College consultants are charging up to $750,000 to help parents of children as early as the seventh grade build standout applications, Bloomberg reports.

It’s as if the Varsity Blues scandal never happened.

Even with Ivy League tuition now approaching $90,000 a year, acceptance rates are below 5%, prompting wealthy parents to fork over the additional money to consultancies that charge as much as $500,000 to $750,000 for five to seven years of guiding a student on the right path to the best higher education possible.

Just take a look at the miniscule acceptance numbers. Only 3.4% of applications for Harvard’s class of 2027 were accepted, 3.9% got into Columbia, and a mere 4.4% made it into Yale.

Out of the more than 59,000 who applied to the University of Pennsylvania, 2,400, or 4.1%, were welcomed. Applications to Yale have ballooned by 50% since 2020, making getting into that school all the more arduous.

To some degree, parents like the cachet of a child attending an ivy league school, according to one college counselor:

“You hit a certain point where quality is legitimately increased, and then everything above that is just brand,” says Eric Sherman, director of college counseling at Kehillah Jewish School in Palo Alto, California, and a counselor at consultancy IvyWise.

“I think that there is a really powerful element here where parents, if they’re at a cocktail party, might want to say, ‘Oh, I drive a Maserati and my daughter goes to Penn.’”

There is also the return on investment of graduating from an ivy league school.  A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology earns a median salary of $111,222 over their first 10 years in the workforce, with a median debt of just $12,000, according to the Georgetown Center on Workforce and Education. That’s a positive net value of $406,200 for an MIT grad’s first decade of working—the highest among the top U.S. universities.

A Stanford grad earns a median of $97,798 in the first 10 years with a median debt of $11,000—for a positive net value of $333,000.

Over 40 years, that increases to even higher amounts, well into the double-digit millions, according to the Georgetown researchers.

This is causing students and parents alike to covet the status of an elite degree all the more.

“Tuition and cost of attendance is not just going up at Ivy League and competitive schools, it’s going up everywhere,” says Christopher Rim, CEO of  Command Education, a college consulting firm. “If a Rolls-Royce and a Toyota are the exact same price, which one would you want?”

Rim estimates that many of his clients have spent well over $1 million on their children’s education and college advisers to get into the best schools.

The Choi family of the Upper East Side of Manhattan has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to put their son through private school since kindergarten, supplementing that with the advice of Command Education since their son was in ninth grade.

The high school senior has now been accepted at Yale, Columbia and the University of Chicago and is still waiting to hear about his first choice, Stanford.

“We are fortunate that price is no object,” says Hope Choi. “Prestige carries a lot of weight, and we want him to attend the best college for his future.”

A silver lining, perhaps, for those applying to elite colleges and universities is that many of these institutions have rich endowments that enable them to grant financial aid. In some cases, it could even be less expensive to attend a highly rated than a state school, according to consultants.

However, now that many colleges and universities do not require standardization tests, applications continue to surge, making the game of getting into the right school even more of a challenge.