AS SEEN ON
AS SEEN ON
The Only College Consulting Firm Selected to Advise the Permanent Observer IYO to the United Nations
Ranked #1 in Education on USA Today
If, after your first strategy session as a client, you aren’t 100% confident that we can help your child stand out and give them the best possible shot at their dream school, you risk nothing.
This rare honor marks a significant milestone, reflecting a level of trust and credibility that no other higher education advisory firm has achieved.
This level of recognition only comes from 20 years of proven excellence, rigorously audited results, and a track record that withstands the highest levels of international scrutiny.
Every company claims happy families. We prove it with a 95% renewal rate.
This metric covers 100% of our enrolled families—thousands of parents making real financial decisions based on real results.
This isn’t a satisfaction survey. This isn’t a manipulated review score.
This is hard financial data—the percentage of families who choose to continue paying us year after year.
Our renewal rate reflects families voting with their wallets, making conscious financial decisions every billing cycle. No parent continues paying for an educational program that isn’t delivering results for their child. Period.
We passed comprehensive due diligence and investment committee review from our long-time investor—scrutiny reserved for large-scale investments. Additionally, federal lending agencies vetted and approved us for maximum financing. (Our investors maintain purely financial roles with no controlling interest, board seats, or decision-making authority. All strategic decisions and operations remain entirely under our leadership.)
Managing $30+ million in assets, these organizations conducted
deep due diligence before backing our financial aid program, comparing us against every other educational
organization. They chose ours.
Required submission of precise revenue figures and third-party verification to
earn our ranking 4 years in a row.
While others rely on cherry-picked testimonials and filtered review sites, we submit to institutional-level verification of actual payment behavior—the only metric that can’t be faked.
Phani’s son was in the 8th grade when they joined our college consulting program. His son was bright and doing well academically, though he had no exposure to any fields/majors. Outside of sports, he also hadn’t participated in any academic or extracurricular activities. Given that Phani didn’t have any experience with how college admissions in the US worked, his family sought guidance on how to help his son identify his interests and further develop his passion to stand out to top colleges.
Their daughter began her college prep guidance under Zenith Prep Academy midway through her 10th grade. Although their daughter was strong academically and had numerous extracurricular activities involving leadership, sports, and volunteering, Charu and Vivek wanted more specialized guidance on how to identify their daughter’s interests and what she could do in the 18 months prior to college applications to help her stand out to admission officers comparing tens of thousands of other students applying for the same colleges with similar academic profiles (grades, honors/AP classes, SAT/ACT scores, etc.).
Robert’s son joined our program during his 10th grade. Although Robert attended high school and college in the US, given that his son went to a hyper-competitive high school (ranked top 100 in the United States), he wanted a highly customized strategy and plan for their son to further his academic interests and build the right extracurricular profile to stand out from his peers in their high school and in the college applications.
Priya’s daughter was accepted and joined our program when she was in 8th grade. Given that Priya did not grow up here and was unfamiliar with how college admissions worked in the US, her family was seeking our guidance on how to help their daughter build a comprehensive profile that would highlight her academic strengths while combining that with her extracurricular interests to stand out to universities.
While other companies promise to bring “the best” for your child, we actually bring the world’s best to speak to them directly.
Here’s something no other college consulting firm, and most boarding schools or elite private school can say: We have former U.S. Secretaries of Education, 4-star Generals, and world champions personally teaching our students their lifelong wisdom.
FORMER SECRETARY OF EDUCATION
TO THE UNITED STATES
Former 4-Star General,
US Air Force
Duchess of Marlborough
6x USA MEMORY CHAMPION
World-Leading Engineering Professor
Arne Duncan served as U.S. Secretary of Education from January 2009 through January 2016 as part of the Obama Administration. Prior to joining the Obama Administration, Duncan served as chief executive officer of Chicago Public Schools.
From 2001 to 2008, Duncan won praise for uniting the city’s stakeholders behind an education agenda that included opening 100 new schools; expanding after-school, summer learning, early childhood, and college access programs; dramatically boosting the caliber of teachers; and building public-private partnerships around a variety of education initiatives.
He currently leads Chicago CRED, a nonprofit trying to achieve a transformative reduction in gun violence in Chicago. Through partnerships with local business leaders, community organizers, and nonprofit groups, Duncan aims to provide outreach, therapeutic, educational, and employment opportunities for the young men most likely to be engaged in gun violence.
He is also the managing partner at Emerson Collective, an organization dedicated to removing barriers so people can live to their full potential. Secretary Duncan graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1987, majoring in sociology. At Harvard, he served as co-captain of the basketball team and was named a first-team Academic All-American.
