Have you ever seen a student make headlines for getting into all eight Ivy League schools? Over the years, we’ve had some students sweep the Ivies. One of Ivy Coach’s clients once did so, turning around a disappointment after she was deferred from Harvard University during the Early Action round. This is just one of the many success stories of our clients. But this client of ours was quite out of the ordinary. Usually, our clients do not apply to more than a handful of schools. After all, she only applied to the seven other Ivy League schools because she was deferred in the Early Action round to Harvard. Had she earned admission, she never would have applied to any of the other Ivies.

You see, the vast majority of our students at Ivy Coach earn admission in the Early round. So, they typically apply to only a few schools. Maybe they can apply to Harvard, a Single Choice Early Action school, along with a public university like the University of Michigan as a backup (since Harvard, like all the Ivies, allows students to apply to public universities in the Early round). Maybe they apply to Columbia University via Early Decision, University of Chicago via Early Action, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology via Early Action. Or perhaps they apply to Dartmouth College Early Decision. Either way, they don’t typically apply to all eight Ivies. Why would they?

We Oppose Applying to All Eight Ivies, With Exceptions

If our clients get into Dartmouth, Columbia, Brown, Penn, or Cornell via Early Decision, they’re bound to attend and can’t apply to other schools after that. If they get into Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, we will forcefully object to our students submitting Regular Decision applications to Dartmouth, Columbia, Brown, UPenn, or Cornell. Because we don’t believe they’d attend these schools over Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. If one of our Yale or Princeton admits wants to apply to Stanford or Harvard in the Regular Decision round, we get it and support it. But we will not now nor ever support a student who gets into Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Stanford who subsequently then applies to Cornell because that student will never choose Cornell over Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Stanford. Sorry Cornell!

All they’ll do is take an admissions slot away from a deserving student. Top schools (including Ivies!) want to achieve the highest yield rate possible to bump up their performance on such lists as the U.S. News ranking of top universities nationwide. They might claim they don’t care about these publications, but we know better. In other words, they don’t like to extend an offer of admission to a student who won’t end up accepting, which limits the total number of acceptances they will give out each admissions cycle. So-called’ feathers for their cap collectors’ (or at least that’s what we call them!) thus waste an already limited number of slots.

The Moral of the Story: Ivy Coach Can Help

At Ivy Coach, we vehemently oppose the idea of ’feathers for their cap collectors.’ This term refers to students who apply to all eight Ivies without a genuine interest in attending. However, there are exceptions. We once allowed a student to apply to all eight Ivies and Stanford, and here’s why: that student was deferred in the Early round to Harvard! This student was the only one of our students that year in the Early Action/Decision cycle who didn’t get in, and we were disappointed (though not discouraged!) for this student and the student’s parents. But our disappointment turned to joy when the deferral turned into an offer of admission, and those other offers came in, too. This student wasn’t collecting feathers for her cap. This student had every right to apply to all eight Ivies and more, and their story serves as a guiding light for our approach to college admissions.

As our clients have demonstrated through the years, getting into eight Ivies is well within the realm of possibility for someone who has optimized their odds of admission with a compelling singular hook (though, at Ivy Coach, if one of our students gets into all eight Ivies, it likely means there was a disappointment in the Early round!). Our team of former elite college admissions officers will work with your child to craft a compelling application that will knock the socks off of admissions officers at the nation’s most prestigious and selective schools.

You only need to fill out our complimentary consultation form to get started, and we’ll be in touch with an outline of our services.