What’s the craziest thing about a $16,000 college application boot camp: that it has a wait list, or its secret location?

Are you doing enough to get your kid into college? Are you sure? Have you hired a former CIA operative to scrub your kid’s social media presence? Are Hollywood screenwriters helping zip the college essay? Do you have a Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center interventional radiologist positioning your high schooler for the medical school track?

Did your child just finish the four-day, $16,000 Application Boot Camp at a Boston-area hotel — a program so hot that cofounder Michele Hernandez Bayliss wants the location kept secret? “We’ve literally had reporters and competitors trying to stalk” us, she e-mailed the Globe.

When it comes to college consultants, nothing is too extreme. With applications at elite colleges rising — and acceptance rates plummeting as a result — so many wealthy parents are so desperate for any edge it’s as if satirist Sacha Baron Cohen is at work, trying to see what people will buy.

How about $5,000 or more for a summer expert to help your teenager “find his passion” and “architect a plan” that includes brand-building volunteer, educational, or work opportunities? The goal is to build a summer resume that will look good on the college application.

“Parents come to us and say, ‘What is the one program that is going to get my child into the college they dream of?’ ” said Jill Tipograph, the founder of Everything Summer & Beyond. “But there’s no ‘program.’ It’s about [a student’s] entire story.”

In the Boston area, the average consulting package — which includes a college list, essay and interview prep, and organizational tools and general advice — costs about $4,800, according to Mark Sklarow, CEO of the Independent Educational Consultants Association, a trade group. But it’s possible to spend $80,000 or more for star consultants.

That’s a lot of money. In some cases enough for an entire college education, when you consider that in the 2017-18 school year, the average published price for tuition and fees and room and board for in-state students at public four-year universities was $20,770, according to the College Board, which administers the SAT.

But with parental panic mounting, the consultant business is booming.

Membership in the consultants’ association has doubled in five years, to nearly 2,000 members, Sklarow said, “and it will double again in four years.”

Some families start working with a consultant before the child hits ninth grade, with the goal of choosing every high school class and extra-curricular activity to impress some future admissions officer.

But don’t be stressed! Enjoy your childhood!

At the $16,000 application boot camp, students worked on all essays including supplements, completed the Common App, learned interview techniques, created a list of their activities and awards, and developed an admissions strategy to maximize early acceptances. In September, the price is rising to $18,000, but tuition includes a pre-boot camp personalized admissions report and consultation.

Who would spend this kind of money? Not most people, that’s for sure. Regular folks can’t afford it. They’re relying on high school guidance counselors — many of them very well-qualified, albeit typically too busy with large workloads to give the level of individualized attention of a private consultant.

The other side of this college arms race is well-documented: Many students and their parents are going deep into debt to afford college.

And even some with the budget to afford the private consultants are outraged.

But here’s the problem: In today’s world, in which onetime “safety” schools have gotten competitive, anxiety is rampant, especially in wealthier families who see acceptance at a “name” school as a ticket to success. That’s led to a crazy situation in which many who consider consultants overpriced are in fact hiring consultants.

“You don’t want to be one of those people,” said a Boston-area mother who spent $4,000 on a coach to help her daughter find a musical theater program, “but at the end of the day, if everyone else is one of those people, you have to be one, too.”

The woman, who asked that her name and town remain anonymous to protect her family’s privacy, said her daughter’s therapist told her she needed to “butt out” of the process, even though her daughter wasn’t getting her applications done early enough to secure audition slots.

“I kept riding her and riding her,” she said. “And I was right. The auditions filled up. But the therapist told me what I was doing wasn’t helping.”

Another mother who hired a consultant for her daughter, and also requested anonymity, said she feels guilty that she is able to afford what many families can’t. “It makes me want to take a shower,” she said.

With so many qualified kids applying to so many schools, the challenge for straight A students is to differentiate themselves from other straight A students, an opportunity — ideally, but not always — provided by the Common Application’s essay.

“Sometimes kids try to do this huge, broad, sweeping essay, which kind of puts the reader to sleep,” said Teddy Barnes, a cofounder of EssayDog, the firm preaching Hollywood techniques.

“Say a student wants to write about the death of a parent or a pet,” he said. “We’re like ‘don’t do that, because out of 100 essays the reader goes through in a day, he or she may read ten essays about that. It’s not that compelling.’ ”

The trick, he said, is to find the story within the story. “Maybe you met a long-lost uncle at the funeral and you learned all this interesting stuff.”

A major gripe against consultants is that they’re just one more way for the wealthy to buy their children a leg up.

But another complaint comes from the wealthy themselves: You can spend a lot of money for essentially nothing.

