Reach School Admissions

Ivy League schools- the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Harvard, Brown, and Cornell- are among the world’s most selective schools. Because they are so sought after, they have to be highly selective with the students they grant admission, averaging at about a 9% acceptance rate. These prestigious schools accept three types of students (or some mixture of these types): elite students (valedictorians, national merit scholars, etc.), elite performers (athletes, published authors, child actors, etc.), and elite connected (the children of world leaders, legacy families, or wealthy donors).

Attending an Ivy League school can open many doors and put you ahead of your peers- it makes it easier to find employment, make meaningful connections, and much more. About 24% of the 400 wealthiest people in America rated by Forbes attended an Ivy League School.

After hearing this, it makes sense for you to want to be an Ivy alum, but how do you secure your admission into such a prestigious institution?

Through our college consulting programs, we have been helping students get into these types of schools for over 5 years now and have done a very good job according to our former students and parents.

Grades and scores

First, we will examine the academic portion of getting accepted to an Ivy.

Although there is no benchmark grade point average (GPA) that will ensure your acceptance, there is a significant trend in coursework difficulty and GPA. Meaning, you will have to be taking high-level classes- such as honors, IB, AP, or AICE- and achieve high grades in them.

If you are applying to an Ivy, it can be assumed that you can handle more rigorous and intense coursework, so you should strive to take the most challenging curriculum available to you. Ask your guidance counselor or academic advisor if you can dual-enroll in a community college to round out your curriculum further.

It is important to remember, the board of admissions wants to see a student who has a consistently high GPA with a steady increase in difficulty. You must take your entire high school curriculum history into account when deciding if an Ivy is right for you.

GPA goes hand in hand with test scores; if you are in high-level classes, you should be receiving high scores on standardized exams. For prestigious schools such as these, ‘good’ scores actually mean nearly…