Brian Taylor, founder of Ivy Coach, is a tell-it-like-it-is thought leader in college admissions for the last two decades. A graduate of Dartmouth College, he has debunked commonly held misconceptions about the admissions process and used the platform to speak truth to power, issuing a clarion call for a better process.

Brian has been quoted in The Harvard Crimson on the waitlist, The Yale Daily News on the role of private college counselors, The New York Times on the male advantage at many top schools, and Le Monde on how great grades aren’t enough, among many others. He’s appeared on TV programs from Nightline to Morning in America, addressing topics ranging from the Varsity Blues scandal to college enrollment.

Brian knows how to shape great stories, which is foundational to Ivy Coach’s approach to college counseling. He won a Peabody Award for producing Showtime’s The Good Lord Bird, a series the American Film Institute deemed one of America’s greatest screen stories for its “contributions to America’s cultural legacy.”

Each year, Brian works with America’s veterans on a pro bono basis to help them earn admission to the colleges of their dreams.

What is Ivy Coach and what led you to be Managing Partner?

Ivy Coach is a Manhattan-based leading college counseling firm that helps students from across the country and around the world earn admission to highly selective American universities. We have a reputation for telling it like it is, for speaking truth to power, and, above all, for helping students position their cases for admission so that admissions officers at our nation’s most elite universities are effectively dared not to offer them admission.

My mom, Bev Taylor, was a high school counselor on Long Island for many years who became one of the first private college counselors. Elite college admissions was thus the soundtrack of my youth. After graduating from Dartmouth and starting a career as a television executive in Los Angeles, later heading development for Kelsey Grammer’s Lionsgate-based company (I continue to produce shows and movies, like Showtime’s The Good Lord Bird, since storytelling remains a fundamental part of Ivy Coach’s identity but my identity as well), I realized that while I loved the storytelling of Hollywood, Hollywood lunch breaks were just too long.

So, during my lunch breaks and each evening, I’d blog about college admissions and then I’d blog some more, espousing our positions on hot-button topics in admissions. Ivy Coach’s blog, which began attracting hundreds of thousands of readers, would become our soap box, our platform to dispel misconceptions about the elite college admissions process and issue a clarion call for a better, more equitable admissions process.

And just like in any good Hollywood story, we’ve got heroes and villains of elite college admissions. There are times when we salute universities for taking the road less traveled, like when Dartmouth chose to respond to the events of October 7, 2023 by hosting a series of dialogues between experts from the Jewish Studies and Middle Eastern Studies departments to teach and learn from one another about the intractable conflict. There are also times when we hold universities to account, like when Harvard said it would “investigate” ending the practice of legacy admission after the fall of Affirmative Action but never took concrete action. How elite colleges can continue to justify offering preferential treatment to the sons and daughters of alumni while underrepresented minority applicants no longer receive a leg up is perplexing to say the least.

How has the business and your services evolved since your founding decades ago?

We now have former admissions officers from Harvard, Stanford, Yale, UChicago, Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Penn, Duke, and more on our team. Just as many prosecutors become defense attorneys, Ivy Coach’s former admissions officers were the very people evaluating applicants’ cases for admission at our nation’s most elite universities. But before our former admissions officers begin their work on the other side of the desk, we train them in Ivy Coach’s methods — our secret sauce — in how to help our students stand out.

Yet the more things change, the more they stay the same. Our approach has worked for over three decades. In our early years, we operated with a crystal ball. When a student didn’t know if they could earn admission to Stanford, we’d give them our crystal ball reading. In 2025, we’ve still got a crystal ball. Our famously accurate readings are of course influenced by data, but the crystal ball informs our recommendations nonetheless.

Why should families work with Ivy Coach?

Our track record. Over the last 10 years, excluding a few students who chose not to heed our advice on their Early Decision/Action choice or who made unapproved changes to their applications, among Ivy Coach’s Early Decision/Action applicants, 90% of our students earned admission to Harvard, 78% to Yale, 67% to Princeton, 79% to Columbia, 91% to Dartmouth, 79% to Brown, 88% to Penn, 71% to Cornell, 91% to Stanford, 85% to Duke, 87% to UChicago, 74% to MIT, 67% to Caltech, 78% to Northwestern, 81% to Johns Hopkins, 77% to Vanderbilt, 77% to WashU, 92% to Georgetown, 90% to Carnegie Mellon, 89% to Emory, and so on.

