Who

Cohen is the co-founder and CEO of IvyWise, the admissions counseling service popular with some of the city's most affluent parents.

Backstory

Raised in Brentwood, California, the daughter of a Bear Stearns banker, Cohen's familiarity with elite educational institutions began when she attended high school at Harvard-Westlake in Los Angeles. She went on to Brown before pursuing a short-lived career as a dancer. When a trip to Africa (to perform with the National Ballet of Senegal) left her severely ill, she traded in her dancing shoes for the safer world of academia. In 1997, Cohen earned a PhD in Latin American literature from Yale, where she also began moonlighting in the admissions office. She went to work full-time as a Yale admissions officer before taking it private, founding IvyWise to help kids package themselves for their college applications. An article in Vogue just weeks after IvyWise opened its doors led to Cohen's first flood of calls.

Of note

IvyWise's services don't come cheap. The company's "platinum package," which consists of 24 in-person sessions and one hour of phone time per week, will set you back $33,000. (IvyWise has some cheaper options, too: A three-hour session will only run you $1,000.) But Cohen says her prices are worth it: She claims 75% of her clients are admitted into their top choice and 98% are admitted to one of their top three choices. Despite the steep prices, Cohen's business has expanded leaps and bounds over the past few years. IvyWise's college counseling clients now include students as young as 12, and she recently launched a new IvyWise Kids division to help parents navigate the ultra-competitive pre-school and kindergarten admissions process.

Drama

IvyWise attracted some unwanted publicity in 2006 when its most famous client, Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan, turned out to have plagiarized large sections of her young-adult/chick-lit novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. Further investigation revealed that it was Cohen who had initially decided that Viswanathan's writing talents could be a "hook" for colleges and connected her with the William Morris talent agency, which also happens to represent Cohen's own literary efforts. Yet part of Cohen's appeal is her tendency to exploit her personal connections on her clients' behalf. More than one IvyWise student has interned with Doug Liman, who just so happens to be an ex-boyfriend of Cohen's.

In print

She's written two books, The Truth About Getting In and the unfortunately titled Rock Hard Apps.

The look

Perhaps the best-looking guidance counselor you'd ever meet, one of her former clients told New York, "She looks great in a bikini."

Personal

The never-single-for-long Cohen lives in the East Village.

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