the Ivy League

College Search & Selection
1

<p>Do schools like the Ivy League universities exchange a college applicant's information between each other and come up with pretty much mutual decisions?</p>

2

<p>There have been rumors of that, and of course people from the inside deny it all, so there's really no way for us to know. My intuition is no, they don't. I think that was mostly made up by people who got rejected to all the ivies or only got into one and thought it was some big conspiracy when in fact admissions is largely a crapshoot. There is, however, some evidence to suggest that some Ivies <em>cough</em>Princeton<em>cough</em> turn down some applicants that they would otherwise accept on the suspicion that applicant will likely get into another ivy and choose it over that school.</p>

3

<p>The information they are allowed to exchange is limited to financial aid and it appears only to verify that they have all been told the same things by the applicants.</p>

<p>From Yale's Office of the Vice President & General Council - "Anti Trust Compliance" <a href="http://ogc.yale.edu/legal_reference/antitrust.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://ogc.yale.edu/legal_reference/antitrust.html&lt;/a>

[quote]
In particular, except as permitted under Section 568, Yale must continue to refrain from agreeing with other educational institutions on the basis upon which financial aid is to be awarded or the manner in which need is measured. Section 568 permits Yale and other qualifying schools to agree to award aid solely on the basis of need, to agree on methods for determining need, to agree to use common aid application forms and to engage in a one-time exchange of certain student data. A qualifying college group exercising these activities has been organized. The “overlap” procedure used before 1991 to compare individual aid awards to students admitted to more than one school, however, and any informal device to achieve similar aims, remain prohibited.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>They can't share what they plan to award to individual applicants in an effort to assign that applicant to a particular institution.</p>