Honest, even when it costs us the engagement
We tell families what we believe, not what they want to hear. Sometimes that means telling a parent their dream school isn't the right one. We'd rather lose a client than mislead one.
About
The people behind Oak Collegiate.
A small, deliberately chosen team of practitioners — co-founders who just lived the cycle, senior partners with twenty years of reading experience between them, and a bench we expand slowly and on purpose.
Leadership
Two co-founders. Two senior partners.
Click any portrait to read the full bio, credentials, and what each person advises on.
Our story
We started Oak because the firm we wished our families had didn't exist.
Hao and Simon met at Penn — first-generation students, athletes, and survivors of an admissions cycle that had grown unrecognisable in the AI era. They watched friends with brilliant minds pay $40,000 to firms that gave them generic essays, outdated advice, and a junior consultant they'd never met.
In 2024 they founded Oak Collegiate around a simple wager: that families would pay for a boutique advisory run by current practitioners — small enough to know every student by name, and serious enough to compete with any firm in the country.
Two years later, Oak is a small private practice. We accept twenty families per cycle. The founders run every engagement. Senior partners — including a former Common App reader and a former MIT interviewer — handle essays and STEM strategy. Nobody works with us they don't know personally.
What we believe I. II. III.
The student is the protagonist
Parents pay us. Students work with us. Every plan is built around who the student is becoming — not what the family wants to brag about at dinner.
Practitioners, not pundits
Everyone on the Oak bench has lived the work recently. We don't lecture from a 1998 playbook. We coach from this cycle.
By Appointment
Talk to a founder, not a salesperson.
Every consultation is run personally by Hao or Simon. Twenty minutes, no fee, no follow-up unless you ask.
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