Essay Tested
College admissions have evolved into one of the costliest, more byzantine exercises of the teen years. More teens are applying to college than ever and applying to more colleges per person, say experts in the college advising sector. With the recent growth in test-optional admissions, where students are not required to submit scores from standardized tests such as the ACT and SAT—ostensibly because of their bias against kids from certain backgrounds—the “personal statement” has grown in significance, accounting for 25% of applicant’s weighting at some schools.
A local communications entrepreneur is trying to scale in that space, offering admissions essay consulting to high school juniors and seniors. Minnesota College Essay Coach is owned by Tschida Communications founder Stef Tschida, who describes the business as a natural extension of her primary one. “It’s basically a marketing exercise,” she explains. “If we can do that for CEOs, we can easily do it for students.”
Tschida began offering the service in 2020 and deemed it promising enough to earn a College Access Counseling certificate from Rice University. She hires recent college grads to work with clients, who pay an all-in $1,899 fee, which is, at minimum, less than half the cost of private advising, which usually includes essay coaching but can cost $8,000 or more.
“We don’t compete in that marketplace,” says Tschida. “We’re focused exclusively on the life skill of telling your story.”
After fits and starts trying to market to kids, Tschida realized her target market was parents, who are frequently more motivated about their kids’ applications than the high schoolers themselves. “We use a communications marketing approach, involving key messages, originality, and being personal,” explains Alison Rosengren, 24, one of the firm’s essay advisors. She typically spends several months advising each teen; the work includes scholarship essays and interview consulting.
Rosengren believes the more selective a school, the more important originality and creativity are in the essay: “We encourage them to take risks, even with the sentence structure.”
Clients tend to be at all skill levels. “Even very strong writers struggle with this,” Rosengren notes. “They tend to overthink it or try to pack every achievement of their life into it.” Tschida, who is in her 40s, believes Rosengren’s generational proximity to clients is an advantage that helps kids open up and feel comfortable.
Tschida and Rosengren also do some pro bono or reduced-fee consulting for families of limited means. “We’re grateful to our affluent families,” Tschida says, “who help us assist the families that are not.”
