When Royston G King arrived at the University of Southern California as an exchange student, the access surprised him. According to the founding story he tells on Ivy Tier’s website, USC opened up things he had not been looking for: invitations into elite student societies, internship paths at firms like Bain & Company, introductions to people who would shape the next phase of his career. The institution was doing the sorting work on his behalf, simply by being what it was.
That observation became the company. Ivy Tier is Royston G King’s college admissions consulting firm, based in Laguna Beach, California, working with students from middle school through high school who are preparing applications to Ivy League programs and other selective U.S. universities. The premise behind it is the one King arrived at after USC: that getting into one of those institutions is worth engineering toward carefully, and that how most families engineer toward it needs to change.
Royston G King transferred to Columbia University for his undergraduate degree after the USC exchange shaped his thinking. He had also attended summer programs at Harvard and the London School of Economics, and later served as an alumni mock interviewer for the USC Career Center. The sequence is something he puts in front of prospective clients openly, treating his own path as context for the work Ivy Tier was built to do.
The Case Against Standard Extracurriculars
The conventional blueprint for competitive applications has leaned on extracurricular depth for decades. The problem King identifies is that depth has become the floor.
High school sports drew more than 8.26 million participants in 2024-25, a figure the National Federation of State High School Associations described as a record. The National Speech & Debate Association puts active debate program participants at somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 student leaders nationally. Volunteer participation among high school students runs into the millions each year. An admissions officer at a selective institution has reviewed thousands of applications organized around the same activities.
“The traditional admissions model has become increasingly competitive, and students need more than just strong grades and standard extracurriculars to stand out,” King said in a February 2026 press release. His argument is that the next layer of differentiation is externally verifiable: a publication credit in a recognized outlet, a published book, a social media audience built around a specific subject, or a business with actual metrics attached to it. These are outputs that an admissions officer can confirm without relying on the applicant’s description of them.
The Passion Projects Program
This logic runs the Passion Projects program, which Ivy Tier describes as its central specialty. Students who work through it may develop features in established publications, co-author a book as part of a broader publishing effort, build a niche social media following with measurable engagement, or launch a business or project with trackable results.
The distinction the firm draws is between activities that produce a verifiable digital record and activities whose depth or quality is harder to assess from a paper application. A student who can point to a published piece, a live audience, or a business with revenue has done something an admissions reader can check. Ivy Tier’s position is that helping students build that kind of record is where the firm adds something that most traditional counselors do not offer.
The Full Admission Strategy
Running alongside it is what Ivy Tier calls its Full Admission Strategy. This program covers essay writing and editing, guidance on securing internships and research positions, SAT and ACT preparation, English-proficiency testing support, scholarship applications, interview preparation, and academic planning beginning in the middle school years. Royston G King is described by the firm as directly involved in each student’s progress throughout the process.
For the advisory side, Ivy Tier has assembled a team that includes graduates and current students from Harvard, Columbia, Brown, Duke, NYU, UC Berkeley, Caltech, and USC. Several advisors hold advanced degrees from the London School of Economics, MIT, and the University of Chicago Booth. The firm keeps most client work confidential, citing the nature of the field, so the advisory team is the main public-facing signal of the kind of outcome the firm is organized around producing.
Royston G King’s Own Credential
King was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Monaco roster in the Media & Entertainment category, a placement confirmed on the Forbes Monaco publication’s own list. Beyond the consulting firm, he has contributed to Entrepreneur and built a social media following that Ivy Tier’s own materials put at more than 15 million across platforms.
The connection between that career and Ivy Tier’s method is not incidental. Building verifiable public credentials through contributed work, press recognition, and a measurable audience is the same strategy the Passion Projects program is designed to produce for students. King ran it on himself before he offered it to families.
