What Colleges Don't Tell You (And Other Parents Don't Want You to Know): 272 Secrets for Getting Your Kid into the Top Schools

A sought-after "packager" of high school students shares highly coveted strategies to help parents get their kids into the country’s most competitive colleges

Did you know? A child’s guidance counselor can help reverse a deferral. A parent can help get a child off a waiting list. And there is a way for students to back out of Early Decision once they’ve been accepted.

Based on the controversial insider information Elizabeth Wissner-Gross has gleaned from working for years as a successful packager of high school students and from interviews with heads of admission at some of the nation’s most competitive colleges, this book helps parents answer questions such as: Can an application be sabotaged by a competing student or parent? How do colleges really know if a student applies to two or more schools for Early Decision? Is it possible to prescreen a teacher’s recommendation? As well as the biggest question of all: Of the tens of thousands of highly qualified students that graduate each year, why should a college choose yours?

Targeting the college-educated parents of today’s college-bound teenagers who seek to gain a proven edge in the highly secretive and seemingly arbitrary college admissions process, What Colleges Don’t Tell You (and Other Parents Don’t Want You to Know) reveals 272 little- known, unconventional, tried-and-true secrets to help parents get their children into the most competitive schools of their dreams.