Find out whether your child can actually get into their dream school.
Answer a short set of questions about your child. Get a written read on where they stand at each school you pick, which schools are genuinely reachable, and exactly what has to change if you want the odds to move.
Measured against each university’s own published admitted-student data, with the source printed beside every number.
Source: UCLA Undergraduate Admission, First-Year Profile, Fall 2025.
You get the complete read whether or not you ever buy anything from us.
Which one of these is you, right now?
Be honest. Most parents we talk to are at least two of them.
If any of that landed, the rest of this page is worth four minutes. There is a structural reason none of it has added up, and it isn’t that you haven’t tried hard enough.
You’ve been reading advice about a race your child isn’t running.
Nearly all Chinese-language admissions content is produced by agencies whose clients are families in mainland China. Their advice is not wrong. It is simply written for international applicants, because that is who pays them.
A US citizen or green card holder applying from a US high school is read in a completely different applicant pool: different students, different institutional incentives, different financial-aid treatment, and a different admit rate.
Four answers about your child. In writing. In plain language.
Not a score out of 100. Not a percentage chance. A written read that quotes your own answers back to you, because a number tells you nothing about what to do on Monday morning.
Achieving
What is already working, and which questions you can genuinely stop turning over at night. Named schools, real published bands, sources cited.
Lacking
Where your child falls short, and honestly, whether each gap is still fixable in the time you actually have left.
Focus on
An ordered list, not a checklist. What to do first, second and third, based on your child’s grade and what is genuinely still open to them.
Potential
What is realistically reachable, including schools you may be underestimating, and the one where being out of state actually helps you.
The most valuable thing a good consultant does is not admissions expertise. It is being a third adult your teenager will actually listen to, so the house stops going 鸡飞狗跳 every time the subject comes up. We cannot be that person. What we can do is tell you which of your worries are worth raising and which ones the data says to let go, so that when you do speak, you are worth listening to.
Your group chat already has a word for the thing you are missing: 定位. Knowing where your child actually sits. That is what this is, and nothing else.
That combination, real effort with no confidence, is not a knowledge problem. It is a calibration problem. You have been reading answers written for a different applicant pool.
Three numbers in our data that surprise almost every parent.
We are not asking you to trust us. Every figure below is published by the university itself, and you can verify all three in about five minutes.
At UC San Diego for Fall 2025, Californians were admitted at roughly 25% while out-of-state applicants were admitted at nearly 40%. UCSD makes far more offers than it has seats because its yield runs near 20%. Being out of state is an advantage here, which is true at almost no other public flagship.
College Transitions analysis of UC San Diego admissions data. Secondary source, not the university’s own reporting, and labelled as such wherever we use it.
UC Berkeley offered 9,102 students a waitlist place. One was admitted from it. Carnegie Mellon admitted 32 from a waitlist of 16,484. Parents treat the waitlist as a second chance. At these schools it is not one.
UC Berkeley Undergraduate Admissions Student Profile; Carnegie Mellon Common Data Set 2024–25
Cornell rates the application essay Very Important and standardized test scores only Considered. The part you cannot help with outranks the part you have been paying to improve, and that is Cornell’s own reporting, not our opinion.
Cornell University Common Data Set 2024–25, section C7
There is no phone field anywhere in the Lantern Check, because we will never call you.
Three steps. Two of them cost nothing.
Take the Lantern Check
22 questions about your child: grade, courses, scores, activities, intended major, and where the essay actually is. Every question takes under three seconds. There is not a single question about your income, your savings, or financial aid.
FreeRead what we found
Your child’s read, in four parts, built from your own answers and placed against each school’s published admitted-student profile. It arrives on screen immediately and by email. It is yours to keep, forward to your husband, or ignore entirely.
FreeGet the school guide
The full picture for one school: your child’s fit score out of 100, door by door, with every component shown; what students who actually got in did; and the ordered list of what to change. That is the part we charge $20 for. One school, one guide.
