The ruinous state of our economy has done little to deter this year's batch of Ivy aspirants; for the class of 2013, acceptances rates fell at six of the eight Ivy League schools.

Harvard and Yale solidified their positions as the toughest schools to get into, at 7% and 7.5%, respectively, though the school formerly known as the College of New Jersey - while maintaining its third place position - slid, much to the dismay of some prestige-hungry Princetonians,  precipitously close to its proletarian New York City peer.

If we had to hazard a guess, we'd say the general rise in applications to the Ivy League may be owed in part to its constituents' sizable endowments and commitment to need-blind financial aid; in marked contrast, several other selective colleges and universities - including Colby and Oberlin - are, according to the New York Times, looking more favorably on wealthier applicants as they make admissions decisions this year."

Perhaps the decrease in selectivity at both Princeton and Penn is due to the fact that they are,  or rather have been, traditional feeders into Wall Street - a Wall Street that is no longer as glamorous as it was a few years before. If that yawn-inducing class on financial derivatives or corporate valuation isn't going to net you that super sweet 100-hour a week gig at Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns you might as well learn hot boxing 101 and take creative writing classes pass/fail at Brown.

At 5pm today, about 27,066 of the record 29,112 students who applied to Harvard this year will get the thin email from 86 Brattle St. These down-and-out overachievers will be weeping into the AP test prep books until they hear from the other 7 Ivies. But that doesn't mean that the Cambridge crowd can't laugh at them first.

Who says that Harvard students are arrogant about being Harvard students, anyways? (A few different sources, actually.) Well, any doubt can be assuaged by the warm pat on the shoulder offered by On Harvard Time. Reports of a new record low 7% acceptance rate guarantee that OHT's new video, "You Got Rejected," beats the Yale Amazing Race audition tape for the most relevant video of the day.

Read advice from Dean Fitzsimmons about money and the waitlist after the jump.

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IvyGate's Guide to Admissions: Part IV

Somewhere between F. Scott Fitzgerald's untimely death and that Tom Green movie about Harvard, some misconceptions of the awesome Ivy League education have spiraled out of control. First of all, the classes are not that difficult—seriously. And if you don't like just plain easy classes, there are stupid easy ones too! Beware, though, it's actually pretty easy to get (sort of) kicked out for a million things besides getting a C. Wait, you didn't know that grades are being phased out in the Ivies? Welcome to the high graduation-rate heaven of the still very profitable elite universities.

So if you're one of the happy few, be prepared to abandon all those bright-eyed ideals of your presumably successful high school career. Time to get greedy, lazy, jaded, and depressed.

1. Shine your shoes and practice that shit eating grin. A good grade is not hard to find at any Ivy if you know the right way to slut it up. First of all, we're all familiar with this grade inflation myth, right? Without even getting into the whole argument, it exists. According to the Boston Globe, over half of the grades given out at Harvard in 2007 were in the A-range. The real question, then, is how to make sure you're in the lucky half rather than the poor bastards who have to settle for B's, a sure fire dive into a life of destitution and, consequently, fewer orgasms. The answers...

• BORROW a learning disability. No kidding. Just make it up, go to health services, and enjoy with the fun medication or exemptions from required credits. One anonymous source told us about an anonymous freshman from an anonymous school who convinced doctors that he had an inability to learn foreign languages and thus avoided the language requirement. Too bad he wanted to be a comp lit major.
• BEG your professors for extensions, exemptions, and excellent grades you don't deserve. It's an art in its own way, but little things like attending office hours (with lots of cleavage) and chatting with your TA (with lots of cleavage) really do translate into better results.
• STEAL someone's identity! A couple years ago, a con artist got into and attended Columbia–though that's no big deal. Or you could just steal somebody else's work. If Kaavya Viswanathan (among others) can  bullshit her way up, so can you!

After the jump: skipping class, going nuts, and graduating happy! Plus, hating the Ivy League, leaving, and coming back by novelist Andrea Seigel.

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IvyGate's Guide to Admissions: Part II

Getting into an Ivy League school can be likened to winning the lottery: Pencil in a bunch of scantron bubbles, cross your fingers, pray to be struck by lightning. But instead of winning millions, you're rolling the dice for the opportunity to impoverish your parents. (Or ruin your credit rating, or both!) Nevertheless, aspiring Ivy is a time-honored American pursuit, and no matter how improbable, impractical, and ultimately unpleasant the prize may be, thousands attempt it every year. Mostly, we do it for the free t-shirts.

