Grace Baker is proud of her sons, who secured places on prestigious MBA courses at Harvard Business School and Stanford respectively. But Ms Baker, who asked for her name to be changed to save her boys’ blushes, helped them to get over the line in the applications process by paying $14,000 for an admissions consultant.

“This is an investment,” she says about the bill, noting that other parents in her circle of friends on Manhattan’s Upper East Side had gone further and paid their children’s MBA fees and living expenses. “Our zip code is very achievement oriented,” she says.

Part of the reason for paying for outside help was the desire to give her children some guidance, Ms Baker admits. Neither she nor her husband had attended business school so they had no personal experience to pass on. She also felt that her sons, who had demanding engineering jobs, needed a spur to complete a business school application. “I was the monkey on their back,” she says.