Meet the sage of school admissions, from private preschool to elite universities

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A young person’s path to a successful life requires setting off on the right foot — even when they are tiny preschool feet. In the competitive world of Ivy League education, merely tutoring a kid who’s struggling with math no longer cuts it.

That’s where Zahra Rasul comes in. Rasul is an educational consultant and coach whose Vancouver-based firm guides children from private schools to university to their first jobs.

Her team of about 30 employees helps them gain admission to elite schools, teaches them the importance of volunteerism, preps them for standardized tests, helps them write resumes and offers expertise in everything else that matters in today’s status-conscious world of professional success.

Rasul has her own long list of achievements, including graduate studies in education and gender studies at the University of Toronto. She grew up on the west side of Vancouver, the daughter of high-achieving parents who are also philanthropists. She is active in the non-profit and mentorship space and helps people who are less privileged than her wealthy clientele.

Her Rasul Learning Group is a thriving business working with about 2,000 clients at a time, on a referrals basis only. The pandemic has only accelerated demand for its services.

Who’s your typical student?

We don’t have a typical student outside of the socio-economic profile. We are cradle-to-grave. We do admissions for students from private preschool — and yes, that’s a real thing and some are harder to get into than Harvard — all the way up to PhDs. I personally spend a lot of my time in the elite U.S. college space, and medical school/medical residency applications.

We get to know a family and understand their goals. A lot of them are family businesses, who have inherited wealth, who have a foundation or investment structures, typically with kids and grandkids and cousins.

I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and we measure success by the length of the relationship we have with the family. One of the cool things is we will meet a student and I will work with their siblings and five of his cousins, and his mom who wants to go back to school. So that’s cool. You start to understand their values and goals. And you figure out the big picture strategy and how everyone is going to fit into it in the longer term, and you guide the vision and the work of that individual.

That’s part of it I really enjoy. It’s not a transactional situation. I say, ‘Here’s what the big picture looks like,’ and we are committed to you for 20 years.

When do you usually start with a student?

The first time I meet a student would be Grade 8. I create an educational plan and they will have a team from our group. You might have a standardized test specialist or a writing instructor on the team. If you have a learning disability, you might see our educational psychologist. So we almost always start with students in high school.

If you want to go to Harvard, you have to start thinking about that in Grade 8. There has to be a plan to get there. If you want to go to medical school, you plan that in high school. You ask, ‘Where are the opportunities for research? Are there hospitals close by where I can volunteer?’

We work through college and university planning, course planning, resumes and career stuff. There are multiple touch points with clients. We look at how they are spending their summers. I work with them usually until they are in their early 30s.

How has your business been doing throughout the pandemic?

When the pandemic first started, I wasn’t doing many initial consultations, and I thought to myself, ‘Maybe people won’t have the money to pay folks like us in the private education consulting industry.’ We had no idea.

But then all of a sudden, when the university admissions cycle geared up again, we saw record numbers of clients reaching out for support, and in every single discipline — not just nursing or public health or virology, but everything, teaching and social work, elite college admissions, international boarding schools. It was the most bizarre thing. In the last two admissions cycles, we’ve seen record numbers of applicants. Everybody wants to go to school.

Even with high grades, some students don’t get in, and so sometimes the difference maker is relationships that the families have, or the legacy, or people they know who sit on boards, are donors, or went to those schools.

They are reassessing their lives. I’ve been working with CEOs of Fortune 500 companies who have decided to retire and do something like a PhD in theology. That’s an actual example, and that normally wouldn’t have happened. And I think younger people are trying to get their foot in the door because they are worried about what it will look like going forward. They feel an urgency.

Educational consulting wasn’t a thing when you started. Did you base your business model on the American education system?

I guess it depends how you would define that. The Americans had a very well developed education-consulting model that didn’t exist in Canada when I was going to high school. There just weren’t educational consultants in Canada.

Part of the reason for that is the Canadian admissions system just wasn’t that challenging. You would graduate from high school, fill out a form and send in a transcript, and if you had good grades, you would get in. And even then the grades you needed were not that high. The admissions process for Canadians was not challenging or arduous.

The American process of educational consulting was robust, and it was the only example I had at the time. But it didn’t include the coaching part of it — it was more the top-down consulting: ‘Here is what you do, here are the schools that you should consider, this is what you need to do for the application.’

Wealthy people have an advantage over lower income groups because they have access to a better education. Is it problematic that there’s this uneven playing field?

We do have families that have money, and we have been successful in leveraging their generosity to support the tuition of other students we work with. For example, I have families who are billionaires, and they will regularly pay for a degree for one of our other students who can’t afford it.

