By Lindsey Kundel, Editor in Chief, InGenius Prep
Every year, I talk to parents who’ve spent thousands on test prep — SAT tutors, ACT bootcamps, score-guarantee programs — and are still waiting for the needle to move. Not just on scores, but on the application as a whole. The student is smart, the GPA is strong, and yet something is missing. What’s missing, in most cases, is a mentor.
I want to be clear: I’m not dismissing test prep. Scores matter, particularly as more schools return to requiring them. But after years of working with families through the college process, I’ve come to believe that we’ve badly miscalibrated where the real leverage is — and the research backs that up in ways that should make every parent stop and reconsider the plan.
The families whose kids get into the most selective schools aren’t just buying more preparation. They’re investing in relationships. Specifically, in the kinds of adult relationships that shape how a teenager thinks, what they choose to work on, and how they talk about that work when it counts. That’s the hidden curriculum. And most families don’t even know it exists.
What Admissions Officers Are Actually Reading For
Here’s something worth sitting with: admissions readers at selective colleges are not auditors. They’re not checking boxes. When an officer reads your kid’s file, she’s trying to answer one question — is there someone in this student’s life who actually knows them?
That sounds almost too simple. But think about what it means in practice. A recommendation letter from a teacher who had your student in a class of 28, gave them an A, and found them pleasant — that letter reads exactly like what it is. It signals nothing. Contrast that with a letter from a researcher who spent 18 months watching your kid wrestle with a real problem, push back on the framing, revise her methodology three times, and eventually produce something worth sharing. That letter is different in every sentence. It doesn’t just praise — it describes. And it shows an admissions reader exactly what they’re looking for.
The numbers reflect this. UPenn’s Dean of Admissions reported that roughly a third of students admitted to the Class of 2026 had engaged in academic research during high school. A separate analysis of admitted class data found that 45 percent submitted materials documenting independent research work. These are students who had mentors — people who took their intellectual curiosity seriously enough to guide it somewhere real.
Essays tell the same story. The ones that get remembered aren’t the ones listing accomplishments. They’re the ones where you can feel a student being pushed. Where an idea didn’t land the way they expected. Where someone made them go back and think harder. Behind almost every memorable essay is a mentor who made that happen.
A 1580 and a 1560 look the same to an admissions officer. The student with a richer intellectual life — usually the one with a mentor — does not.
The ROI Argument Parents Need to Hear
Let’s talk money, because I know that’s where a lot of these decisions actually get made.
The research on commercial SAT and ACT prep is remarkably consistent. Across roughly 30 published studies, the consensus finding is that a typical student in a coaching program gains somewhere between 25 and 32 points on the 1600-point SAT scale. A 2010 Ohio State analysis based on the National Education Longitudinal Study put average gains from private tutoring at about 37 points. And for students already scoring above 1300 — the range where most competitive-school applicants live — a College Board study found average gains of only 30 to 50 points even with intensive preparation. You can spend $5,000 and get, in the best case, a one-section improvement.
Now look at what mentored research produces. Pioneer Academics, which pairs high schoolers with university professors for original research projects, tracked its students’ college outcomes over three years. Their alumni were admitted to UPenn at 23 percent — against a 5 percent institutional average. To Columbia at roughly 20 percent, versus 4 percent overall. Lumiere Education reported similar findings: their students were admitted to UPenn at 11.1 percent compared to the university’s 5.4 percent rate.
Those aren’t marginal improvements. They’re structural ones. And the difference isn’t that mentored students scored higher on the SAT — it’s that they arrived with stronger recommendation letters, more specific essays, and evidence of the kind of sustained intellectual work that test prep cannot produce no matter how many sessions you book.
The 2023 Opportunity Insights study by Harvard economists Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman — drawing on admissions data from more than 400 colleges and 3.5 million students — found that among applicants with comparable test scores, “non-academic ratings” played an independent and significant role in who got in at Ivy-plus institutions. Those ratings capture exactly what mentorship builds: strong letters, distinctive intellectual accomplishment, evidence that a student has been genuinely formed by someone who challenged them.
The Hidden Curriculum — and Who Gets Access to It
The sociologist Philip Jackson coined the term “hidden curriculum” back in 1968. He was describing the unspoken rules of school — about authority, about behavior, about what’s expected of you — that students learn without anyone explicitly teaching them. The concept translates almost perfectly to college prep.
There is an entire body of insider knowledge about college admissions that never appears in any guidebook. Which summer research programs are actually known to admissions offices, and which are just expensive résumé lines. How to write a cold email to a professor that gets answered. Why presenting at a university symposium is more meaningful than winning a school competition. What “original contribution” actually means — and how a high school student can gesture toward one. This knowledge exists. It travels through relationships. And it is not equally distributed.
MENTOR’s 2023 national study — “Who Mentored You?” — surveyed more than 2,600 Americans and found something counterintuitive: while young people today are more than twice as likely to be formally mentored than they were 30 years ago, the mentoring gap has actually widened for vulnerable youth. First-generation college students are especially affected. Research on the “undermatching” phenomenon has documented this clearly — high-achieving, first-gen students routinely underestimate where they’re qualified to apply, partly because no one in their network has been there. They’re not less capable. They just don’t have access to someone who knows the terrain.
The Chetty data drives the point home. Among applicants with the same 1500 SAT score, a student from a low-income family had roughly a 10 percent chance of attending an Ivy-plus college. A student from a top-1-percent family? Somewhere between 30 and 40 percent. Two-thirds of that gap, the researchers found, came from higher admissions rates for wealthy applicants with comparable scores — driven by stronger non-academic ratings and more persuasive recommendation letters. Those aren’t innate advantages. They’re the downstream products of richer mentoring environments.