$20 per schoolA fit score out of 100. For each school, and for each door inside it.
Not a chance of admission. Nobody can predict an individual decision, and any product that claims to is lying to you. This is something more useful and considerably harder to argue with: your child’s position against the students that school actually admitted.
Every component is shown, with its source
- GPA against that school’s published admitted band.
- Course rigor against what the school says it weighs. At Cornell, NYU and UIUC, rigor is rated at or above GPA.
- Test position inside the submitted range, and whether submitting helps or hurts.
- Recognition level, measured against where the bulk of the applicant pool actually sits.
- Residency, which at a public flagship moves the number more than anything else on this list.
- Early Decision, where the school reports a separate round.
Scored door by door, because UCLA Engineering and UCLA College are different questions with different answers. Engineering admitted 6.8%. The College admitted 11%. A single university-wide score would hide the only number that matters to you.
$20 for one school. Written against your child, not a template.
Two families buying the same school’s guide do not receive the same document. Your child’s grade, GPA band, course rigor, test situation, intended major, recognition level, essay status and residency all change what it says.
What is inside every guide
- The fit score out of 100, door by door, with every component shown and every figure sourced, so you can see exactly how the number was built.
- Reach, target and likely, sorted. Including schools you did not think of, and the ones on your list that the numbers say to drop.
- Where your child actually stands at that school: their numbers against the school’s own published admitted bands, with the source cited on every figure.
- What students who actually got in did. Interviews with admitted students at that specific school: what they wrote about, what they were told to do, and what they wish they had ignored. Every guide prints the exact number of students we interviewed at that school and the years they were admitted. We state the real count. We do not round it up and we do not average across schools to make one bigger number.
- Which door to apply to inside the university. Wharton is not Penn, Stern is not NYU, and UCLA Engineering is not UCLA. This choice moves the odds more than anything else you control.
- The gap list, ordered by how much each one actually moves the score. Not an undifferentiated checklist. Each gap paired with what admitted students did about the same one.
- Activities and clubs: what admitted students at that specific school actually had. Not generic advice about leadership. The real shape of the activity lists that got in.
- GPA and rigor: what the published band means for the semesters your child has left, which is a different answer for a 9th grader than for a senior in December.
- The essay section: what that school says it weighs, in its own published words, and the patterns across the essays that worked rather than one lucky anecdote.
- A month-by-month plan for your child’s grade, not a generic senior-year checklist.
- The race question after the 2023 Supreme Court ruling, explained calmly and without heat.
One school, one guide, $20.
A real school list is never one school, and the odds change enormously from one door to the next. So most families take three or four.
You cannot buy a guide until you have taken the Lantern Check, because without your answers, it would just be a generic PDF, and there are enough of those.
If it doesn’t tell you something you didn’t know, you don’t pay.
Read the whole guide. If it taught you nothing, reply to the email and we refund you.
No form to fill in. No questions about why. No “please explain your reasoning.” One reply to the email the guide came in, and the money goes back.
We can offer that because of what this product is. We are not selling you hope or an outcome, we are selling you calibration. Either the guide told you something about your child’s position that you did not already know, or it did not, and you are the only person who can judge that.
Anyone can buy this. Not everyone will like what it says.
We do not screen you out and we do not decide who deserves a guide. What we will not do is tell you what you want to hear.
What that means in practice
- Some reads say the school on your list is not realistic. Not as an opinion, and not gently. In numbers: here is your child’s position against the students that school actually admitted, and here is the size of the gap.
- We would rather tell you in September of junior year than let you find out in March of senior year. One of those leaves time to change the list. The other does not.
- Every guide names the schools that are reachable, not only the ones that are not. A read that only says no is useless. The point is to move you onto a list that can actually work.
- We will not read or fix your child’s essay. Nobody here does that. If that is what you need, hire a person for it, and spend real money on a good one.
