped to be accepted but not to be whole, we get a generation of kids fighting to stay afloat in a system that never saw them. And unless we change how we guide students from the beginning, this story will keep repeating.

What Happens When Students Are Truly Seen

As the Cornell professor Allan Bloom wrote in The Closing of the American Mind, students are asking, “Help me become a whole person,” and it is to them whom the university—and many admissions counselors—have nothing to say. I’ve seen too many brilliant, sensitive, driven students fall through the cracks because no one ever helped them understand what made them whole.

JJ had taken 12 to 15 AP courses, had a perfect GPA, and had done some incredible work throughout high school. He had sought an essay coach as early as summer of that year but came to me after being rejected from Yale just weeks before Regular Decision deadlines. To be clear, I generally recommend an earlier start to the writing process, and there are a million reasons a student would be rejected from Yale—after all, it’s Yale. But when I looked at the essay, I knew why he had been rejected.

“It sounds like you’re trying to tell a story about what this event has meant to you,” I said. “But the problem? I can tell you have a deeply caring and devotional nature, but I have no idea what you’re saying—and if I were an admissions officer at Yale, it would be hard for me to admit you based on what I’m reading here.”

We worked together over just a few short sessions, and everything changed. He was subsequently admitted to schools like Johns Hopkins, Penn, Northwestern, Emory, and Georgetown:

“When I first met Rayner, I was in a college essay crisis. I was completely lost on how to fix my Common Application essay, and deadlines were approaching. Rayner was able to quickly catch onto what message I was attempting to deliver within my essays. Then, he masterfully revised, edited, and helped me portray my message clearly yet beautifully, with my admissions officers even complimenting my essays. Rayner truly is a wizard, and I highly recommend him.”

How can admissions counselors still be providing generic advice, having students write essays that make no sense and providing suggestions that overlook their uniqueness? Helping students find their unique voice and direction shouldn’t be the exception. It should be the foundation of how we serve families.

The A+ Method: Authentic, Aligned, Admitted

That’s why I created Galaxy Mind Education—to eliminate the false tradeoff between prestige and purpose. We guide students with a blend of elite admissions strategy, award-winning storytelling, and whole-life alignment, helping them get in without selling out. Every student works with me directly, alongside a vetted network of trusted advisors. And while our students have earned spots at places like Yale, Brown, Cornell, and Duke, the real outcome is deeper: clarity, confidence, and a strong inner compass that lasts long after the acceptance letter fades.

It’s what led me to introduce The A+ Method™, a framework that resolves the longstanding conflicts between authenticity, alignment, and achievement in admissions and higher education. These interlocking parts shape student success, career alignment, and well-being, and have everything to do with whether a student spends years unrecognized, unsupported, and off-course, or if they go further to actualize their unique potential. For many families, the time for alignment is now.

I’ve watched students go from fragmented and frustrated to clear, connected, and calm. Many students would end up giving TED talks within weeks of meeting me based on resonance alone, without it ever being recommended in our conversations. Others went to places like Yale, Cornell, and Brown—not because they played the game better, but because they finally realized who they were, and how to express it. Along the way, I’ve had my education innovation work featured by leaders like Melinda French Gates and 4x #1 NYT Bestselling author Marianne Williamson.

The A+ Method isn’t just about getting in. It’s about using the process itself to build the clarity, resilience, and direction that college is meant to deepen. It’s about removing the painful trade-offs between being one’s authentic self and achieving one’s goals while resolving the tension between the family’s fears and the student’s dreams. When we open ourselves to achievement and authenticity, students don’t just get accepted. They feel seen. They discover what truly matters to them—and often, for the first time, they understand what makes them exceptional.

What I Want for Every Family

Sometimes I still think back to that meeting with the consultant who promised so much. If the person sitting across from me had seen me and known how to guide me toward something real instead of something rehearsed, things might have looked different. Maybe I would’ve skipped the false starts. Maybe Duke would have been just one of many great options. Maybe I would’ve known that I was more than enough.

But I didn’t, and too many students still don’t. That’s why I do this work. I want something better for students and families. I believe the admissions process can be a portal—not just to selective universities, but to self-understanding, not just to prestige, but to purpose, not just to a good college list, but a remarkable life.

College admissions shouldn’t be a masquerade, but a process of becoming. When students finally feel understood and parents witness their children light up from getting in as their real selves, everything can begin to change—for students, for families, and for the world they inhabit.