For families with parents who attended selective schools, siblings at elite universities, or family friends in research and professional settings — the hidden curriculum transmits almost on its own. For everyone else, it doesn’t transmit at all unless someone deliberately builds those connections. That’s not a moral failing. It’s just how the system works. And it’s worth understanding clearly, so you can act accordingly.
What separates a strong application from a remarkable one is almost never what a student did. It’s who helped them understand why it mattered.
Why Starting Early Is Not Optional
One thing I’ve seen play out over and over: families who discover the value of mentorship in junior year scramble to manufacture it before the application deadline. Sometimes it works. More often, it doesn’t — not because the mentor isn’t talented, but because the relationship hasn’t had time to produce anything real.
The Big Brothers Big Sisters of America study — a re-analysis of 30 years of data from a 1991 randomized control trial involving nearly 1,000 youth, with outcomes tracked to age 30 — found that mentored youth were 10 percentage points more likely to enroll in college than their non-mentored peers. That finding came from relationships that started early and built over time. Not from eight weeks before an application deadline.
Think about what early mentorship actually produces. A student who connects with a chemistry professor in 10th grade doesn’t just gain lab hours. Over the next two years, she learns how scientists frame questions — not how to answer questions on a test, but how to notice gaps in existing knowledge. She develops enough field literacy to read a journal article and know which part is actually interesting. She starts thinking like a researcher rather than a student, and that shift shows up everywhere: in how she talks about her work, in the specificity of her essay, in the confidence she brings to an interview. That’s not something you can simulate in a summer program. It takes time.
Research by MENTOR confirmed the compounding quality of these relationships: mentored students in college-prep settings showed improved attitudes toward college — including motivation to apply, self-efficacy about being accepted, and sense that college was genuinely within reach — and those improvements held independent of academic progress. The mentor relationship itself moved the needle, above and beyond any tutoring or test prep component.
Starting in 9th or 10th grade isn’t just better. It’s categorically different from starting in 11th. The student who has had two years with a real mentor arrives at application season with depth. The late-starter may have a credential, but rarely a story that only they could tell.
What an Actual Mentoring Relationship Looks Like
This is where I want to be precise, because “mentorship” has become a word that means almost everything and therefore sometimes means nothing.
A teacher who writes you a strong rec letter is not your mentor. A college counselor is not your mentor. Even a professor who lets you observe in her lab for a summer may not qualify if the relationship doesn’t extend beyond supervision. What actually constitutes mentorship — the kind that shows up in essays, shapes intellectual character, and produces letters that admissions readers remember — is something more specific.
Real mentoring relationships are sustained. They run over months, not weeks. They involve genuine intellectual exchange, meaning the mentor doesn’t just assign tasks — they argue, push back, redirect, and raise the bar in ways that feel uncomfortable. The mentor is actually curious about the student’s development, not just tolerating it. And they produce something: writing, research, a project that the student genuinely owns.
The research literature on what makes mentoring effective consistently points to quality over proximity. A multi-disciplinary meta-analysis published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest found that the quality of the mentoring relationship — not simply its existence — is the primary driver of outcomes. Mentors who challenge students to higher standards, who offer honest rather than flattering feedback, and who stay engaged over time produce measurably stronger results. Episodic, transactional relationships move almost nothing.
When I’m working with families and we’re evaluating whether a relationship counts, I ask a few simple questions. Is your kid’s thinking changing? Are they encountering ideas they can’t immediately resolve? Are they producing work that they’re proud of for reasons that have nothing to do with grades? And — maybe most importantly — is there an adult in this relationship who will genuinely tell them when the work isn’t good enough?
If the answer to those questions is yes, the relationship is working. College outcomes will follow.
What to Actually Do With This
The dominant logic of college prep is additive: stack more credentials, higher scores, more activities. I understand the appeal. It feels like control. But at the most selective schools, where the median scores are already stratospheric and GPAs are nearly perfect across the applicant pool, more of the same credential doesn’t differentiate anyone. The application becomes one more flawless document in a pile of flawless documents.
The families whose kids stand out — really stand out, not just technically stand out — have usually made a different kind of bet. They’ve prioritized depth over breadth. They’ve found adults who take their kid’s intellectual curiosity seriously, and they’ve given those relationships time to develop into something real. They’ve stopped asking “What looks good?” and started asking “What will actually form my kid?”
Formation, as opposed to credentialing, produces something that test prep cannot: a student who has been genuinely shaped by serious engagement with hard ideas and with the adults who wrestle with them professionally. That student writes a different essay. They have a different interview. The letters written on their behalf are from people who actually know them. That’s what admissions officers are trying to find.
The data makes a clear case. Students engaged in mentored research are admitted to elite institutions at two to four times the rate of unmentored applicants. Thirty-year longitudinal data shows mentored youth are 10 percentage points more likely to enroll in college overall. And the ROI on test prep — the thing most families spend the most on — caps out at around 30 points on a 1600-point scale for competitive-range students. These aren’t close calls.
If I could tell parents one thing, it’s this: the best college counselor in the world cannot substitute for an adult who knows your kid as a thinker. Start looking for that person now. Give the relationship time. And trust that the application will reflect it — because it will.
If your family is preparing for the next admissions cycle, the work begins now. Schedule a free consultation to talk through where your child is and what comes next.
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