And the honest boundary: nobody can predict an individual admissions decision, and we will never claim to. What we can show you is exactly where your child sits against the students that school admitted, and what moves that position. Anyone selling you a guarantee is selling you something considerably worse than this.
You have seen the pattern: a parent hires a consultant, their own child gets into a good school, and the next year they are selling admissions advice themselves. Expertise that was bought once, resold as though it were earned. It is a fair thing to be suspicious of, and we are not going to try to talk you out of it with a biography.
So there is no founder photo on this page and no story about whose child got in where. Every claim we make is a number a university published about itself, printed with its source beside it, and you can check any of them without our help. If we ever put a person on this page, it will be because we have something verifiable for them to say.
Most pages like this one would have a wall of five-star quotes here. We are new, and we are not going to write fake ones or borrow a stock photo of somebody else’s family.
This section stays empty until real parents have used the guides and said something we are allowed to quote, with their permission and their own words. If you take the Lantern Check and it helps, tell us, and if it does not, tell us that instead.
The honest answers.
Is the read really free, or do you ask for money at the end?
Really free. All four sections appear on screen and are emailed to you, with no card and no payment step. The guides are offered underneath the read, never in front of it. If you never buy anything, the read is still yours.
How is a $20 guide different from a $40,000 consultant?
It is not a substitute for a good one, and we will not pretend it is. A consultant works with your child for a year. We give you calibration: where your child stands, what each school actually weighs, and what admitted students did. It is what you read before deciding whether to hire anyone. Plenty of families read it and conclude they do need a consultant. That is a fine outcome.
How do I know this isn’t just another 智商税?
You don’t, yet, so don’t take our word for it. Take the free read first. It is the whole four-part analysis, it costs nothing, and there is no card and no phone number anywhere in it. If it is thin, you will know inside three minutes and you will have lost nothing. The usual verdict on this category is 无功无过, no help, no harm. We would rather you tested that for free than risked it at $20.
Why should I trust your numbers?
Because you can check every one of them, and we make that easy on purpose. We use each university’s own Common Data Set and admissions-office reporting, and we print the source next to the figure. Where a school does not publish something, we say so instead of estimating. Where a number comes from a secondary analysis rather than the university itself, we label it as such.
What actually makes it “personalized”? Is this just a template?
The guide is generated against your 22 answers. Your child’s grade, GPA band, course rigor, test situation, intended major, recognition level, essay status, Early Decision willingness and state of residence all change what it says, including which college inside the university we tell you to apply to, and which of your gaps we tell you to fix first. Two families buying the same school’s guide do not receive the same document.
Do you ask about our income or financial aid?
No. Not one question about money, income, savings, aid or ability to pay appears anywhere in the Lantern Check. We only ask about things that affect whether your child can get in.
My child is in 9th or 10th grade. Is it too early?
It is the best time. Almost everything that ends up in the “Lacking” section of a senior’s read: course rigor, depth in one activity, actual recognition, is still wide open to a 9th or 10th grader. Time is the one advantage nobody can buy back later.
Will my child have to do anything?
No. You answer the questions yourself, from what you already know. If you are not sure of an exact number, every question has a band or an “I’m not sure” option. One question asks what your child is most serious about, in your own words, and even that one is skippable.
Will this be available in Chinese?
Yes. A Chinese version is coming, written by a native writer rather than machine-translated, because copy that reads like an agency wrote it is exactly what we are trying not to be. Everything is in English for now.
What happens to my email address?
We send the read, then at most one email a week about the specific schools you chose. There is no phone field anywhere in the Lantern Check, because we will never call you. One-click unsubscribe, and we do not sell or share the list.
You have been guessing for long enough.
Twenty-two questions, about three minutes, and you will know where your child actually stands, and what to do about it first.
Start the free Lantern CheckYou keep the read either wayBuilt on published university data. If your child doesn’t need our guide, we’ll say so.