New York Magazine’s latest cover story by Caitlin Moscatello examines the world of elite educational consultants who charge upwards of $120,000 a year to sculpt high-school kids into Ivy League college bait. Moscatello takes an in-depth look at Christopher Rim’s Command Education, whose 41 full-time staffers provide nearly round-the-clock services to members of the 0.1 percent, as a lens on the $2.9 billion independent-educational-consultant industry. To the question of fairness Rim tells Moscatello: “When I’m working with these students, people might say, ‘Chris, you’re helping the rich have an unfair advantage.’ Yes. But an unfair advantage over other rich students. I’m not helping a wealthy client take the spot of a low-income student or an underrepresented minority. They’re competing against each other.”
“I’ve always been interested in systems of power and how they operate — the idea of who gets access, who doesn’t, and why, and what that does to the human psyche,” says Moscatello. “Since the Varsity Blues scandal several years ago, there’s been intense scrutiny on the college admissions process, and yet it hasn’t been clear how much has really changed. Then COVID hit, and many schools went test optional, and last year, SCOTUS ended affirmative action, making the process even more opaque. There’s real anxiety, and everyone from students to their parents to the colleges themselves are in a scramble. When I heard there was this young consultant who’d never worked in admissions and yet was charging six figures to help get kids into colleges, it felt like a lens through which to observe the whole admissions ecosystem and the lengths people will go to game a system they perceive to be no longer necessarily working in their favor.”
Elsewhere in the issue, features writer Simon van Zuylen-Wood profiles Tammy Murphy, the First Lady of New Jersey, who is running to fill the Senate seat held by Robert Menendez, providing an in-depth look at the unseemly and nepotistic politics of the Garden State. Nicholson Baker looks at why so many smart people are insisting UFOs are real, and Olivia Nuzzi talks to one New Hampshirite who gave Trump a second chance.