<p>All the Ivy League universities and colleges are very different from each other; a person who will be happy at one won’t necessarily be happy at all the others. </p>
<p>In addition, tokenadult’s post rings true – assuming that bombarding all 8 of them for admission raises your chances of getting into one is a fallacious assumption, and the admissions offices to undergraduate colleges have better things to do than sit around talking about who applies to who. These are universities that get applications from 20,000+ people each per year. Do you really think they are sharing with one another who applies to more than one (which is probably a large percentage of those applications, considering the fallacious statistical assumption high schoolers seem to have)?</p>
<p>Yes, sometimes they share absolute wall bangers, like students who have made up part of or all of their entire educational record or who are caught for committing a crime or have hidden something egregious that they should’ve shared with other admissions offices – but that’s not just across the Ivy League because of some sort of Justice League affiliation; admissions officers who have colleagues at other top schools’ offices will share that information with them.</p>
<p>Momwaitingfornew, I think the point of “the Ivy League is just a conference” is not denying the prestige of those schools, but acknowledging that membership in the League doesn’t necessarily confer prestige and/or that there are other shools that are just as great.</p>
<p>In reference to the last post, I also think people overestimate the importance of ‘diversity’ that they bring to the student body. A student who is unqualified for Brown or Harvard (by the admissions committee standards) is not going to get in just because he’s from Idaho or because he’s Latino or because she’s poor or plays the bassoon. Similarly, a student who is very qualified and who the school wants is not going to be rejected from Columbia solely on the basis of the fact that they lived in New York all their life (there’s a reason schools have a large percentage of their students come from their home city and surrounding states).</p>