April 30, 2005

Parents with college-bound students turn to consultants

By Katherine Corcoran, Mercury News

When college acceptance and rejection notices started arriving early last month, Steven Ma sat anxiously by his phone and obsessively checked his e-mail.

Silence would bring Ma, a 26-year-old graduate of UC-Berkeley, the agony of a 17-year-old high school senior. But news that Boris Wang got into Berkeley, or Jing Li into UC-San Diego, would make Ma jump and howl with delight.

"It's like you won the lottery," Ma said, "or won a bet."

Ma is one of a growing fleet of high-priced college consultants whom parents hire to get their children into prestigious American colleges. While parents and educators debate the implications of such professional packaging, Ma's work takes a cultural bent.

The Taiwanese native works almost entirely with Asian-American families headed by parents who immigrated for high-tech jobs or to further their own educations. They're an upper-income group with high expectations who are often labeled for pressuring their children and only valuing top UC campuses or the Ivy League.

Ma sees it differently.

Puts students first

His job is to be the bridge between parents, who mostly know the competitive and exclusionary education systems of their homelands, and their teenagers, now in a culture that values self-determination and variations of success.

He puts students first and rejects clients who won't.

"Success is only created if you follow your passion. It can't be forced," says Ma, who also tells parents: "I haven't seen any successful person who did it because their parents told them to."

Still, Ma said, it's vital for him to understand parents' realities as well.

"They're not saying, `I want you to study engineering because I really want to force you to be an engineer,' but `I want you to have a steady income,' " Ma explained. "If you can identify and target their fears and support with evidence that it's not going to be a problem, most are willing to compromise with their kids."

Ma knows about straying from the scripted path.

His parents barely finished high school and worked menial jobs in the Bay Area until they bought a vineyard in Lockford. Ma struggled learning English in adolescence and never made higher than a 3.0 GPA at his Lodi high school. But he scored 1500 on the SAT. He took community college classes to boost his résumé and was accepted at UC-Berkeley, where he studied mathematics and physics. Eventually, he landed a six-figure job as a hedge fund analyst.

But Ma was unhappy and quit to work as a substitute high school teacher while figuring out what he wanted to do next.

There he found his calling.

"I really liked to work with teenagers," said Ma. "I enjoyed enlightening them, giving them hope, giving them direction."

In 2002, he and two former Berkeley classmates started ThinkTank Learning (www.ttlearning.com), a tutoring and academic enrichment program with offices in Fremont and Cupertino.

$150 an hour

Last fall he added college counseling services, charging $150 an hour or $2,000 per application, and helped 17 students apply to 30 schools.

Ma says many parents follow a model that goes: "My neighbor's son, Albert, got into Stanford because he did this, this and that. And you will follow this model, no matter what your interest is."

"Asian parents have a pigeonhole vision that their children have to be a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer. . . . If kids are interested in art and design, they won't tell their parents," he said. "What I tell them is if your daughter likes art, don't look just at the art. Look at the fact that she's creative. She could study architecture, marketing, psychology. She could be the chief product designer for Proctor & Gamble. She could work for Pixar."

Angela Cheng, 17, a senior at Mission San Jose High School in Fremont, said Ma helped her convince her parents that it would fine for her to list psychology as a major on her applications. They wanted her in finance.

"They were scared I was going to become a social worker and I wouldn't get a job," she said.

Jing Li, a senior at Gunn in Palo Alto, didn't want a college counselor.

"I thought I had everything under control and my parents were second-guessing," she said.

But she liked Ma. "We got to know each other a little more and talked about life experiences."

Ma told her to change her essay and to write about the social and language difficulties of moving from China to Japan and then to the United States. He urged her to write about her passion, the cancer research she conducted during the summers in her father's lab.

But when her friends started hearing from UC campuses and Jing didn't, her father turned nervous and cross.

Then the first acceptance for the future biology major came -- UC-Irvine, then Davis. Then came her dream school, UC-San Diego.

"I was speechless. . . . I cried," Jing said when "congratulations" popped up on her computer screen. "I called my dad and he said, `I'm coming home right now.' We went out to dinner. We never go out to dinner."

Ma had also recommended Jing apply to Berkeley. But she was certain she wouldn't get in and didn't want to check. Then one day while online in her father's lab, she signed on to the UC Web site and saw an acceptance.

"There must be something wrong with the system," she thought at first. "Then my dad started laughing."

Back at ThinkTank Learning, Ma read Jing's e-mail and cheered. Another lottery winner, another bet won, on both sides of the generational aisle.

Copyright © 2005 The Mercury News