Do Ivy league colleges exchange information on students who applied? Does one college know to what other Ivy colleges you applied, and do they base their decision on that information(I heard that many people who applied to more got only into one)?
While I can’t give you a declarative answer, I would say I highly doubt it.In any event you can choose only one to attend.
I would not base too much on an urban legend. You can only apply to one ED/SCEA, and no GC who values his/her job will risk his reputation or the HS’s by submitting 2 GC recs for ED/SCEA.
If by chance, one were to slip through, and an applicant got accepted to more than one school, at some point both schools will rescind the offer. It’s not a question of if they will find out; they will.
@skieurope , I didn’t get the impression OP was talking about ED. My understanding is that the question pertains to RD.
@Wolowizard , there also seem to be stories of kids getting into multiple Ivies and other highly selective colleges. They probably were stellar candidates or hooked.
They do not exchange information on individual applicants in the way you suggest. Doing so would hold themselves open to charges of colluding. In the past the Ivies got in trouble with the federal government for trying to set standard financial aid packages.
@Kayak24 Ah, thanks for the clarification.
@Kayak24 Yes, I was talking about RD.
@skieurope It’s not urban legends, these are people I know personally.
For RD, so do I. As noted above, I incorrectly thought you were talking about ED.
I cannot find the source right now but I am positive I have read in the past that exchanging virtually any student information between colleges is illegal. However, I’m not sure if this includes information about what schools a student applied to/was accepted to. My hunch would be that even if it is legal, AOs do not care to search and see what other schools a student was accepted into, though they do see your FAFSA rankings (where you put in the top 10 schools you want to attend, in order) and may base decisions on that. As far as the anecdotal evidence goes, the majority of people I know who were admitted into an Ivy were admitted into multiple, but not all that they applied to- for example, I know someone who got into Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, but was rejected by Yale and Penn. As far as I can tell that’s just because each of the Ivies are very different schools that look for different kinds of applicants.
Director of Admission at UPenn has said in an article (sorry, I don’t have the link) that UPenn would recommend certain applicants, who presumably UPenn didn’t accept, to other Ivies after it had reviewed their applications and found them to be better fit for the other Ivies. This suggests that Ivies do exchange certain information.
@astrobiodreams I thought they could no longer see the other schools listed on the FAFSA. I thought that was a thing of the past
I have heard that the Ivy League schools send admissions officers to meet in person, basically deciding which student is accepted by which school at the “meetings”. Not sure if this is true or just legend, but I think in the past it was a problem with colleges offering financial aid and students asking the colleges for more based on acceptances.