The thing that opened up, when Royston G King arrived at the University of Southern California as an exchange student, was not the degree itself. By his own account, it was the Kairos Society, a student entrepreneurship network, internships at Bain and Company and several top firms, and a cohort of students whose ambitions extended well past graduation.
He applied to transfer to Columbia University as an undergraduate and was accepted. He also spent time in summer programs at Harvard and the London School of Economics before those years were over.
That arc, from USC to Columbia with Harvard and LSE along the way, produced the central observation behind Ivy Tier, the admissions consulting firm King founded and runs from Laguna Beach, California. The firm works with students between the ages of 13 and 18 who are targeting the most selective American universities.
According to the firm’s account, Royston G King studied the pattern of which students were gaining admission to elite schools and found it wasn’t only a matter of transcripts. What many of those students had was something an admissions officer could confirm independently: a documented accomplishment outside any particular school’s walls. A publication credit in a recognized outlet. A business with real activity and traceable metrics. A platform with a following built around a specific subject area. Ivy Tier’s Passion Projects program is built around that observation.
The program is designed for students from middle school through high school, not only seniors with applications already due. The earlier a student engages, the more time there is to build something that carries genuine weight. A social media presence developed over 18 months tells a different story than one created in September of senior year.
The program pairs each student with the kind of project suited to their background and interests, with King’s team handling much of the execution alongside them. Media placement draws on King’s existing relationships with publications. Book projects involve co-authoring and publishing support. Social media accounts are built around a specific subject area and documented through measurable activity. Business and app projects are structured around real outputs. Each project has to be real. In each case, the aim is that whatever the student builds should be independently searchable, not merely mentioned in an essay.
Alongside the Passion Projects track, the firm runs a full admissions strategy program covering the more conventional elements of the process: essay writing and editing, recommendation letter guidance, interview preparation, SAT and ACT prep, internship placement, research position support, scholarship applications, and extracurricular planning.
The firm’s case for running both programs together rests on a practical observation about the competitive applicant pool. Traditional extracurriculars have become the expected baseline rather than a distinguishing factor for serious candidates. The National Federation of State High School Associations counted more than 8.26 million sports participants among high school students in the 2024-25 school year. The National Speech and Debate Association works with tens of thousands of student leaders. Nearly 2.8 million U.S. high school students aged 15 and older volunteer annually, according to the University of Maryland Do Good Institute. What these numbers describe is shared context, not exceptional profiles.
Royston G King’s involvement in each student’s process is structured around direct attention rather than handoffs to junior staff, with the firm describing him as engaged from initial assessment through application submission. The firm’s advisor panel extends that work, drawing on contributors from Harvard, Brown, Duke, MIT, UC Berkeley, NYU, Columbia, Caltech, and USC. Among them is a faculty fellow at MIT and affiliated researcher at Columbia, who holds law degrees from the London School of Economics and USC, and a doctorate in transnational economic law from Universität Halle-Wittenberg.
Royston G King was named to the Forbes Monaco 30 Under 30 at age 23, has contributed to Entrepreneur as a Forbes Council member, and serves as an alumni mock interviewer at the USC Career Center. The firm lists him as an appointed mentor to students from Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, and Oxford. The same institutions that changed what was available to King are, Ivy Tier says, part of the network the firm brings to its students.
