For $120,000 a year, Christopher Rim promises to turn any student into Ivy bait.
Christopher Rim makes himself hard to get to. First, there’s the email to register as a guest at the Aman Club, where members pay an initiation fee of $200,000 to perch themselves above the crowds on Fifth Avenue and where Rim sometimes holds his client meetings. Then there’s the check-in at the front desk to get access to the elevator, which leads to another reception area on the 14th floor. From there, a man in a suit guides me into the main room (fireplace, lots of couches, mostly empty), then through a door that blends into a wall, past a bar (one guy drinking water; it’s only noon), and up a narrow flight of stairs. It’s there that I meet Rim in a small room decorated with bottles of Macallan 18 and coffee-table books about art.
His look is quiet luxury, though everything about this meeting appears designed to scream money. On his wrist: a $55,000 Patek Philippe watch. On his back: a Loro Piana cashmere sweater. Rim tells me that sometimes he runs into his clients here and they pretend not to know him. But he can imagine what they’re thinking: What is the tutor doing at the same club where Bill Gates lunched when he was in town?
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.