Meet the guy wrecking yield rates for Brown, UPenn, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, and Dartmouth: Kwasi Enin, a 17-year-old who got into every last one of ’em.
Enin is a violist and aspiring physician—TOO GOOD FOR BLOGGER?—who made the unprecedented decision this year to apply to all eight Ivy League schools. His guidance counselor told him to apply to just a couple of the elite Ivies, because each asks for different qualities in its applicants (Harvard gets the overachievers; Brown wants weirdos and Emma Watson), but Enin decided to go for broke. And it paid off.
It didn’t hurt that he volunteers in his local radiology department and he’s taken all the APs and his SAT score is higher than some hall-of-famers’ hit totals. From USA Today:
The feat is extremely rare, say college counselors — few students even apply to all eight, because each seeks different qualities in their freshman class. Almost none are invited to attend them all. The Ivy League colleges are among the nation’s most elite.
“My heart skipped a beat when he told me he was applying to all eight,” says Nancy Winkler, a guidance counselor at William Floyd High School, where Enin attends class. In 29 years as a counselor, she says, she’s never seen anything like this. “It’s a big deal when we have students apply to one or two Ivies. To get into one or two is huge. It was extraordinary.”
For most of the eight schools, acceptance comes rarely, even among the USA’s top students. At the top end, Cornell University admitted only 14% of applicants. Harvard accepted just 5.9%.
In all seriousness, good for Enin. He’s a first-generation American with parents from Ghana and this is just the start. Parlay this bidding war into a dynamite financial aid package and go do some good in the world, brah.