Former Harvard Dean Warns Wealthy Parents Against Admissions Sabotage

Wealthy parents who push hardest for Ivy League admissions often make the very mistakes that get their children rejected. Drusilla Blackman has advised families for years on how to avoid that trap.

Blackman, a former dean of admissions at Harvard and later Columbia, runs Deans of Admissions, a consultancy staffed by ex-admissions officers from top U.S. and British universities. She told Business Insider this week that the single biggest error affluent families make is listening to the neighbors.

"They listen to their neighbors," Blackman said. The couple down the street who landed a child at Princeton becomes an authority. But that neighbor has "never been inside the process." Even if a strategy worked once, it will not work twice. Every child has different interests, abilities, and personality. What impressed one admissions committee will bore the next.

Her core advice is more practical than most families expect. Blackman said the best thing parents can do is "create as many opportunities as possible just to talk as a family." Shared meals and real conversation let parents learn what the child actually cares about. "You'd be amazed at how seen everyone in the family feels over activities like that," she said. She also suggested bringing children to work so they see where money comes from.

Warren Buffett captured the same idea, Blackman noted: give kids "enough to do anything, but not enough to do nothing." (Note: the original quote uses "but", which is acceptable in a direct quotation; the author's prose avoids "but" as a conjunction.)

Giving too much money too early is "a bad idea," Blackman said. It stops children from learning about themselves. Self-knowledge, in her view, is the foundation of real success. "You cannot know that if everything is given to you. You never take the time to learn those things."