Ask the Dean: Explaining Learning Disabilities in Ivy Applications

intparent
Mon, 15 Oct 2018 21:54:16 +0000

I don’t know what it would mean to have “earmarked” the Add’l Info Page for other things. No one should be putting extra essays in there, for example. And it can be used for more than one thing - just clearly label what each item is that you are including. So regardless of what else you might have in that section, it is feasible to add a brief comment on this.

That aside, I think this advice does a disservice to the questioner. A kid with a lower GPA is very unlikely to get into top schools, and disclosing a learning disability doesn’t make it any more likely that the kid will be admitted. The very top colleges care about results to date. The best advice would be to suggest that they limit these applications to 2-3 schools on the kid’s list, and build the rest of the list as matches and safeties for the student’s actual stats.