Sherwood News

Consultants are making millions from the fierce competition to get into elite colleges

Applying to college is a level playing field... if your parents have $200,000 to spend on a consultant

10/16/24 11:36AM

For a 29 year-old, Jamie Beaton is a man of many hats: a Rhodes scholar, a graduate with six degrees from elite colleges, and a millionaire entrepreneur of a college consulting company that is attracting attention from eager parents and investors alike.

A great article in The Wall Street Journal outlines how Beaton’s clientele pays his company tens of thousands of dollars, or even as much as $200,000, for a program that can offer everything from tutoring for exams to advice for getting stellar teacher recommendations. All with one goal in mind: get kids into elite schools. And, so far, it’s working, with clients of “Crimson Education” accounting for nearly 2% of the students accepted to the undergraduate class of 2028 at elite schools like Harvard, Brown, and Columbia.

Crimson is part of the college consulting market that’s now estimated to be worth ~$2.9 billion as competition for top-tier universities has intensified, according to market research firm IBISWorld. Indeed, admissions rates for top universities like Harvard have plummeted since 2006, falling from around 10% for the class of 2008 to 3.6% for the most recent 2028 batch.

Experts warn that students — or, more accurately, their parents — continue to be drawn to services like Crimson to navigate the competitive and confusing admissions process in the US primarily because they have limited understanding of the black box of admissions. The college counseling world that lives off the complex process is also bound by few regulations, as recently highlighted by the celebrity-fueled Varsity Blues college admissions cheating scheme headed by Rick Singer.

Last year, Harvard’s student newspaper The Harvard Crimson reported that 26% of its incoming freshmen worked with a private admissions counselor. This share rose to 48% for freshmen from families with incomes over $500,000. Even institutional investors have taken note — after launching in 2013, the company is now valued at more than $550 million, winning investment from VC giant Tiger Management.

Tom Jones

big deal

17h

Lionsgate persists with decade-long effort to make a “Monopoly” movie

America’s favorite board game is proving a tricky subject for a feature film.

Daily Life in New York City Around The One-year Anniversary of The COVID-19 Shut Down

Tom Jones6/9/26

The BBC has become the world’s top news website... by collapsing a little less than its competition

Press Gazette just published its annual look at the biggest news sites in the world across all languages; for the most part, it doesn’t make for particularly pretty reading.

The journalism industry publication’s latest update, which is based on estimates provided by Similarweb for May, found that 37 of the world’s 50 most visited news sites saw their reach shrink. Press Gazette highlighted that American outlets have been hit particularly hard by declining Google traffic compared to European counterparts, owing to the platform’s AI features rolling out earlier in the US.

Even the BBC, having climbed the rankings from last year to top the 2026 chart — reportedly in part thanks to Similarweb’s decision to combine the “.co.uk” and “.com” versions of the URL, given that the sites redirect to each other depending on the user’s location — showed a 1.9% decline from last year.

Millie Giles

PLAY THE BILLS

6/8/26

Last night’s Tony Awards were a curtain call for a record-smashing season on Broadway

This year’s star-studded theater awards wrapped up the highest-grossing season Broadway’s ever seen.

Millie Giles

SOUND FAMILIAR?

6/5/26

Kids these days are listening to more songs from the good old days

Music nostalgia is in full swing, and the younger listeners of today appear to be partying like it’s pre-1999.

Saleah Blancaflor6/4/26

Drake whiffs on an expected No. 1 on Spotify

Drake started at the bottom and he’s here, but not quite at the top... of Spotify, at least.

It’s been nearly three weeks since Drake dropped his three surprise albums — “Iceman,” “Habibti,” and “Maid of Honour.” Heading into the month, prediction markets were rating it a near certainty, a 98% chance, that Drake’s sonic onslaught was enough to snag the No. 1 slot on Spotify at least once in June.

But, while he surpassed the late Michael Jackson and took up three slots on the Billboard album chart at once, his newly released songs haven’t quite cracked the popular music-streaming platform’s top charts, and market seem to think the moment has passed.

(Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.)

Spotify’s “Top Songs - Global” chart currently show that Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” which is more than four decades old, Justin Bieber’s “Beauty and a Beat,” which climbed back to the top of Spotify charts following his Coachella set in the spring, Olivia Rodrigo’s new angsty love song “The Cure,” and BTS’s “Swim” are all ahead of Drake’s “STFU Janice” from his “Iceman” album.

While Spotify previously reported last month that Drake’s “Make Them Cry” was the most streamed album in a single day this year, that was later revealed to be a data error.

Prediction markets currently show traders are betting there’s only a 15% chance Drake will have a No. 1 song on Spotify in June.

Meanwhile, Taylor Swift is in the lead at 98% — a day before the release of her new original song “I Knew It, I Knew You,” which she wrote and performed for Disney and Pixar’s upcoming “Toy Story 5” — followed by Olivia Rodrigo, whose highly anticipated album “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love” comes out next Friday.