Other times, they want to do it anonymously. They say, ‘Here’s an amount of money we are willing to pay for a student’s tuition. Find a student most deserving and most in need.’ I think it is the most direct way of also showing their kids what that responsibility looks like.

Your dad is originally from Kenya and your mom from South Africa (because they’re Ismaili, their families were expelled from Uganda in the early 70s during Idi Amin’s reign). Your mom went to university in London and then was among the first group of women of colour to graduate from the University of Toronto in dental surgery. She must have been your role model.

I was very affected by my mother growing up in apartheid Africa – she lived in racial segregation and couldn’t get an education. She would say, ‘They can take your money but they can’t take what is in your head, so get a good education.’

It’s the classic immigrant story. She was in Canada specifically for the purpose of studying, and she had saved up money to be able to come here and do that.

Your parents pulled your sisters out of private school in Vancouver and sent them to an elite boarding school in Boston. Do we not have enough elite schools here in Canada? Are we at a bit of a disadvantage?

That’s a really big question. It’s about the education, but it’s not even about the education. It’s more about the network and the opportunity for students to attend top U.S. colleges – it’s harder to do from Canada, for sure. Those New England boarding schools are considered feeder schools, which is why everyone wants to send their kids there, because a certain percentage of those classes get accepted to the different Ivy League schools or other places, and so it’s a way to create a network for influence for wealth and success.

Is it really more about the parents and their connections than about the kid?

It’s very, very hard to get into an elite school today just by your parents knowing the right people. It used to be the case, like the Jared Kushner thing — Ivanka Trump’s husband — and the whole story about his parents giving money to Harvard, and he got into Harvard. You used to be able to do that back in the day.

Today you can’t do that. The kid has to be a straight-A student with an excellent extra-curricular profile and high grades and high standardized test scores. But even with the high grades, some don’t get in and so sometimes the difference maker is relationships that the families have, or the legacy, or people they know who sit on boards, are donors, or went to those schools. That all plays a part.

What did you think of that case in the States where celebrities were paying to get their kids into the right schools?

Everyone can look at that and say that’s objectively wrong. But there are a lot of parallels with the families who give a large sum of money to the school prior to their child being accepted. The biggest difference there is that it’s considered legal to donate funds to a school, and it just means that your child will get a better look in the admissions process, versus what these people did — which, frankly, is quite a low amount, to spend $100,000 or a couple hundred thousand dollars to bribe coaches or falsify an SAT score or pay someone to take the test for their child. That’s a very small amount of money, compared to what others would pay for something that is basically the same thing, just the legal version of it, which is donating $1 million to an institution in the year that their child is not applying.

That whole situation must have made you cringe.

Oh, yeah. It was terrible for those of us who work in this field and are professionals and abide by a code of ethics that bind us by our professional organizations that we belong to. Yeah, it sucks, because everyone is like, ‘Oh you guys all do the same thing.’ And that’s not true.

You bring your own view to working with students. You want them to be more progressive in their understanding of the world, correct?

I did graduate work in anti-racist, feminist, critical race theory and gender studies. I articulate a very progressive social justice standpoint, and I hire staff whose values align that way. We expose our students to these perspectives. Most of the kids we see have tremendous privilege, and with that comes social responsibility to do something to intervene in the systems of privilege that afford you that privilege and misses others.

Rich people are often painted as quite conservative. Do the majority get on board with your approach?

It’s not for everybody. We definitely have potential clients who reach out to us and read our territorial land acknowledgements, and a lot of them are developer families and others who will take great offence that we call the land stolen and unceded. If you don’t like it, then we are not a fit.

But I find the majority do get on board. The generation of clients we work with are pretty progressive themselves, and the 20-year-olds I encounter often hold very different beliefs than their parents do. They’ve been raised in a very different climate than a lot of those parents.

Can the kids you help reach you on the phone at any time?

Oh, yeah. They text me. I don’t mind that because by the time they get to the admissions cycle, some have worked like three or four years to get there. It’s a very exciting thing.

And we treat it like it’s a ritual. There’s a rhythm to it: You make yourself totally available to those kids any time they need to text you about something. You can’t just rely on a weekly session. There are small fires and crises along the way. I get very invested in what’s happening.

Do you stay friends for life?

For sure. They all come back. Many of my clients I’ve known since they were 11 years old and they are in their 30s, and they come back with their kids. And a lot of my staff are people I’ve helped get into programs.

My assistant, I’ve known her since she was 16. I helped her get into university and her graduate program in teaching, and she works part time for me in the evenings, and during the daytime as a grade one teacher. I’ve known her for years.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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