Ivy League

<p>I have a general question about applying to all the ivy leagues.
My college consultant told me it's really bad to apply to all the ivies but from what I understand they can't see where else you applied so what do you guys think as I was planning to apply to them all in hopes of increasing my chances of getting into one</p>

<p>Just apply to the ones you really like. Also colleges publish lists of the students that do apply so they might know. There is really no point in applying to all of the Ivies.</p>

<p>If the only reason you want to get into an Ivy League school is because it is an Ivy, you likely will not be accepted to any… your college consultant wants you to go to a college that is a right fit for you… all the Ivies cannot possibly be the “right fit”</p>

<p>Hmm while you bring up a good point I really only like princeton harvard yale columbia and brown out of the ivies but I would think applying to them all would better my chances of getting in?</p>

<p>You shouldn’t apply for an Ivie just because it’s an ivie school…</p>

<p>Once again, the “If I apply to all 8 Ivies, will it increase my chances” post. These come around as often as the full moon. A quick search will get about 40 threads asking the same thing and its inherent fallacies</p>

<p>Columbia: the risk you face will be to appear very unfocused as the schools aren’t the same</p>

<p>vasduv: applicant name lists are private. They don’t publish such a thing. Lawsuit!!!</p>

<p>^The new guys speaks truth</p>

<p>lol thanks, but i really don’t know if i should early d to columbia engineering which has a 34% acceptance rate or take my chances at yale with 13% early action acceptance rate because yale is my #1 but its REALLY hard to get into and I only have a 3.665 gpa 2280 sat score with 760s across the board and am going to take the act in september and hopefully get a 36 but i doubt theyll take me</p>

<p>"I would think applying to them all would better my chances of getting in? "
Nope, this is a fallacy that somehow gets repeated every year. Your chances of getting into any Ivy have nothing to do with how many Ivy’s you apply to. It is totally subject to 1] the strentht of your application in comparison to other applications for that particular college, and 2] what that college is looking for that year.
Think if it this way
0+0+0+0+0 still equals 0. A very strong candidate is going to be accepted at an Ivy over an “average” student every time.
To get a better idea of your “chances” of acceptance at any college, look at the accepted students stats, and at the % of ACCEPTED students with stats similar to yours, which often can be found on the admission’s website, OR do a search for the Common Data set for each college, which is a federally required disclosure statement required annually of each college in the US. Buried in each report is tons of information about admissions statistics.</p>

<p>T26E4 has seen the FAQ before: </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>For the OP, I would apply to Columbia engineering ED, assuming you want to be an engineer.
If you are not admitted, I would take that as an indication of your chances at other Ivy schools. Not impossible, but better look to other alternatives.</p>

<p>For borderline kids, there is definitely an advantage to applying to all eight of the Ivies. However, it’s not a quantifiable advantage. we can’t break it down to a probability question.</p>

<p>The argument that applying to all eight (right?) ivies doesn’t increase your chances of getting admitted into at least one is completely invalid. Think of it, if the OP applies to eight vs. four, the chances of getting admitted into at least one school can not go down, that’s impossible. I think the OP’s strategy makes some sense. Admissions at top schools are a real crapshoot. People get into Yale but rejected from WUSTL and Cornell (my friend) or get into Stanford but rejected from Duke (my sister’s BF). So, say the OP is a fantastic student, but for some reason he got unlucky and all four ivies he applied to rejected/waitlisted him, as he just didn’t cut it or didn’t click with the adcoms. I would guarantee that if a student is waitlisted at Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton but applied to all the other ivies, he would get at least one acceptance from the remaining four. Diversify the risk? DEFINITELY! But only apply to schools where you could imagine yourself going.</p>

<p>The bottom line is, despite myth, they are all looking for the same thing. That’s why you see many here who got into most or none.</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>How much money are you willing to put behind that guarantee? </p>

<p>Yes, someone who is waitlisted at both Harvard and Yale is probably a strong student, and thus a student likely to get into less selective colleges. But what guarantees anything about what any of the colleges will do?</p>

<p>“The bottom line is, despite myth, they are all looking for the same thing. That’s why you see many here who got into most or none.”</p>

<p>Ummm absolutely not.</p>

<p>…the reason it is stupid to apply to all of them is because they are all very different schools. Someone who wants to go to Columbia does not want to go Cornell, and someone who wants to go to Brown does not want to go to Princeton.</p>

<p>Largely from Michelle Hernandez, I think most wait list designations are for political reasons, rather an indication that the student was strong. Steinberg’s “The Gatekeepers” about admissions at Wesleyan backed up that impression. The biggest push and pull described in that book was between an admissions officer, his boss, and a high school guidance counselor about whether a particular applicant would be placed on the wait list. There was no illusion on the part of any of the three that the student would ever be admitted. Of course the poor student was never let in on this behind the scenes dance.
I’ve never seen anybody else post on CC with this take, but “The Gatekeepers” to me was the most depressing book I have ever read about college admissions.</p>

<p>I am sorry, I mistyped. I believe college release the students that were accepted (ED lists) so if the OP wanted to apply to all 8 for ****s and giggles there that would be whole other story, and this was not the question asked by the OP. (I need a summer vacation) I am very sorry for the fact that I mistyped.</p>

<p>^Yes, I was exagerrating. But, I’d actually be willing to put a lot of money (if I had any) on it. </p>

<p>And hmom, they are not looking for the same exact students. Ivies have different acceptance rates (which already disproves your statement) and they all look for different people. Yes, grades are important everywhere. But, some ivies may place more weight on test scores, another may absolutely fall in love with a student’s essay (a risky one, for example, that other schools didn’t like as much), some may be looking for more well-rounded students, others may accept more of a certain ethnicity. This all contributes to the whole crapshoot thing I was speaking of. Yes, some top students get into them all, and some bad (relatively) students get rejected from them all, but this is far from a majority of prospective students. For those many in-between students, which the OP may be, it is a lot more random. </p>

<p>At my school, those in-between people (including myself) apply to a few ivies, and no one I know that fits into the tweener category recieved consensus decisions (yay or nay) from their schools. As I mentioned before, my friend got into Yale but not Cornell. My sister got into two but waitlisted at another two (I never found out which, though). Another friend got into Cornell but rejected from Penn and Harvard. Yet another got waitlisted at Harvard, into Princeton, and rejected at Yale. I know far more of these types of people than the all accepts/all rejects crowd.</p>