<p>I agree that applying to all eight Ivy League schools doesn’t make a lot of sense. First, assuming you also want to apply to some matches and safeties, it will make your application list ridiculously long. Second, there are plenty of terrific non-Ivy League schools that may be better “next best” choices, based on what you’re looking for, than another Ivy League school. For example, my son really wanted to be in a major city. That ruled out Dartmouth, Cornell and Princeton, and made Brown and Yale less attractive (all five of those schools were less attractive to him for other reasons as well, but not being in a major city was definitely an issue). He ended up only applying to Harvard and Columbia among the Ivy League schools, and was lucky enough to be accepted at both. But “next best” choices were non-Ivy League schools such as University of Chicago, Berkeley, McGill and Georgetown.</p>