That’s an assertion that Sklarow, the head of the trade association, disputes: Independent consultants can educate families about out-of-town schools they might not have considered, where they might have a better shot at acceptance and merit scholarship money, he said.

He also emphasized that the typical client hiring an independent educational consultant is not wealthy. The largest block are middle-class families.

As for the big question: Do consultants improve a student’s odds of getting into a specific school?

That’s not even their role, Sklarow said in an e-mail.

“No one should hire a [consultant] because they think that person has the secrets to get admitted to Harvard. . . . We judge success in seeing if students are happy, satisfied, thriving, and engaged at the college they choose to attend.

“The fact that students working with a [consultant] are less likely to transfer and more likely to graduate in four years is our evidence of success.”

Meanwhile, with the application season ramping up — and stress escalating in many families — a father who sent his twins to the $16,000-per-student boot camp held in Boston said it was money well spent, and not just because he got a slight sibling discount or because it’s good to have expert advice.

“We want to take the anxiety out of this for our children,” he said. “And it takes us out of some of the drama of having to bug them.”

The father, who works in the finance industry, asked to remain anonymous. “There are misconceptions that having someone help organize things is somehow giving a leg up,” he said.

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Anti-Israel activists fostering hatred of Jewish students

Anti-Semitic incidents on U.S. college campuses have continued to grow in 2018, with at least 384 recorded incidents in the first half of this year, according to a new report showing the number of genocidal expressions towards Jewish hit new highs on campuses across the United States.

A new report by released Wednesday by pro-Israel organization the AMCHA Initiative, a group that tracks anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activity on college campuses, shows that much of the anti-Semitism on U.S. campuses is the result of activity by anti-Israel activists who promote imagery such as swastikas and tropes calling for the destruction of the Jewish people, according to the report.

Genocidal expression, such as images and language promoting the killing of Jews and destruction of Israel, "rose dramatically" over the past years, with at least 75 percent of such incidents "involving classic anti-Semitism" and "genocidal expression," according to the report. The number of such incidents appear to have dropped slightly from 2017 to the first part of 2018, the report notes.

Most notably, according to the report, "Israel-related incidents were significantly more likely to contribute to a hostile campus," the report found.

The AMCHA report puts figures to a range of anecdotal and reported conflicts on college campuses across the United States, where anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activity continues to flourish. Pro-Palestinian campus activists continue to aggressively silence those in the Jewish community and foster an unsafe environment for many Jewish students.

The Washington Free Beacon reported last week that Stanford University was investigating a student who threated violence against Jewish students on campus in what is just one example of the unsafe environment stirring many college campuses across the country.

"Israel-related incidents with intent to harm were 6.5 times more likely to have multiple perpetrators and 7 times more likely to be affiliated with groups than classic incidents," according to the findings.

However, the number of "classic anti-Semitic incidents" still outnumbered "Israel-related incidents three to one," according to the report.

Much of the anti-Semitic and anti-Israel activity has centered around efforts by anti-Israel activists on campus to promote their views and suppress the free speech of pro-Israel activists and those in the Jewish community.

"Suppressing speech and ostracizing and excluding Jewish and pro-Israel students from campus life were the most common features of Israel-related anti-Semitic incidents," AMCHA found.

At least 44 percent of the Israel-related conflicts on campus "involved behavior intended to silence expression, including shutting down, disrupting, defacing, or other attempts to interfere with Israel-related events, displays, or trips," according to the report.

Perhaps most startling, 76 percent of recorded incidents against Jewish and pro-Israel students "involved behavior that directly and personally targeted students or groups for denigration or discrimination in order to ostracize and exclude them from campus life," according to the report.

Efforts to silent and exclude Jewish students on campus continued to manifest in 2018, following growing trends of past years.

"Attempts to silence pro-Israel expression stayed relatively constant," according to the report, while "incidents involving attempts to ostracize or exclude pro-Israel students and staff from campus life more than doubled."

In addition, "attempts to ostracize and exclude pro-Israel students and staff became much more flagrant" this year, according to the report. "Incidents including open calls to boycott interaction with or expel actual on-campus students or student groups increased from 3 in 2015 to 4 in 2016 to 14 in 2017, and 18 in the first half of 2018 alone."

"Recognizing that anti-Semitic incidents given equal weight in an audit may not have an equal impact on Jewish students, either individually or collectively, this study sought to go deeper than previous studies and look beyond the tallies to better understand how anti-Semitism affects American campuses today," AMCHA wrote in the report.

"Our examination revealed that Israel-related anti-Semitic incidents were considerably more likely to contribute to a hostile environment for Jewish students than incidents involving classic anti-Semitism, and that anti-Israel campus activities are no longer intent on harming Israel, but increasingly, and alarmingly, they are intent on harming pro-Israel members of the campus community," the organization noted.

