Getting into Columbia University as a transfer student requires more than grades. Royston G King knows this because he did it.
Royston G King’s educational path began with an exchange program at the University of Southern California. What he encountered there, by the company’s account, went beyond coursework: access to elite student organizations, competitive internship pipelines, and a peer group that tended to go on to run companies rather than work in them. The experience proved formative enough that he applied to Columbia as a transfer applicant. He got in. He also completed undergraduate summer programs at Harvard and the London School of Economics.
By the time he founded Ivy Tier, a college admissions consulting firm operating out of Laguna Beach, California, Royston G King was not working from theory. He had passed through several of the most selective admissions processes in American higher education and spent the years that followed building a career around the same credential-building work, now for paying clients.
His professional background, per the company’s materials, includes founding a digital marketing and brand development agency, earning industry recognition for revenue performance, and accumulating a social media following the firm puts at over 15 million people across platforms. The company also describes him as a multiple bestselling author. According to Ivy Tier, King works as an alumni mock interviewer for USC’s Career Center and serves as a mentor to students at Harvard, MIT, UC Berkeley, and Oxford.
What he kept observing, through his own application experience and through years of building reputations for brands and high-profile clients, was a pattern. The students gaining admission to competitive American universities were often students with something verifiable and searchable. A published book. Coverage in recognizable outlets. A social media audience around a defined subject. A working digital project with real metrics. The accomplishment that mattered was the one an admissions officer could independently confirm within seconds of typing a student’s name into a search box.
Ivy Tier was built to produce exactly that kind of record.
Two service lines
The firm works with students from middle school through high school, roughly ages 13 to 18. It runs two parallel programs.
The full admissions strategy covers the conventional elements of the process: essay drafting and editing, internship placement, guidance on securing research positions, SAT and ACT preparation, scholarship applications, and extracurricular planning. Royston G King describes his own involvement as hands-on throughout each student’s engagement, a model Ivy Tier positions in contrast to larger operations that cycle students through multiple staff members working from standardized frameworks.
The second program is the piece that distinguishes the firm from most others in the space. Ivy Tier calls it the passion projects program, and it operates on a specific argument: that the activities college guidance offices have historically championed now arrive at admissions offices with diminished effect. Sports participation, debate teams, volunteer hours, academic competitions: the numbers of American high school students involved in any given category run into the millions. These activities signal participation. They have stopped signaling distinction.
The passion projects program builds credentials designed to stand out at the search level. Students work with Ivy Tier to earn media coverage in publications and broadcast outlets through the firm’s existing network. Or they co-author and publish a book with the firm’s team, aimed at an Amazon bestseller category. Or they build a social media account with a real audience in a defined niche. Or they launch a functional business or digital project with output that can actually be measured and found.
Each track produces something an admissions officer can independently verify before the interview.
Who does the work
The advisory team Ivy Tier has assembled draws, according to the company’s materials, from alumni and current students at Brown, Harvard, Duke, USC, UC Berkeley, and Caltech, as well as professionals from McKinsey, Morgan Stanley, and elsewhere.
Ivy Tier has structured its engagements as multi-year programs. A student who starts at 13 or 14 has time to build something real before application deadlines arrive. A senior looking for a last-minute fix is a different kind of client, and a different kind of problem.
Royston G King built his own record this way, long before anyone was looking at his credentials. The business he has constructed at Ivy Tier is, in functional terms, a system for replicating that approach for other people’s children.
The evidence he is betting on starts with his own application to Columbia.