What follows is IvyGate's foolproof, guaranteed, 100%-success-or-your-money-back step-by-step guide to swindling your way into the school of your dreams.* Be warned: It isn't always pretty, and a few of these steps (#3, section ii, second option) might make you go to hell.

1. Have perfect SAT scores, an off-the-chart GPA, amazing extracurriculars, leadership positions in everything, and the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Duh. This one is a given, a prereq, if you will. Even the richest kid in the world won't get in if he's apt to flunk (or, more likely, drop) out.

2. Be from an insanely wealthy and/or well-connected family, preferably one with an Ivy League legacy. Apply early. While legacy admission standards aren't as hilariously low as they used to be, a study by Princeton SOC professors Espenshade and Chung equates legacy status with a 160-point SAT boost (on a 1600-point scale) to the privileged few who definitely need it least. But that's not what we're talking about here. To guarantee admission, you need to be the child of a major donor, the kind who write seven-digit checks to their alma mater and have buildings named after them. One such Ivy Leaguer, the grandson of a prominent university trustee, told us about his admissions process, starting with an unconventional and star-studded campus tour:

my grandad flew to meet my dad & i [at the university], and i just figured that it was going to be a regular day of tours & walking around. however, when we got there we were met by a super friendly admissions guy. he took us on the regular tour, but then we ditched it because he said "it's completely useless" (ironic, considering how much energy & money the university pumps into those tours) he took me around campus, and then brought me to meet a representative from the most popular department at the school, which i claimed to be interested in it. (later, i realized that he was one of the senior professors and chair of the undergraduate program) then they shuttled me over to the president's office. i didn't really GET that it was the president until they told me after we met. the meeting was brief, but looking back, it was quite an unbelievable opportunity. after lunch, we wandered around campus with another admissions rep, who told me all about undergraduate life.

After the jump: Anonymous Silver-Spooner (ASS) (Don't be mad, ASS! We tease because we love/hate) continues his story and we offer five more tips for getting in. Read the rest of this entry »

IvyGate's Guide to Admissions: Part I

Lately, the cavalcade of admissions soothsayers seems to stretch from high school guidance counselor's offices all the way to the bank—not to mention a stopover at the open palms of admissions coaches. Neither here nor there, the secret to getting in exists. Just ask anyone who can be identified as a "Former admissions officer, Ivy League college." A recent flurry of clues on how to get in and how not to get in gave so much credit to said anonymous sources that we decided to do a little multi-part series on Ivy admissions.

As an introduction we've picked out some of the more salient comments from the Daily Beast's recent treatment of the elite admissions game. Appropriately enough, the prophets holding the keys to the Ivory Tower tend to be the half-jaded, wholly-enlightened ones who write those books with clever titles that pun on the letter "A." (Oddly enough, a lot of the authors seems to have worked in Dartmouth's admissions office.) These guys have some interesting—and some offending—things to say. But in the long run we'll be bringing out some dirty truths from the students who do get in.

The low-down from a current Ivy League officer (probably from Dartmouth based on the aforementioned trend in admissions book publishing)—via Daily Beast:

An admissions officer is really asking himself, ‘Would I like to hang out with this guy or gal for the next four years?’ So if you come off as just another Asian math genius with no personality, then it’s going to be tough for you. An admissions officer is not going to push very hard for you.”

Ok, that's racist. Asian math geniuses are actually as fun as white, brown, or black math geniuses after a couple of drinks. To be real, a lot of smart people are a lot more fun if you're smart enough to keep up with them. Read more upsetting truths about why you did (or didn't) get in after the jump.

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Over a year ago, IvyGate learned that 5% of Cornell applicants (1,300 students) were immediately rejected because they forgot to check off which college within Cornell they wanted to attend. Well, these Cornell wannabes are at it again. The New York Times reports:

About 1 percent of applications to Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa — or 30 to 40 a year — are meant for Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., says Todd White, its director of admissions.

