<p>How many Ivies should one apply to? I heard that applying to a lot can hurt you seeing how the Ivy League is like a consortium and they talk to each other (won't they get suspicious if you tell all of them that they are your dream school)? Which is the optimal number to apply to?</p>
<p>Just apply to whatever college suits you the best…
do NOT apply to all the Ivy Leagues… waste of time and money.
Apply to schools that you think would be best for you. You don’t have to go to an Ivy League. There are plenty of other good schools out there.</p>
<p>and the ivies are all so different that it would be strange for them to ALL be the “dream school.”</p>
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<p>says who? The Ivy League is nothing but a sporting conference in the Northeastern United States. They are actually competitors for student yield and will not disclose admissions details, names, or applicants. </p>
<p>Also, there are 20,000+ applicants per school. They do not have the time, manpower, and resources to track down each applicant(no matter how special paranoid CC’ers think they are)</p>
<p>lol i know a kid who got a 2200+ on the SAT but he said: “Ivy league? hell no!! ivy league is actually an athletic league.i’d rather go to a state school and save my money for graduate school.”</p>
<p>I’ve never heard of colleges talking to each other to see if somebody cross-applied. There are plenty of very elite and top-notch schools besides the Ivy League; see MIT, Caltech, JHU, Washington U, Duke, Stanford, Williams, Amherst, Northwestern, UChicago, etc.</p>
<p>Again, they differ so check out the ones that fit you as a person the best. Don’t mold yourself to a college; find one that fits YOUR mold! Good luck and best wishes! :)</p>
<p>This relates to my FAQ file on this Frequently Asked Question: </p>
<p>APPLYING TO ALL EIGHT IVIES </p>
<p>Wrong extreme idea 1: </p>
<p>Some students “reason” that if an applicant applies to all eight Ivy League colleges, his chance of admission at any one of them is the same as the average base admission rate for all of them (which is wrong assumption a). Then the students “reason” that because the eight admission committees don’t all meet in the same room, that they select students “independently” in the STATISTICAL sense (which is wrong assumption b). The students then misapply a formula learned in high school that only applies to differing situations, to calculate that the chance of getting into some Ivy League college is almost a sure thing. </p>
<p>What’s wrong with wrong assumption a is that a weak applicant for admission at the least selective Ivy League college is a weak applicant at all the other colleges in the league, and that means that applicant’s chance of admission anywhere is well below the base rate of admission for any Ivy League college. </p>
<p>What’s wrong with assumption b is that usually colleges don’t have to actively collude to end up choosing similar kinds of applicants. ALL colleges prefer stronger applicants to weaker applicants. A teacher of statistics explained to me what “independence” means in the sense used by statisticians: “What is independence? It means that when you learn about the outcome of one event, it has no influence on your guess about the probability of success in another event. However, in this case, if a student gets rejected from 8 schools, that DOES influence my guess about how likely he is to get rejected from the 9th school. I’d say someone who gets rejected from 8 schools is more likely to get rejected from the 9th than someone who didn’t get rejected from 8 schools.” In other words, even if colleges act independently in the layman’s sense of the term, you can’t use the multiplicative rule of probability to figure out the joint probability of being admitted to one out of the eight Ivy League colleges. Plenty of students get rejected by all eight. </p>
<p>Other threads from time to time bring up </p>
<p>Wrong extreme idea 2: </p>
<p>Ivy League admission officers are thin-skinned and personally offended if you apply to their “competitors,” and will reject you if you apply to all eight Ivy League colleges. </p>
<p>Well, that’s just ridiculous. There are plenty of students each year who are admitted to more than one Ivy League college (of course, those are rather extraordinary students) and there are at least a few each year who apply to all eight and are admitted to all eight. Ivy League colleges do NOT collude in this manner when making admission decisions. They admit the students who they think will fit well into the next entering class and contribute to the campus community. The bottom-tier Ivy League colleges admit a lot of students who don’t enroll (that is, those colleges have rather low “yield,”) because they admit some students who prefer to enroll at one of the OTHER Ivy college colleges that admitted them. Each college has its own tricks, in five cases including binding early decision programs, to identify students who genuinely prefer that college, but in the regular action round, every college admits some students who are also admitted by some of the other Ivy League colleges, perhaps all of the Ivy League colleges. </p>
<p>Bottom line: don’t worry about either wrong, extreme idea. Apply well to all of the colleges that interest you. There is little point in applying to a college you wouldn’t possibly attend if admitted, but there is every reason to apply to a college you like, because you can’t get in if you don’t apply. </p>
<p>Good luck in your applications. Don’t use calculations that apply (well, maybe they do) to coin flips or dice tosses to guess what will happen to college applications.</p>
<p>It sounds like you only want to go to an “Ivy” because it’s an “Ivy.” You need to choose a school based on its fit for you, not because of its reputation. There is no possible way that all eight Ivies are a good fit for anyone… they are all very different and unique… do some research.</p>
<p>Just apply to the ones that are good fits. They are all very different from one another and the only thing they all have in common is that they are in the same athletic conference.</p>
