The Ivy League Roadmap Pt. 3

How Ivies Make Decisions.

This is an excerpt from the Ivy League Roadmap, if you’d like to read the full e-book, you can buy a copy here.

What You’ll Learn:

• How Ivy admissions works on the inside

• Why your AO must LOVE YOU

• Why applying Early can TANK your odds of Admission

How do Ivies decide? Quickly, then slowly by committee.

Admissions offices are secretive about their exact process and it varies widely by school even within the Ivy League. However, based on public descriptions by admissions officers, here's the general way an application gets reviewed:

First, your application gets sent to 2 Admissions Officer (AO) readers who specialize in your region of the country to be lightly reviewed and scored. This is meant to weed out anyone who applied to an Ivy because "you never know", but is obviously unqualified to go there (about half the applications). The remaining serious applications get scrutinized in a lot of detail. If you want to know how a specific Ivy will weigh different parts of your application, go on Google and search "<Name of School> CDS". This will lead you to the Common Data Set for each school which about half way through will include a table telling you how a particular school thinks about different parts of your application.