2024-10-18 19:30:06
In March 2023, Mateo J. Velarde-Berrios ’25 received an email from Harvard Primus — an undergraduate organization for first-generation, low-income students — advertising an opportunity to staff leadership conferences in Dubai and New Delhi that summer.
Velarde-Berrios and his fellow Harvard students who signed up to work the conference — a job that came with a $500 stipend — said they were “passionate” about the opportunity to help students abroad through their role as youth mentors.
The conference was organized by the Big Red Group, an India-based education firm that rebranded as Big Red Education earlier this year. The group aims to “democratize the Ivy League experience” by hosting leadership workshops for students around the world, according to Big Red Education’s website.
Instead, Velarde-Berrios and his peers said that the Big Red Group exploited and deceived the Ivy League students they recruited to work.
More than 11 people with experience working with the Big Red Group expressed concerns about poor communication, lack of compensation, and an uncomfortable work environment, according to interviews, documents, and email communications obtained by The Crimson.
Big Red Education’s website also continues to falsely imply an ongoing affiliation with two Harvard student organizations that do not have ties with the educational firm. Several Harvard undergraduates also criticized Big Red Education for continuing to display their names and faces on its website more than a year after ending their association with the firm.
Big Red Education CEO Rishi Jalan said in an interview early Friday morning that he “would never indulge in these things which puts the safety of a Harvard mentor, anyone in danger.”
“They wouldn’t have come back again and again to us if we were not treating them with respect,” Jalan said.
Still, Jalan conceded that his company was not entirely without fault.
“I’m not saying I’m 100 percent right here,” Jalan said. “I’m sure I’ve made mistakes.”
‘An Array of Inappropriate Behavior’
Jalan, a Cornell University alum, founded the Big Red Group in 2016 to aid youth in India in gaining admission to an Ivy League University.
The Big Red Group — named after Jalan’s alma mater — first partnered with a Harvard-affiliated student organization in 2018, when Jalan approached the now-defunct Harvard Leadership Institute to develop educational workshops for high school students.
In 2022, he began a new partnership with Harvard Youth Lead the Change — later renamed to Harvard Undergraduate Leadership Mentors — an officially recognized Harvard College student organization which organized leadership workshops for students.
Less than one year later, YLC ended its partnership with the Big Red Group. Jalan described the split as “amicable.”
But in a 2023 email with the subject line “Caution Around BRG,” YLC alum Ethan E. Kee ’23 warned Velarde-Berrios and six other Harvard students about YLC’s experience working with Jalan’s company.
“Our relationship was very close until, due to concerns which I’ll explain in full below most importantly including the physical and mental wellbeing of our members, we ended the partnership,” Kee wrote.
“This includes inappropriate jokes and comments, uncomfortable physical interactions, peer pressure to indulge in certain going-out activities including the consumption of alcohol, and general disrespect for the safety and personal concerns of our YLC team,” Kee added.
Still, Kee did not advise the students to immediately back out of staffing the conference, writing that the Big Red Group “in many ways, had been a generous partner and thoughtful host.”
“We also don’t want to paint all of BRG — many of whom are caring and kind — in this light,” Kee added. “Nevertheless, we felt compelled to share our experience.”
But Velarde-Berrios and his classmates said their experiences with Big Red Group was filled with moments similar to the concerns Kee described.
In response to allegations of misconduct, Jalan said his company has implemented a code of conduct to establish a way for mentors “to reach out to us and tell us.”
The code of conduct instructs mentors to report any experiences of inappropriate behavior to “Mr. Rishi Jalan,” according to a copy of the code obtained by The Crimson.
Jalan himself, however, was the subject of several concerns raised by Harvard students who staffed past Big Red Group conferences.
Three people who worked with the Big Red Group recounted instances when Jalan personally pressured students working at the conference to go out with him to different nightclubs at the end of each day.
“It was interesting because, especially the CEO, they pushed you a little bit,” said Velarde-Berrios, who staffed leadership workshops during summer 2023 and winter 2024.
“They offered alcohol and continuously offered it,” Velarde-Berrios added. “Told you to relax, have fun.”
Jalan acknowledged in an interview that he invited the college students who staff his conferences over to his home.
“Mentors have come to my house as my guests. They’ve had drinks,” Jalan said. “We want them to have fun.”
However, Jalan said that “indulging in telling them, ‘Please go out’ or something like that, is not something that we do.”
