Cardinal Education is a boutique educational consulting firm based in the Bay Area, with offices in Burlingame and Woodside, as well as in Beverly Hills, Bellevue, and NYC. We work with a carefully selected group of families each year on private school admissions, boarding school admissions, college application consulting, test preparation, and academic coaching.
We hire slowly and deliberately. The consultants and coaches who work here are people who take this work seriously, not as a side role or a stepping stone, but as a professional practice. If that describes you, we’d like to hear from you.
Cardinal Education is a small firm by design. We limit our client intake so that consultants can do the work properly, with enough time to know each student’s file, enough space to give honest feedback, and enough flexibility to adapt as a student’s needs evolve across an application cycle.
The work is demanding. Families come to us with high expectations and complex situations: students navigating learning differences, international families unfamiliar with the U.S. admissions system, and seniors who’ve come to us late with a tight timeline. Being useful in those situations requires genuine expertise and the ability to stay calm and direct when there’s pressure to tell people what they want to hear.
Allen Koh is directly involved in the work. Senior consultants collaborate with him on complex cases and have access to two decades of institutional knowledge about the schools, admissions officers, and application dynamics that define this field.