Nelson Dellis is a 6x USA Memory Champion and one of the leading memory experts in the world, traveling around the world as a competitive Memory Athlete, Memory Consultant, Published Author, and highly sought-after Keynote Speaker.
As a Memory Champion, Mountaineer, and Alzheimer's Disease Activist, he preaches a lifestyle that combines fitness, both mental and physical, with proper diet and social involvement.
Barbara Oakley, PhD, PE is a Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan; Michigan’s Distinguished Professor of the Year; and Coursera’s inaugural “Innovation Instructor.” Her work focuses on the complex relationship between neuroscience and social behavior.
Dr. Oakley’s research has been described as “revolutionary” in the Wall Street Journal. She is a New York Times best-selling author who has published in outlets as varied as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. Her book A Mind for Numbers, on effective learning in STEM disciplines, has sold over a million copies worldwide; Uncommon Sense Teaching is a critically praised guide to teaching based on insights from neuroscience.
Dr. Oakley has won numerous teaching awards, including the American Society of Engineering Education’s Chester F. Carlson Award for technical innovation in engineering education and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers William E. Sayle II Award for Achievement in Education. Together with Terrence Sejnowski, the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute, she co-teaches Coursera’s “Learning How to Learn,” one of the world’s most popular massive open online courses with some four million registered students, along with a number of other leading MOOCs.
Dr. Oakley has adventured widely through her lifetime. She rose from the ranks of Private to Captain in the U.S. Army, during which time she was recognized as a Distinguished Military Scholar. She also worked as a communications expert at the South Pole Station in Antarctica, and has served as a Russian translator on board Soviet trawlers on the Bering Sea. Dr. Oakley is an elected Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.
Maryanne Miller is a retired 4-star General for the United States Air Force. Her last position before retirement in October of 2020 was Commander, Air Mobility Command. As the Air Component Commander for U.S. Transportation Command, General Miller was responsible for directing global air mobility operations in support of national objectives.
General Miller was commissioned in 1981 as a distinguished graduate of the ROTC program at The Ohio State University. She is a command pilot with more than 4,800 flying hours in numerous Air Force aircraft.
Maryanne spent 39 years serving as an officer and pilot in our Air Force, but now serves on the Boards of Bristow and Leaven Kids. And since 2013, has been a volunteer and co-worker for St. Teresa of Calcutta’s Missionaries of Charity, serving the poorest of the poor around the world.
Consuelo Vanderbilt is a seventh-generation descendant of Cornelius Vanderbilt and the great-great-niece of Consuelo Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough. She is the founder of C&R Production and co-founder of SohoMuse, an exclusive network designed to connect and empower the global creative community.
Ms. Vanderbilt serves on the board of the Vanderbilt Museum and Planetarium and has been appointed as an Advisor to the Forbes Council, reflecting her commitment to fostering innovation and collaboration across various sectors.
This intelligence took nearly 20 years and $25 million to build.
Even if a competitor started today with unlimited funding, they couldn’t buy this—it requires decades of time and tens of millions in investment. They’d need 15+ years to replicate it. By then, we’ll have 35+ years of data and your child will have already graduated from their dream school.
Not even former admissions officers or Ivy League graduates have it.
That’s why the smartest people in college admissions, including former Ivy League admissions officers and graduates, work at Zenith. They know this proprietary dataset is more valuable than their individual experience.
Most college consultants give advice based on what they think works. We give recommendations based on what we know works because we own what’s widely recognized as the largest private dataset on Top 50 admissions in the country.
Here’s the truth: Right now, thousands of students are building the exact same profiles. They’re all joining extracurriculars and clubs.
They’re all playing violin. They’re all volunteering at hospitals. And 90% of them will be rejected from top universities, not because they weren’t qualified, but because they were invisible in a sea of identical applications.
worked with a “prestigious” consultant on paper—[a former Harvard admissions officer]. She built an “impressive” environmental profile: club president, beach cleanups, Costa Rica service trips.
started with us three years later. Our data revealed environmental volunteering had become the second most
oversaturated activity. While 10,000+ students were organizing beach cleanups, we positioned Michael at the intersection of environmental science and machine learning—a field fewer than 50 students nationwide were pursuing.
Accepted to MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley with merit scholarships.
We know which activities become oversaturated 2-3 years before it's obvious
We identify emerging fields universities desperately want but few students pursue
Your child competes with data-driven strategy while others rely on outdated advice
In hyper-competitive college admissions, information and dataset determines outcomes.
Zenith is not just “better” college consulting. You’re not buying consulting. You’re buying the strategic advantage your
child needs to compete against 50,000 other qualified applicants. Because when everyone has perfect grades, the families with better
information and better access win.
We offer something fundamentally different from other firms, at the same price point. That’s why we’ve been America’s fastest-growing college consulting company 4 years in a row—a distinction that speaks to the transformative results our families experience.
