The best experts won’t guarantee results. They’ll tell you what they need to hear.

“Can you guarantee my son’s admission to Harvard?” For 35 years, our answer at Ivy Coach, a leading college consulting firm, has always been the same: “No.” Then we usually add, for good measure, “Nobody can guarantee your son’s admission to Harvard. And if someone tells you they can, run, run fast, and run for the hills.”

It tends to put some useful distance between us and prospective clients we probably don’t want becoming clients anyway. In our business, the G-word is a major red flag.

But over the last few years, we’ve noticed something strange. More parents are coming to us expecting guarantees. And increasingly, their expectations bear little relationship to reality. We used to joke that somewhere out there was a parent of a C student searching for the college consultant who could get their child into Harvard (and not even via the secretive Z-List!). It’s not a joke anymore.

We hear from more and more families whose children simply aren’t remotely in the academic ballpark for the schools they’re targeting, yet they still ask some version of, “Can you guarantee it?” No. The C student is still not getting into Harvard. Although, for the record, we once helped a student with Ds earn admission to Stanford as a transfer. But that was hardly a normal admissions case.

He had been deeply depressed at West Point under the military’s then-existing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, and his grades suffered badly as a result.

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