Unlike so many other entrants in the increasingly crowded college admissions consulting landscape, Acuity Admissions wasn’t founded as a top-down startup operation, nor as an attempt to exploit a soft spot in the educational marketplace. We don’t try to claim that digital platforms or data analytics hold all the answers, nor do we try to pair you with well-meaning but inexperienced part-time tutors we have hired on the cheap.
Rather, our business is us — and it evolved organically and incrementally, on the basis of repeated requests to guide our classroom and tutorial students in the various intricacies of the college application process. As we personally engaged over the years with more and more applicants, across an increasingly broader range of backgrounds and special skills to emphasize, word of mouth around our work grew to the point that college counseling became the focus of our efforts…and Acuity Admissions was born.
But don’t let our origin story fool you! Just because our growth has been winding and gradual doesn’t mean we’re not laser-focused on our work. We stay abreast of all the latest trends and technologies, we maintain a keen interest in the growing ability of data to inform the admissions process, and we’re never too proud to learn from other experts in the industry — all as part of an abiding effort to maximize the depth and breadth of opportunity available to our clients.
Yes: our ability, our expertise and our focus mean that we frequently work with high-powered students targeting entrance to elite universities. But we don’t want our approach to reflect — much less to intensify — the cutthroat ethos of entitlement and hypercompetition that has infected the admissions process over the last decade. Our pledge instead (or if you’d rather, our mission statement) is to restore sanity to the increasingly insane world of college admissions: to guide our clients in producing uniquely brilliant applications with a calm and balanced confidence, and without the outrageous expense that so often accompanies high-level admissions consulting.
If you’re looking for guarantees, special advantages, privileged access, pushiness or upsell, then that’s not us. But if you’re looking for incisive intelligence, for actionable insight borne of experience, for composure, creativity, compassion and good humor…well that’s exactly what Acuity Admissions is all about.
Brian Algra, Acuity’s founder and chief counselor, has been working since 2003 to help students and their families navigate the college application process. As a graduate of Harvard University and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, UK, he knows a thing or two about high academic achievement in his own right…and his years of experience teaching everywhere from university halls to elementary classrooms mean that he knows a lot about how to optimize college readiness in the students he has mentored along the way.
Brian is directly involved with every one of Acuity’s clients — and when he’s not working to round out college lists and polish personal statements, you’ll find him wrapped up in a good book or an old movie…or patrolling the ballfields of Southern California with his three young-ish sons.