A private practice, built over three decades.
St. Aquinas was founded by a former admissions officer at Georgetown University, who later read for several peer institutions across the Ivy League. The firm was established for a small group of families who wanted the kind of counsel they had relied on in other parts of their lives: experienced, discreet, and willing to take the long view.
In the years since, every student who began with us in the eighth grade and followed the academic plan we recommended has gone on to a top-choice university. We do not promise that for every student we meet, and we will say so honestly in an early conversation when we believe another path is right.
A singular, discreet, and practiced firm.
Every advisor on the St. Aquinas team has held a senior reading or decision-making role inside a highly selective admissions office. Our advisors have read files at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, Penn, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, MIT, Georgetown, Chicago, Duke, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, the Juilliard School, Oxford, and Cambridge.
We do not publish the names of our advisors on the website. Families who wish to know with whom they would be working are introduced before a retainer is signed.
Families thinking carefully about the long view.
We work with a small number of families each year. Some are founders or executives, some hold public positions, and many are simply parents who have decided to give their child's education the same care and attention they bring to the other long decisions in their lives.
About half of our students arrive as introductions from current and former families, and the rest reach out directly. Our engagements often last six to ten years, beginning as early as the eighth grade and continuing through college recruiting and graduate planning. We are frequently re-engaged for younger siblings, and, in recent years, for the next generation of families we first worked with at the start of our practice.
A candidate is the product of many years.
Selective admissions decisions rest on a great deal more than a score or an essay. They turn, in our experience, on the moment a reader closes a file and feels they have come to know a young person they would welcome into the community their college protects. That moment is the result of years of careful work, in school and outside of it, and our role is to help a student do that work well and to present it honestly.
- ◆ Begin early, and revise the plan each semester.
- ◆ Build a record of real work, not a résumé of titles.
- ◆ Write in the student's own voice, on the student's own time.
- ◆ Keep the family informed; keep the world informed of nothing.
A fifteen-minute introduction.
We are glad to speak with prospective families at no cost, and to be honest about whether our counsel is the right fit.
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