See Inventing the Perfect College Applicant: For $120,000 a year, Christopher Rim promises to turn any student into Ivy bait by Caitlin Moscatello. This is a fascinating article, even beyond the issue I focus on. Excerpts:
"For the past nine years, Rim, 28, has been working as an “independent education consultant,” helping the one percent navigate the increasingly competitive college-admissions process — the current round of which ends in February. He started by editing college essays from his Yale dorm room for $50 an hour but now charges the parents of his company’s 190 clients — mostly private-school kids, many of them in New York — $120,000 a year to help them create a narrative he believes will appeal to college-admissions officers. That company, Command Education, currently has 41 full-time staffers, most of whom are recent graduates of top-tier colleges and universities. The pitch is crafted to appeal to the wealthy clients Rim courts: a “personalized, white glove” service, through which Command employees do everything from curating students’ extracurriculars to helping them land summer internships, craft essays, and manage their course loads with the single goal of getting them in."
"Business is good. The Independent Educational Consultants Association estimates that up to 25,000 full- and part-time IECs will be working in the U.S. this year, and the market-research firm IBISWorld estimates it to be a $2.9 billion industry — up from $400 million just a decade ago. Most consultants charge in the ballpark of $4,000 to $7,500 for helping students with typical application prep, including making their college list and looking over their essays, but Rim operates in the uppermost echelon. In certain circles in Manhattan and Brooklyn, “everyone is charging six figures,” says a parent who hired Command for her teen. In a recent survey, one-third of Horace Mann high-schoolers copped to working with a private consultant, but multiple parents with kids in city private schools estimate that number to be much higher. Rim says he has a waiting list."
"In a survey of Harvard’s class of 2027, 23 percent of respondents said they had worked with a private college consultant. The gap widens once income is considered: About 30 percent of respondents from families earning half a million dollars or more per year hired a consultant, compared with just 6 to 7 percent of respondents from homes with incomes of $125,000 or less."
"Command offers tutoring, but the real selling point is its “mentors” — 20-somethings who earn $100,000 to $200,000 a year by being on call for their teenage mentees at all hours. (The base salary is $55,000 to $72,000, but Rim says mentors receive bonuses for getting clients into one of their top-choice schools as well as for retaining clients year after year.)"
"Once parents sign a contract (“‘Our services are strictly advisory.’ We say that 100 times in the contract. It’s like you’re hiring McKinsey,” says Rim), there’s an initial consultation, and after that, a client typically meets with a mentor one hour a week over Zoom. “Then if we need to go to two, three, four hours a week, we need to have half-hour meetings two times a week, three times a week — we’re fully able and willing to do that,” says Gabe Cramer, who oversees the company’s mentors. Those mentors assign their clients weekly tasks, he explains, which can vary in intensity depending on how close that student is to the application process. Mentors are expected to be available to their clients from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day and a minimum of six additional hours a week outside that window."
"The base of its formula is what Command calls the “passion project” — the specialty it helps students develop so they become what counselors call “pointy” kids rather than well-rounded ones. Rim and other college counselors push the message that being captain of the debate team, a varsity soccer goalie, and class president is the kind of gold star that isn’t that special. Schools, they say, are looking for highly specialized students who demonstrate a specific talent or passion. (The oft-repeated quote is that colleges don’t want well-rounded students so much as “a well-rounded class.”)
The theme of the passion project becomes what Cramer calls the “hook” that hangs their essays and lists of extracurriculars together. “You don’t have to play the violin, be the first chair in your state, and rescue the whales. You can just pick one and be so good at it that you want to dare the admissions officers not to accept you and that they will regret it,” says Rim. No matter what, “we will find the story.”"
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See Creative Destruction by Richard Alm and W. Michael Cox. Excerpt:
"Joseph Schumpeter
(1883–1950) coined the seemingly paradoxical term “creative destruction,” and generations of economists have adopted it as a shorthand description of the free market’s messy way of delivering progress. In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), the Austrian economist wrote:The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. (p. 83)Although Schumpeter devoted a mere six-page chapter to “The Process of Creative Destruction,” in which he described capitalism as “the perennial gale of creative destruction,” it has become the centerpiece for modern thinking on how economies evolve."
But also see this link which suggests that the idea goes back even before Schumpeter to other scholars: Creative Destruction in Economics: Nietzsche, Sombart, Schumpeter by Hugo Reinert and Erik S. Reinert.
"Abstract
This paper argues that the idea of ‘creative destruction’ enters the social sciences by way of Friedrich Nietzsche. The term itself is first used by German economist Werner Sombart, who openly acknowledges the influence of Nietzsche on his own economic theory. The roots of creative destruction are traced back to Indian philosophy, from where the idea entered the German literary and philosophical tradition. Understanding the origins and evolution of this key concept in evolutionary economics helps clarifying the contrasts between today’s standard mainstream economics and the Schumpeterian and evolutionary alternative."
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