<p>Just a thought, since you sound like you’re only trying to go to Ivies for their namesake, have you looked at other schools? I hope that I’m not drawing the wrong conclusion, but you should consider some top LACs or other great universities as well. If you find one person who’d scoff at you for going to MIT or Williams, then they’re insane. Just expand your list some more, keep working hard, and find a “fit school.”</p>
<p>By applying to all the Ivies, in a way that means that you should apply to every school in the ACC or Big 10…get what I mean? It’s just a famed athletic conference with a great reputation for educational oppurtunities.</p>
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<p>That’s good advice. Also, if you’re still considering your list of colleges (as the OP and I are) then what I would do is to start with the Ivies, and the rest of the top colleges, and see what I like about each one. I’d probably find something to like about Columbia, or Brown, or Amherst, even though, at the moment, I don’t know much about them besides their top reputations. The important thing is to learn as much as you can about a college, even if you can’t visit, and then go from there. But I would also put more effort into learning about the top-ranked colleges.</p>
<p>It maybe against the law, but most of top tier schools speak with private schools GC before decisions are made. They review every applicant together, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they know what other schools each of those applicants is applying to. The conversation sometimes gets down to, “If we were to offer a spot, what’s the likelyhood he/she would come?”</p>
<p>No, do not apply to every Ivy because it’s rediculous to go to a school just because it’s an Ivy. No, it is very naive for anyone to say Ivy is just a sports league. We all know it’s a lot more than that. It may have started that way, but it has become a group of top tier schools.</p>
<p>Although I’m not sure if oldfort is right about the conversations between schools, I definitely agree that there is more to the Ivies now than just a conference. Going to an Ivy League college means that you have an extremely strong alumni network and a recognizable name behind you when you go into the job force. This isn’t important so that you can brag to future employers about how great you are, but more so that they know that you are really serious about what you’re doing (and depending on which Ivy you attend) that you did a LOT of work to get where you are. So, it doesn’t make sense on a personal level to apply to all Ivies because you probably wouldn’t enjoy going to all of them (think about the difference between Columbia, in NY city, and Cornell, in Ithaca) but there is no denying that there is a value to going to a big name school.</p>
<p>The Ivies do not talk to each other about applicants.</p>
<p>The Ivies differ greatly from each other so it’s usually not a good idea to apply to all since all wouldn’t be good fits for the same student.</p>
<p>^I totally agree with Northstarmom. There is a huge difference between Penn, Harvard, or Columbia and Dartmouth or Cornell. Would you want to live in a large, vibrant city or a small, rural town? Do you prefer a larger student population (Cornell) or a smaller one (Dartmouth) to feel comfortable? There are lots of differences among these outstanding colleges, so you need to do some soul-searching to determine what YOU want out of college and which Ivies (if any) would be places right for YOU. </p>
<p>GOOD LUCK!!</p>
<p>Ivies may not speak with each other, I really wouldn’t know. But I do know adcoms from those schools speak with our school’s GCs prior to making decisions. Would GCs disclose which schools their students are applying to? Information goes both ways, right?</p>
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<p>I’ve seen the above comment all over CC, and it’s about as ridiculous a statement as saying that Cambridge and Oxford are nothing but rowing rivals. Yes, the Ivy League was named after the sports league that several of the top northeastern colleges formed, but, if that’s all it was, people wouldn’t be applying in such large numbers. The Ivies offer excellent educations and attract both top students and top faculty. That said, they aren’t the only places one can receive an excellent education.</p>
<p>As for conferring about applicants, the Ivies used to do this decades ago, and they were sued for it. They are not allowed to discuss applicants beyond circulating a list of students who were accepted ED. </p>
<p>Each Ivy has different strengths and weaknesses, so it would behoove the OP to look at each critically to decide which are worth applying to.</p>
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by law they can not do this … no schools can talk to other schools about appilcants … it is considered restraint of trade and that it hurt the students applying (yes, there have been court cases).</p>
<p>Hell if you have the time, grades, and SATs apply to all.</p>
<p>I have a few, possibly contrarian, points on this. I think it could be quite reasonable for a student to apply to all, or at least almost all of the Ivies, if what he is primarily looking for is a highly able student body (he might add in Stanford and Duke, and a couple of others). While these schools have lots of differences, they may not be differences that matter to some students. In my son’s case, as an example, he didn’t want to apply to Cornell or Dartmouth because of their location, but he saw a lot to like in each of the others.</p>
<p>The other thing is that while applying to more schools doesn’t increase the mathematical odds of admission, for the reasons tokenadult has stated, it still may make sense for a student interested in highly selective schools to apply to more of them. I have read numerous accounts on CC of students admitted to one or two of the Ivies, and rejected to others, and you can’t always predict the pattern. (In other words, it can and does happen that somebody is rejected by Brown and admitted by Harvard.) While selection isn’t random, it does involve lots of factors that aren’t obvious to the student. The fact that you’re from Idaho may help this year at one school but not at another.</p>
<p>I agree with the advice to only apply to schools you really like, and to not be swayed by prestige alone. I would just suggest that you might want to resist the idea that you are applying to “too many” reach schools.</p>