<p>today i was reading an article and it said that 60% of the spots in an ivy league school are already taken before the first application is received. from like quadruple legacies and from applicants of families who have given alot of money to the school. and there is this society of people who gave over 2.5 million dollars to a school and 80% of the members have or have had a student in one of the ivy leagues.</p>
<p>No Way! I can't believe that's true!! Wouldn't it be true to at boarding schools, like if I had wealthy parents who donate 10 million to the school, wouldn't it be impossible to be rejected?</p>
<p>yea but probably at a lesser extent.</p>
<p>I find it difficult to believe myself. Prepchick, could you provide a link or list the publication, so I can find it at Borders?</p>
<p>I'd be curious where the author got his/her statistics for such a study.</p>
<p>Oh, and BTW, if you read threads on the College side of this board, you would find out that the "Ivy League" is actually only an athletic agreement between schools of similar background, regulating standards for competitions in sports and recruiting for athletes.</p>
<p>So as much as we think of Ivy League as something intellectually elite, it really isn't. Anyway, this is a prep school area, so let's not get look too far down the road. One day at a time.</p>
<p>Danile Goldens book sites numerous advantage types kids getting into many types of elite schools. He discusses the many monied interest groups that take up a chunck of the seats. When it comes to ED, if that's what you mean, Penn and Princeton fill nearly 40-50%</p>
<p>60% is way too high
as a student who attended Andover, an Ivy, and who works in an admissions office of an Ivy that number is wayyy too high. If you are the child of a serious legacy, or a recruited athlete your numbers skyrocket, but that still represents far less than 60% of every Ivy class... Chill out and enjoy high school/prep school while it lasts, then worry about admissions.</p>
<p>3-5% of each incoming class at Duke are "development admits"--that is, students who the development office targeted and recruited to come to Duke because their parents are rich, not because they show any academic or personal promise. These students have NO connection to the school whatsoever, just money. There was a Wall Street Journal article about this a few years ago in which they profiled students with less-than-mediocre (think 1000 on the old scale) SAT scores and GPAs that the school had actually recruited. Pathetic.</p>
<p>In some ways, the real Ivies are better about this sort of thing because they tend to have large endowments and less to prove. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have all introduced path-breaking financial aid systems in what seems to be a genuine effort to move class privilege further from the admission equation. And legacy status (at least when not in combination with huge financial gifts) gets most students surprisingly little at those three schools now--my bf went to Yale, where he was not a legacy, after being rejected from Brown, where he WAS a legacy. Go figure. </p>
<p>Anyway, the previous poster was right. You'll have the rest of high school to worry about college admissions. Concentrate on getting into high school for now.</p>
<p>It hardly matters. Are your chances 1 in 7 or one in 12?</p>