Write stuff: for a fee of $7,500, lacy crawford would help the sometimes indifferent children of wealthy new yorkers write their college entry essays. Photo: john chapple write stuff: for a fee of $7,500, lacy crawford would help the sometimes indifferent children of wealthy new yorkers write their college entry essays. lacy crawford’s first novel, early decision william morrow , out this week, was inspired by the 15 years she spent working as an independent college admissions counselor to the rich and powerful’s sons and daughters in manhattan, chicago, los angeles and london. For a fee, crawford would help them with their entry essays and applications to get them the one thing they couldn’t always buy a spot in an ivy league school. She shares her stories with the names and some characteristics changed with the post. though i worked for 15 years as an independent college applications counselor all over the united states and europe with students whose parents thought nothing of flying me in every weekend to try to make harvard say yes nowhere was the college admissions race more competitive than in new york city. Here the frenzy is amplified by money and power as it only can be in new york college admissions are the culmination of a scramble that begins with nursery school. Here, too, the opportunities for obsessive parents to break a student’s heart seem sharper than anywhere else.

My abiding memory of tutoring new yorkers is of sitting with one girl as night fell late in october. Tears coursed down her cheeks and onto the hem of the distinctive skirt of her elite private school. She was too upset to sip from the mug of hot chocolate her housekeeper had brought up. Her parents were working late, as they always did, and other than the staff, we were alone in the house. From her bedroom window, where we sat, an unobstructed view of central park stretched north to the autumn sky.

How does a young woman with so much come to feel she’s got nothing? my students were almost all thoughtful and diligent, but their parents had fallen into a terrible trap, having raised their children to reach for the stars without teaching them how to so much as stretch out an arm. For many of the children of the most ambitious, wealthiest parents in the city, the college admissions process begins when a child is 2, with the hiring of a consultant to deliver nursery school acceptances. If the tutors fail, the parents will knock on doors until they find a learning specialist who agrees to identify a trumped up deficit in a student’s capabilities in other words, to label the child in some way learning disabled after which the parents will force their excellent school to exempt the child from certain obligations, so she no longer has to take four years of math, say, or timed tests.

The college list will be drawn up no later than sophomore spring, and it will include only trophy schools the ivy league, duke, stanford selected not for fit but according to where the parents have influence. If a parent went to a college, it’s a legacy school, and it goes at the top of the list. By junior spring, the early decision school is chosen, meaning a single application will be made by nov.

Statistically, this is the best chance a student has of acceptance at top schools, and it’s not a problem to apply so early for students who have had years to tour their choices and who don’t have to fill out financial aid forms. The summer before a student’s senior year, the parents work to secure the golden ticket a recommendation letter from a trustee of the first choice school while the student interns for an exclusive institution a neuroscience lab, a political office or performs community service in a far flung locale building schools in bangladesh. Finally, after 15 or so years of parents managing every variable, there comes the time when a student is expected to do something all by herself: fill out the actual application. Her own ideas and feelings, like a language she has not practiced, have fallen away. Their entire lives have been pointed toward this one test of their worth: who wouldn’t suffer writer’s block? the parents yell. I had been an independent college applications adviser for almost a decade when i moved to manhattan in 2007.

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For the three years that followed, i tutored some of the city’s most elite high school seniors, working under the radar, a hired gun who slipped in and out of penthouse apartments and jogged up the side steps of brownstones like someone’s mistress. From 20 to 2010, more than 90 percent of my students were accepted at their top choice schools. My name was shared among wealthy families who would not have dreamed of hiring one of the big college application consulting shops they wanted exclusivity, someone other students couldn’t have. In fact, often i was asked to create false invoices substituting, say, child care services for educational consulting when i billed my $7,500, all in fee.

Five days a week, from august to december, i took the 6 train from midtown to 68th or 77th and walked west to park or fifth, where i sat with wealthy students struggling to free themselves from their parents’ dreams so they might have some hopes of their own. One father requested that my meetings with his son take place in the midtown offices of his private equity group. It wasn’t safe, the father explained, as he led me into the vast glass space of his office, where his son was sitting in fact, he had personally walked to penn station to meet his son’s train and escort him here. Then he took out his checkbook and asked me, in front of the boy, what i’d charge to write his essays.

You see the logic? i love you so much i won’t risk letting you take a cab in the city, and i wouldn’t dream of letting you use your own voice to apply to college. But you can’t expect a student to write effectively in the first person if his own father has no interest in what he might say. He was very bright, but his english was not good enough for a top american college.

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She was engaged in a ferocious divorce from her diplomat husband, and while the blond boy and i sat there, working in the two story atrium of their living room, professionals in slim suits wandered the apartment with notepads and cameras, making appraisals of every item that might be removed. Can they ask for proof? her son sat silent as a stone, blue eyes fixed on his notebook, while the appraisers’ cameras flashed on the picassos on the walls. She, like so many others, was dumb struck, devastated, when it didn’t work out. This is why, year after year, new clients kept calling: they hear the horror stories of wonderful kids who got in nowhere.