Manisha’s daughter gained acceptance into her dream university.
Manisha’s daughter gained acceptance into her dream university. Manisha’s daughter was an 11th grader when they started working with our college counseling team. A first-generation parent, she turned to Zenith to guide her daughter toward how to best use the one year they had left before college applications, highlighting her daughter’s strengths and interests to ultimately help her shine on college applications. With Zenith’s help, Manisha’s daughter gained acceptance into her dream university.
Steve’s family wanted to make sure his son could reach his full potential by the time he applied for college as a senior.
Steve’s son joined our college counseling program as a 10th grader. Though Steve had attended high school and college in the US, he realized how much had changed in the college admissions process during his son’s 9th grade at an academically competitive high school. While his son was hard-working, Steve wanted someone who could motivate their son, help him identify his unique strengths, and most importantly, find an area of interest to pursue outside of school. Given various opportunities in terms of classes, activities, and competitions, Steve’s family wanted to make sure his son could reach his full potential by the time he applied for college as a senior.
Sanjay and Vaishali enrolled their son into our college consulting program in 8th grade to get a head start in planning for high school and college.
Being first-generation parents in the US, Sanjay and Vaishali were unsure how to guide their oldest son to navigate through high school and the eventual college admissions process. Given the different classes a student can take inside and outside of school, the wide variety of clubs offered in high school, and the various extracurricular activities that they heard through various parents, Sanjay and Vaishali enrolled their son into our college consulting program in 8th grade to get a head start in planning for high school and college.
We understand that there are few resources available for parents of 6th – 12th graders who are looking to get into the best universities possible – especially for children who are high-academic achieving or those whose true strengths are not found on their report cards. The reason is because most college consulting programs are designed for the general public and mass appeal in mind.
However, both these students and situations require a very specific strategy and solution to ensure they are accepted into the universities they worked hard for and deserve.
Our philosophy is that:
We would rather be world-class experts in these cases, rather than be mass market and templated.
Our value to families is having knowledge (not found anywhere else due to the 100,000+ hours we have collectively dedicated to these cases) of the most current and effective strategies of what universities are looking for in these students.
To maintain our high-impact program and deliver exceptional results, we only accept students whose profiles match our proven success patterns. We receive 10,000+ inquiries annually but maintain just 1,800 spots across all 50 states and globally, ensuring our program operates at the highest quality.
Depending on the time of year, families can wait 2-3 months for an opening.
Please note: Enrollment is first come, first accepted, first served. No exceptions.
Why Start NOW? Is it too early?
The most common question that parents always ask us is,
“What is the biggest advantage I can give my child to get into a good college?”
The answer always is:
This is undoubtably. The most powerful advantage a parent can give a child in getting them into the college they deserve.
More time is the difference between a student that gets into Stanford versus UC Berkeley. It is the difference between getting into a Top 25 university versus a Top 50 university.
And here’s the reason why.
Just like playing basketball, violin, programming, or anything else, a child with 4 years of time will have a significant advantage and opportunities over the child that has only 2 years to achieve the same goal.
And getting into a good college is no different.
Because there are many things you can’t control for your child such as:
How much time they have left between now and when they apply to college in the 12th grade.
By JUST purely starting YOUNGER and NOTHING ELSE, already gives your child AT LEAST a 4.5x advantage over other students when they fill out the SAME application in the 12th grade!
Imagine the difference in STRENGTH and how much a college application TRULY STANDS OUT when a child has been working towards this goal with the right expert guidance 4.5x longer than another applicant.
So, when a parent is able to give their child more time as an edge, which means more proper planning and structuring as early as possible, it is actually a HUGE competitive advantage and results in way less stress for both the child and a parent.
And in our 15+ years of doing this, we STILL haven’t heard a parent, out of the thousands of parents we’ve worked with, say “ I wish I
started later.”
Every parent by the time 12th grade comes around says, “I really wish I started earlier.”
Everything that is required for a strong and competitive profile is just now compressed into LESS time until the college application deadline.
Said differently, the choices that parents of 6th–11th graders make today have devastating ripple effects and consequences on their 12th grade college application.
So, if you’re reading this right now, then congratulations on taking the first and most important step to give your child the most powerful advantage a parent can give, which is more time, and more opportunities in this life.
By JUST purely starting YOUNGER and NOTHING ELSE, already gives your child AT LEAST a 4.5x advantage over other students when they fill out the SAME application in the 12th grade!
Imagine the difference in STRENGTH and how much a college application TRULY STANDS OUT when a child has been working towards this goal with the right expert guidance 4.5x longer than another applicant.
So, when a parent is able to give their child more time as an edge, which means more proper planning and structuring as early as possible, it is actually a HUGE competitive advantage and results in way less stress for both the child and a parent.