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Few costs to the success of Australia's universities

I don't like to rain on anybody's parade but Australia's advantage is partly geographical.  Australia is in roughly the same time zone as China and only a short jet flight away (around  $500 one way).  So Chinese can readily flit between the two countries and do so without jetlag

The Australian university system is highly unusual globally in two key areas: the large size of most universities, and the high proportion of international students, particularly from China, now attending them.

The massive growth in international education means it has become Australia's third largest export after iron ore and coal – as Malcolm Turnbull happily acknowledged in a recent speech at the University of NSW.

It's also translates into a not-so-quiet revolution on Australian campuses.

Several of the Group of Eight universities have international enrolments running at well over 30 per cent. In NSW, the percentage of international students at all universities is currently above 37 per cent, in Queensland it is 34 per cent.

The biggest growth, not surprisingly, has been in the Chinese student market, with 125,000 Chinese students at Australian universities as of last May and growing at about 15 per cent a year.

One result is that Australia is on track this year to jump Britain into second place, only behind the US, in the sheer number of international students in its universities. That's even though Britain's population is 65 million rather than 25 million.

On Go8 figures, for example, 38 per cent of the 141,000 students starting at Go8 universities in 2016 were international students. That average figure can only have increased since and is clearly much higher in faculties like management and commerce, engineering and information technology where international students are heavily concentrated.

University vice-chancellors certainly love to promote the academic, cultural and economic value of Australia's approach.

A virtuous circle

Ian Jacobs, vice-chancellor of the University of NSW and also chairman of the Go8 universities, will promote its success in a speech at the National Press Club on Tuesday.

This is part of a push by these older research-heavy universities to persuade the government and the bureaucracy that taxpayer money spent on them should not be seen as a budget cost ever vulnerable to cuts. Instead, they want to persuade Canberra to see it as a vital investment generating a very high return.

According to Jacobs, the growth in the international student market helps that, creating a virtuous circle. He sees the growth as an unalloyed good for Australia in general and for Australian students – generating opportunities and advantages that are far more extensive than the purely financial.

Yet for many domestic students and their lecturers, the price of such success seems to also be increasingly obvious – and accelerating given the universities' business model.

These complaints are largely anecdotal but they are persistent and extremely common across a modern generation of students. Just ask one of them.

One problem is the low level of interaction between most domestic and international students, particularly when international students are in a majority of a course. That's compounded by the large size of lectures and tutorials that limit any sense of individualised attention.

Other frequent complaints involve the insidious pressure on lecturers to reduce quality standards in order to pass international students to ensure the money keeps flowing.

Things could be better

Many domestic students also argue they are required carry more of the load on joint projects in order to compensate for the poor English skills of many international students.

Professor Jacobs concedes there may be "pockets" where things could be better, including the level of cross cultural interaction. He still insists Go8 standards in terms of enrolments, marking and English qualifications remain extremely high and that interaction is definitely increasing to everyone's mutual benefit

Australia, he says, is developing a tremendous reputation for providing "high quality education at scale in a very efficient way" with huge flow on benefits and potential to do even more.

To back this up, Jacobs will cite a new study commissioned by the Go8 on the broader economic benefits produced by Australia's top universities, including the massive dollar value of their research.

According to this study by London Economics, the Go8's total operational costs of just over $12 billion in 2016 were dwarfed by the $66 billion contribution to the Australian economy. That includes the long-term impact of their research activity but also the direct and indirect impact on jobs, wages and increased economic growth to support students, especially the accelerating number of international students.

By this yardstick, the study argues that every three international students at a Go8university generate $1 million in economic impact each year.

Big money

For universities, the huge direct financial hit still comes from the much higher charges for international students over their domestic students. For international students starting at Go8 universities in 2016, the net tuition fee income alone was estimated to be over $3 billion.

According to the study, this fee income supports 43,000 jobs throughout the economy plus more than 29,000 due to the additional spending of international students.

But the large tuition fees from international students also allow universities to cross-subsidise their research work which pushes them up the global university rankings. That in turn means they then attract yet more international students.

According to the latest ABS statistics for 2016, the Go8 invested $6.4 billion in research and development of which just over half was in the form of cross-subsidy from general university funds – those not explicitly tied to supporting research.

That balance will be ever more reliant on international tuition income and numbers to bulk up. Can there be – should there be – a limit? Not according to the Go8.

Although Jacobs says the percentage of Chinese students may diminish in a decade or so as China becomes self-sufficient at education, he sees a wave of students from India, then Africa and Latin America sustaining growth for decades to come.

SOURCE