I guess it's reasonable someone would mail his Cornell application to Iowa. At least, it was reasonable to Robert H. Kim. According to the Times, Kim accidentally sent his application to Cornell College and then, after learning of his mistake, fell in love with the school. What was it that so impressed him about bizarro Cornell? The Times says:

students at Cornell College take one course at a time. What an ideal way to study, Mr. Kim thought.

Untraditional courseloads? The temerity.

At certain moments in my month-long stay in Seoul, say when I was navigating about its immaculately clean subway system or gorging myself on endless supplies of Korean short ribs, it occurred to me that it wouldn't have been half bad if I had been born and raised there. But then I'd watch my seven-year-old cousin race off to his test-prep center after class every day, see uniformed high-schoolers trudge back to their apartments past midnight, and I'd silently thank my parents for immigrating to America.

Given the madness I observed in Korea firsthand, I was hardly surprised to see Newsweek write an article on two of Korea's top high schools, focusing particularly on their success at sending students to elite colleges in America. At Minjok Leadership Academy, for example, 25 of its 77 graduates who applied to American colleges were accepted to Ivy League schools. Daewon Foreign Language High School, which is similarly competitive, had 36 students get into the Ivy League last year.

All of this has its price - assuming, of course, that one manages to do well enough in middle school to get in:

Typically, students study well past midnight, sleeping four to five hours a night. The coed Korean schools also have tough rules on dating and other behaviors deemed distracting. Hand-holding is banned.

More insanity after the jump:

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Speaking of exorbitant “independent college admissions counseling," Sarah Jessica Parker's next venture is The Ivy Chronicles, based on a book by Karen Quinn. Parker will play Ivy, a woman who loses her job, gets divorced, moves from the Upper East Side to the Lower East Side (which is apparently still affordably bohemian in Movieland) and "starts a business to help upper-middle-class women get their children into elite kindergartens," or "Baby Ivies." To summarize another way: "Marking a huge departure from [Parker's] previous acting gig, Ivy is about a single gal in New York City who lives in a series of wildly unrealistic apartments."

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You know how the world is sort of going to pieces, what with expensive gas and rice, and related famines and genocides? As it so happens, even Manhattanites living the kind of charmed existence familiar to fans of Gossip Girl are not immune to tragedy. There's a terrible affliction plaguing prep schools far and wide (from the Upper East Side to, um, the Upper West Side): “Harvard drought." This year -- for the first time ever -- not a single student from the elite Dalton School was admitted to Harvard.

It's no Darfur, but you wouldn't know it by the way some of these parents are acting. They are unhappy indeed.

At Dalton’s graduation earlier this month, one mom was heard muttering, "I won’t send my grandchildren here, that’s for sure."

Oh, snap.

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Yes, Princeton is being investigated on charges of discriminating against Jian Li in its admissions process.  The Daily Princetonian reported a couple weeks ago that the investigation has broadened, but the best part about the article is the unmoderated melee going on in the comments!

Since the article went up on the website one commenter "Yale College Dad" or, as the cool kids have begun to call him, "YCD," has posted the overwhelming majority of the 200 comments, responding to everyone else with a rapid fire of enraged fury oh so common to the internet.

One of his better posts:

To the pimple popping Princeton brats...Jian Li has more than a strong argument. At the Ivies, especially at HYP, the evidence is overwhelming and compelling, and it is clear and convincing that for decades, there has been a racial basis, conscience or non-conscience, directed against Asian American applicants. Regardless of the outcome of the decision on Jian Li's complaint from the OCR, since it also consists of biased politically correct appointees, who will undoubtedly rule against Jian anyway, Princeton's admissions files will be OPENED, and this could bolster Jian's claims when viewd by an impartial party. This case has put Princeton and the Ivies on notice for more future complaints and federal law suits based racial discrimination by Asian Americans. They won't be ignored, mocked and ridiculed and be treated as frivolous anymore, especially by the Daily Princetonian....090909 has yet to post a credible reponse. Laugh it up, Princetonians, because the joke will be on YOU!!! BTW, some of my relatives and best friends are graduates of Princeton. Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!

But what isn't so common is his encyclopedic knowledge of the case! From my super-scientific estimation, YCD has quoted extensively from at least a handful of articles and legal texts regarding this case, all in his valiant efforts to defend an innocent student from the Princeton's discrimination and its students' ridicule.

After the jump, the plot thickens!
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