And in our 15+ years of doing this, we STILL haven’t heard a parent, out of the thousands of parents we’ve worked with, say “ I wish I
started later.”
Every parent by the time 12th grade comes around says, “I really wish I started earlier.”
Everything that is required for a strong and competitive profile is just now compressed into LESS time until the college application deadline.
Said differently, the choices that parents of 6th–11th graders make today have devastating ripple effects and consequences on their 12th grade college application.
So, if you’re reading this right now, then congratulations on taking the first and most important step to give your child the most powerful advantage a parent can give, which is more time, and more opportunities in this life.
*Topics covered occasionally change/rotate based on students needs.
Here’s where parents usually realize why our students get such different results…
Every other college consulting firm does the same thing—they meet with your child once a month, maybe help with some essays, and tell them to “study harder” or “get your grades up.”
But how? They never teach them how.
We’re the only college consulting firm in America that provides Monday through Friday cognitive enhancement masterclass trainings.
We’re upgrading a child’s mental operating system so they can compete at the highest levels—not through harder work, but through a better brain.
The 6x USA Memory Champion guest lectures these techniques personally. Barbara Oakley, who created “Learning How to Learn” for 3 million students, designed our protocols.
This comprehensive daily cognitive enhancement program is included as a free part of our standard college consulting package—at the same investment level as traditional firms that offer monthly meetings.
We’ve structured our program this way because we believe families shouldn’t have to choose between affordability and excellence.
Your child receives 20x more contact hours and transformational training—all within the same investment range as traditional college consulting firms.
Some parents ask why every firm doesn’t offer this level of daily support at standard pricing. We can’t speak for others’ priorities, but we know that your child’s cognitive development is too important to treat as an optional upgrade.
Here’s where parents usually realize why our students get such different results…
Every other college consulting firm does the same thing—they meet with your child once a month, maybe help with some essays, and tell them to “study harder” or “get your grades up.”
But how? They never teach them how.
We’re the only college consulting firm in America that provides Monday through Friday cognitive enhancement masterclass trainings.
We’re upgrading a child’s mental operating system so they can compete at the highest levels—not through harder work, but through a better brain.
The 6x USA Memory Champion guest lectures these techniques personally. Barbara Oakley, who created “Learning How to Learn” for 3 million students, designed our protocols.
This comprehensive daily cognitive enhancement program is included as a free part of our standard college consulting package—at the same investment level as traditional firms that offer monthly meetings.
We’ve structured our program this way because we believe families shouldn’t have to choose between affordability and excellence.
Your child receives 20x more contact hours and transformational training—all within the same investment range as traditional college consulting firms.
Some parents ask why every firm doesn’t offer this level of daily support at standard pricing. We can’t speak for others’ priorities, but we know that your child’s cognitive development is too important to treat as an optional upgrade.
*Topics covered occasionally change/rotate based on students needs.
18-year intelligence that money can’t buy elsewhere
Before scheduling, you understand and agree to the following:
By JUST purely starting YOUNGER and NOTHING ELSE, this already gives your child AT LEAST a 4.5x advantage over other students when they fill out the SAME application in the 12th grade!
By JUST purely starting YOUNGER and NOTHING ELSE, this already gives your child AT LEAST a 4.5x advantage over other students when they fill out the SAME application in the 12th grade!
Imagine the difference in STRENGTH and how much a college application TRULY STANDS OUT when a child has been working towards this goal with the right expert guidance 4.5x longer than another applicant.
So, when a parent is able to give their child more time as an edge, which means more proper planning and structuring as early as possible, it is actually a HUGE competitive advantage and results in way less stress for both the child and a parent.
And in our 15+ years of doing this, we STILL haven’t heard a parent, out of the thousands of parents we’ve worked with, say “I wish I
started later.”
Every parent by the time 12th grade comes around says, “I really wish I started earlier.”
Everything that is required for a strong and competitive profile is just now compressed into LESS time until the college application deadline.
Said differently, the choices that parents of 6th–11th graders make today have devastating ripple effects and consequences on their 12th grade college application.
So, if you’re reading this right now, then congratulations on taking the first and most important step to give your child the most powerful advantage a parent can give, which is more time and more opportunities in their life.
Before scheduling, you understand and agree to the following:
Additionally, our Admissions Counseling team members are NOT paid on commission.
So, you can feel comfortable knowing that when you’re meeting with us, our main objective is to: provide you with an unbiased, fact-based answers and proper roadmap for your child. Hence why these meetings are so popular
Our goal is that you leave the consultation no longer confused or stressed about what is the best or right way to help your child.
And you can feel confident knowing that you’re giving your child the best chance at success and getting into a top university.