We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Alex Loveless a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alex, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

Our Mission:

Admissions Angle offers personalized college admissions services for middle and high school students looking not only to maximize their college acceptances, but also to see the process as a reflective and empowering experience for sustainable personal growth.

My business partner (wife) and I started Admissions Angle in 2019 after moving back from living abroad in Seoul, South Korea. We met at The Princeton Review Korea in Gangnam, Seoul (yes, that Gangnam), which started both of our journeys in learning more about the college admissions process. I lived in Korea for almost a decade, from 2009 – 2019, working as an English teacher, math teacher, SAT prep instructor, and then college admissions consultant, and learned a TON about Korean culture and their prioritization of education. We learned about the dedication and commitment that our students had to better themselves through education, especially in learning English and learning about other western cultures like the US.

But we also saw the dark side of the high performance and expectations of their education system. The mental health issues with students who weren’t “perfect” and the long hours of after school tutoring for kids as early as first grade. The Korean emphasis on education was extremely results focused (grades, test scores, matriculation outcomes), which devalued the progress and accomplishments of students who were told that they weren’t enough.

As a mixed race (Korean/White American) man, I’ve always felt like I’ve had one foot in each culture, and I like to think that when we established Admissions Angle, we wanted to bring the best aspects of the Korean education system into our processes without setting exceedingly toxic expectations. We wanted to imbue the optimism and freedom of American expression and exploration into helping out students explore what they want to study and ultimately, what careers they want.

This is why in our mentorships, we strive to push our students to grow and to reach for higher goals and college outcomes while making sure that our work is student-led and based on our students’ authentic interests and passions, not those of their friends or family members. We believe that most of our competitors focus their processes on the admissions outcomes, which are, of course, amazing for marketing and for demonstrating competency as college admissions consultants. But we strive to be mentors that help young people develop skills and motivation that will last long after their acceptance letters.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I think I answered a lot of this in my previous answer, so I’ll try to just supplement that information here.

The primary problem that we solve for our students is figuring out the difference between an interest and a calling. Or figuring out how to nurture an interest into a calling. We know that the college admissions process values students having certainty in what they hope to pursue academically and professionally. On the flip side, if as student doesn’t really know what they want to study or why they want to attend college, their applications fall flat.

At the same time, high schoolers aren’t really given a lot of time to answer these broader questions of career path or college majors. They’re too busy solving algebra problems or writing essays on Catcher in the Rye. And while we don’t devalue a well-rounded, liberal arts style education and its benefits, we do think that counseling services at high schools, in particular public high schools, are severely underfunded and do not do enough to help young people nurture their interests.

Our mentorship services aim to start these conversations earlier and try to organically grow a students extracurricular and academic resume based on the interests they have and ultimately, the major they select. We call this building out their “Admissions Angle”, a strategy we use to center our mentorships. We know that many of our competitors like to instead “astroturf” a student’s resume, but admissions officers are getting smarter and have more tools available to them than ever, so this approach doesn’t even work very well anymore, similar to blackhat SEO strategies that are long obsolete because of more sophisticated Google ranking algorithms.

Our college application services aim to help communicate to officers what makes a student unique and help leverage their authenticity to stand out in the process. Of course, the college acceptances and giving our students as many options as possible is the goal here.

While we also do SAT/ACT tutoring, specialized math competition tutoring, and are getting into other realms, the core mission of our services are to help students see admissions as a reflective and empowering experience.

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

There’s one story that comes to mind. It was one of those milestone moments when we were a young company that confirmed that we were doing something right and that we knew what we were doing.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

Neither Noelle or I have Ivy League degrees, usually a prerequisite for succeeding in our industry to the extent that we have thus far. But I’ve worked managed dozens of SAT tutors who graduated from the “best” schools in the country and they often weren’t the “best” instructors. Just because someone graduated from a top school, doesn’t mean they understood why they did so. Or how there’s a multitude of different ways to get accepted into a top school.

Command Education, for example, recently were on the cover of magazine and are a much bigger and well known competitor of ours that charges $100,000/year for a student to work with them. They only hire consultants from Ivy League+ schools and they are almost all freshly out of college with little experience in the admissions space. They pay them six figures and have near infinite resources because of their revenue per client but I don’t believe they add much value over our services. They apparently will text students to remind them about math tests coming up, but this is something that we never want to do and disagree with fundamentally in helping a young person learn to set their own schedule and manage their time.

On the flip side, the thing we hear from a lot of our families is that the work we do translates to success well beyond college acceptances. Our mentorships are long-term and will meet with students as often as once/week to help with planning, accountability, and brainstorming ideas.

One of our favorite testimonials is below (also plastered all over our website):

“…Now, two years later, with my daughter in her dream school, I can see that their impact on her was much more far reaching than getting the applications in on time. … The Admissions Angle is everything you need them to be to help your student get accepted but in the end their value grows long past the click of the submit button.”

– Randi, mother of Hannah – Michigan Class of ’25

We think that our services are a much higher value propositions compared to most of our competitors and we really feel that we set up our students for sustainable growth and success.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://theadmissionsangle.com
• Instagram: https://www.theadmissionsangle.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theadmissionsangle/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-admissions-angle/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@theadmissionsangle
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/the-admissions-angle-new-york