In addition to pressure from Jalan to party, three Harvard students who attended a Big Red Education conference as mentors recalled being pushed to work on projects they had explicitly told Big Red Group employees they did not feel comfortable staffing.
Specifically, at a January 2023 conference in Mumbai, they recalled how they were suddenly driven an hour outside of the city to give a talk at a local high school that was not previously on their agenda.
The students were then instructed by the Big Red Group employee to participate in a question and answer session about how to gain admission to Harvard, despite the students not being previously informed by the Big Red Group of such planned activities.
One of the students present at the event wrote in a statement to The Crimson that they had “been explicit in sharing our intentions to not be presented to students as such.”
No Big Red Education staff informed the Harvard students involved until they arrived at the program, and no one was compensated for their time there, according to the students.
Jalan said he had told one of the mentors present about the event, and called the discrepancy “more of their internal issue.”
The Crimson corroborated the students’ account by reviewing contemporaneous audio recordings from the travel to the Q&A session and text messages in a group chat of students who staffed the Mumbai conference.
But for some students, their negative experience with Jalan and the Big Red Group extended far beyond their time at the conference.
‘Complete Radio Silence’
In an agreement between the Big Red Group and the student mentors regarding their terms of employment, the firm agreed to reimburse students and pay their stipends “in cash on the last day of the conference.”
More than nine months later, Velarde-Berrios and other Harvard students are still waiting to be paid.
“They stopped communicating in terms of the stipend reimbursements,” Velarde-Berrios said.
“I’ve called more than five times, six times,” he said. “I never got an answer.”
Harvard students who worked at Big Red Education’s conferences were guaranteed a $500 stipend in addition to the Big Red Group paying for food, flights, and living accommodations.
“Initially, what they told us was that they were going to give us sort of cash payments at the beginning of the conference,” said Ashley L. Redhead ’26, a Harvard student who worked at one of the Big Red Group’s conferences.
When they did not receive the funds, students paid out of pocket for taxis and meals with the assurance that they would be reimbursed after the conference.
“We transitioned to this idea that we were gonna get reimbursed,” said Edona Cosovic ’25, another student worker at the conference. “We filed reimbursement forms afterwards, at the end of the conference.”
But there was no response from Jalan regarding the requests for reimbursements.
“He never responded to any of my messages for months, and I called him multiple times, and he never opened a single message,” Cosovic said.
The students finally received communication from Big Red Education “only two or three months ago,” according to Cosovic, a former Crimson News editor.
“He’s been citing some sort of cross-border payment issues,” Redhead said. “It’s very hard for him to figure out how to move money across countries.”
Big Red Group had introduced $500 stipends for staffers for the first time at the December 2023 and January 2024 conferences, resulting in such reimbursement issues, according to Jalan.
He said that banking regulations were the reason for the delay.
“When you have to give $500 or more to other people, it comes under the banking regulations,” Jalan said. “As the banking regulations change, I can’t, through my business, give personal amounts to Harvard mentors until there is an invoicing aspect.”
“And because of that, there were legal issues which we’re still dealing with right now,” he added.
To address the payment complications, Jalan proposed sending cash with someone who was supposed to travel to the United States in the near future, according to Cosovic and Redhead.
“He initially told us that the reimbursements would be sent with somebody who went on a conference this summer,” Redhead said. “That didn’t happen, and there was complete radio silence after that.”
Due to issues fulfilling larger reimbursements, Jalan has removed the $500 stipend for more recent conferences so that “we’re not landing into the problem that we did with the last set of mentors,” he said.
Jalan’s communication regarding such reimbursement issues has still been “not very frequently” and “not very clear on the status of what reimbursement looks like,” Redhead added.
On Thursday, one day after The Crimson reached out to Jalan to request comment for this article, he sent a message to a WhatsApp group chat with Harvard students who staffed conferences organized by the Big Red Group in January 2024.
“Hey Guys — good news, we have figured out to make the reimbursements through the official PayPal or Venmo through our other partners in the US,” Jalan wrote. “Thank you so much for the patience and sorry for the delay but hope everything will be smooth sailing from here.”
It was the first message Jalan had sent to the group chat in weeks.
But for now, Redhead, Cosovic, and Velarde-Berrios remain unpaid.