When you look at the track records of our competitors, they often boast that they can triple, quadruple, or even quintuple a student’s odds of admission as compared to the overall rate of admission. But if a school has a 5% overall admission rate (as many elite universities do), that means that they can — at most — offer a student a 25% chance of admission. That means that 75% of their students don’t get in, whereas Ivy Coach’s numbers are often the inverse (75% of our students do get in).

So when some families choose to work with our competitors, we often scratch our heads and wonder to ourselves if they failed to do basic arithmetic. But it’s ok. In mid-December of a student’s senior year, Ivy Coach offers PostMortem services to students who worked with other college counseling firms and failed to achieve their desired results. Whereas other college counseling firms are quite busy at that time of year with their students, we’re busy with the students of other college counseling firms. After all, our own students tend — overwhelmingly — to earn admission in the Early Decision/Action round.

What sets you apart from others in the college counseling space?

Aside from our track record, it’s how we help our students at Ivy Coach present as wonderfully weird. While all of Ivy Coach’s students are always different and that’s a big reason why they so often earn admission to their dream schools, the one commonality is that they all showcase a singular hook that is wonderfully weird. Whereas many applicants present with well-rounded profiles, Ivy Coach’s students instead showcase a singular through-line in the many puzzle pieces of their applications, including their high school activities and their storytelling in their college admissions essays. Our students’ singular hooks aren’t weird for weird’s sake. Instead, in a sea of the same sorts of applicants, our students’ narratives are simply refreshing.

While, in recent years, many parents know that elite colleges aren’t seeking well-rounded students but instead singularly talented students to form a well-rounded class, most college applicants invariably still present as well-rounded. Why? Because they don’t know what makes a singular hook and how best to showcase that hook through their application’s narrative.

What trends in college admissions are you paying closest attention to right now, and how are you advising families to adapt?

More and more students are making the mistake of using AI when writing their college admissions essays. Admissions officers weren’t born yesterday. When they read generic, flowery sentences, they know they’re reading the words of a computer rather than a human. Aside from admissions officers having AI detection software, AI lacks a voice. A big reason why Ivy Coach’s students so often earn admission to their dream schools is they showcase their voice in their storytelling, a voice we help them bring to the surface, and a voice that so often inspires admissions officers to not only admit our students but want to hug them, too.

Elite colleges are capitalizing on Chief Justice Roberts’ loophole to the ruling striking down Affirmative Action through culture/background essay prompts. In the ruling, Justice Roberts wrote, “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” Many schools now ask supplemental essay prompts that specifically ask about an applicant’s culture. It’s an opportunity for admissions officers to learn about a student’s background, including their race, and continue to admit a diverse incoming class (as they should!).

What markets do you service?

We work with students from across the U.S. and around the world. Elite colleges like to boast that, in each incoming class, they have students representing all 50 states and from x number of countries worldwide. Over the years, we too have worked with students from all 50 states and from nearly 100 countries.

What advice do you have for other leaders who are looking to scale their business?

Don’t lose track of what works and only work with clients you want to help.

Ivy Coach is a boutique firm by design, a family business. While we now have many former admissions officers, tutors, and editors on our team, we are still a boutique firm by design. I still proof every final application.

Also, don’t take on clients who have unreasonable expectations. If a student has C grades and their parents have dreams of Harvard, burst their bubble at the outset. If they still insist on Harvard, recommend your competitors. They’ll likely return for a PostMortem anyway come mid-December of the student’s senior year after things don’t turn out as they hoped.

Is there anything else you would like to share?

We care deeply about helping America’s veterans earn admission to the colleges of their dreams and, in fact, Ivy Coach’s pro bono services are reserved exclusively for veterans of America’s military. Many veterans don’t know that elite American universities actively seek to admit veterans as transfer students. We proudly help these students position their applications so that admissions officers dare not deny these young people who have bravely served our nation in uniform.

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