In an interview, Cosovic estimated that she is owed several thousand dollars from the Big Red Group. Other students are owed similar amounts, she said.
Cosovic and other students who staffed the conference said that the compensation ordeal tainted what was otherwise a positive experience.
“I liked working with the kids, and it’s just unfortunate that it’s all shadowed by the fact that we weren’t paid the money that we were told,” Cosovic said.
‘A Bit of a Stretch’
The Big Red Education homepage advertises its conferences as an opportunity for students to “learn from professors from the best universities from around the world.”
The website lists affiliated “professors,” including four from Stanford, MIT, and Harvard. However, only one out of the four is actually listed in their respective institutions’ directories.
Jalan said his evidence for their status as professors was their respective LinkedIn pages. None of the LinkedIn pages in question include the word “professor.”
One of the confirmed professors listed, public astronomer at the University of Cambridge Matthew Bothwell, wrote that he was “surprised” to see his name on the site.
“My interactions with the group were limited to one online lecture about three years ago,” he wrote.
He added that Big Red Education’s description of his affiliation with the organization was “a bit of a stretch!”
In addition to faculty collaborations, Big Red Education currently claims to be “working with” two Harvard student organizations: The Academies by Harvard Student Agencies and Harvard Youth Lead the Change.
President of Harvard Student Agencies Efrain G. “Frankie” Freeman ’26 wrote in an emailed statement to The Crimson that HSA does not “do business” with Big Red Education.
“This information on their website is incorrect and misleading,” he added.
Jalan said that the graphic in question was “put in while those partnerships were there.”
“It’s not necessarily that those partnerships still stand,” he added.
The board and alumni of Harvard Undergraduate Leadership Mentors — which previously partnered with the Big Red Group when it was known as Harvard Youth Lead the Change — wrote in a statement that even after the end of their relationship “BRG proceeded to plan and publicize conferences that bore the YLC name.”
Three Harvard students that participated in the conference accused Big Red Education of implying they had a formal relationship with Harvard University as part of their marketing.
In response, Jalan said that they were “not at all claiming that this is a Harvard program.”
However, the brochure on Big Red Education’s website for their winter conference mentors includes the Harvard seal on the first page and advertises itself as the “Harvard Leadership course.”
In 2024, one year after Harvard Youth Lead the Change broke off their partnership with Big Red Education, Jalan created a website entitled “Harvard YLC,” with the firm’s upcoming leadership conferences also titled “Harvard YLC.”
Jalan said in an interview that he does not believe Big Red Education’s website has “ever given a false impression that this is an official Harvard program.”
“I think our parents and our students who come in for these programs are smart enough to understand that, and that’s something from the beginning we would also mention to them,” he said.
While the website is not associated with HULM or any other official undergraduate student group at Harvard, Jalan’s full name appeared in the website’s source code at least 18 times.
In the hour following Jalan’s interview with The Crimson, the website was made private.
Until the site was taken down, Jailene Ramos ’24 was listed on the homepage as a student mentor. In an emailed statement to The Crimson, Ramos wrote that she “had no idea” her name was listed on the site or that Big Red Education “was still claiming a partnership with YLC.”
College spokesperson Alixandra A. Nozzolillo wrote in a statement that student organizations can work with external companies, “provided they adhere to the College’s and University’s established guidelines and policies.”
Those policies require use of the Harvard name to “be reviewed and approved by the Harvard Trademark Program.” They also forbid the use of the Harvard name from being used “to imply any affiliation with or endorsement by Harvard.”
University spokesperson Jason A. Newton confirmed in a statement to The Crimson that Harvard “has not approved Big Red Education’s use of Harvard’s trademarks.”
Jalan acknowledged that Big Red Education has received emails in the past from the Harvard Trademark Office over the company’s use of logos from Harvard-affiliated groups.
“These are things that we also try to keep learning,” he said.
Overall, Velarde-Berrios said his experience with Big Red Education fell short of his expectations — and not just because he is still waiting for his $500 stipend.
“The students pay a lot of money to attend those conferences where the Harvard mentors are barely equipped,” Velarde-Berrios said.
“Ultimately, it seemed like a very large misconception in terms of what the Big Red Group was trying to advertise,” Velarde-Berrios said. “It was a little bit of a scam.”
—Staff writer Hiral M. Chavre can be reached at [email protected].
—Staff writer Samuel A. Church can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on X @samuelachurch.
