IvyWise Resources

IvyWise Results: Congratulations to the Class of 2017!

It was a successful college application season for IvyWise’s senior class of 2017, with early numbers showing 91% of IvyWise students gaining acceptance to one or more of their top three choice colleges.

With the help of our team of expert counselors, our seniors were able to secure acceptances to some of the most selective colleges in the US. The schools to which IvyWise students gained admission included all eight Ivy League universities, Stanford University, MIT, the University of Chicago, Duke University, and UCLA, just to name a few. In total, IvyWise students received over 400 acceptances to over 140 different colleges this year!

Class of 2021 Admission Rates
Once again, some of the country’s most selective universities reported record-low admission rates, with Stanford University admitting just 4.65% of applicants for the class of 2021.

IvyWise’s class of 2017 experienced great success with the Ivy League and other highly-selective colleges, with some admission rates for our students up to nine times higher than the school’s overall admission rate. Here are some acceptance rates from this year’s class:

School University Acceptance Rate IvyWise Acceptance Rate
Brown University 8.3% 50%
Columbia University 5.8% 57%
Cornell University 12.5% 45%
Dartmouth College 10.4% 50%
Harvard University 5.2% 29%
MIT 7.1% 43%
New York University 27% 65%
Princeton University 6.09% 27%
Stanford University 4.65% 25%
University of Chicago 8% 75%
University of Pennsylvania 9.1% 41%
Yale University 6.9% 54%

As admission rates have dropped over the last five years, IvyWise students have consistently performed well above their peers in the selective admissions process, gaining acceptance to some of the country’s top universities at much higher rates.

Five-Year Average Acceptance Rates (2013 – 2017)

IvyWise-rates-chart

IvyWise Student Stories
One great story from this year’s class comes from one of our pro bono students, Vienna, who was accepted early to Princeton’s class of 2021. We spoke with Vienna about her interests and experience working with IvyWise and applying to college. Read her interview below!

Q: Tell us a little about your background and interests.
A: Hi, my name is Vienna! I go to a public high school in San Diego, California. I enjoy listening to music and playing music – I play the flute and oboe –and academically I’m interested in psychology or cognitive science. For fun, I love to read or go shopping with friends.

Q: What are your college and career goals?
A: I am very interested in psychology, linguistics, anthropology and sociology. I hope to become a speech-language pathologist and work at a school in the special-education department.

Q: What did you find most challenging about applying to college?
A: During high school, I have become accustomed to the idea that the more I do homework or the more I study, the better I do in school. It’s easy to see progress. For college applications, it’s hard to see progress, so I often got frustrated after working for hours and feeling like I hadn’t made any progress.

Q: What did you enjoy the most about applying to college?
A: I feel that I’ve learned a lot about myself from this process. Being asked to distill your entire personality into a few paragraphs has helped me understand what’s important to me and how I am different from other people.

Q: What made you want to work with IvyWise?
A: At my school, each counselor has hundreds of students assigned to them, and their primary job is to assign schedules and provide counseling services to students in challenging situations. They aren’t really focused on helping students with the college application process. Although my parents went to college, a lot has changed about the college application process since they went through it, so I felt like I needed help from someone who was an expert in college admissions.

Q: How did your IvyWise counselor help you navigate the process?
A: Rachel has helped me so, so much! She has really made the process seem more manageable. She takes things step-by-step so it’s not quite so overwhelming. She has helped me understand that essays take many drafts before they’re good. I’m definitely a perfectionist, so at the beginning I hesitated to send anything to her unless I thought it was great. But I have learned that more progress is made when I just write and then she can give me constructive feedback. She also made me realize what parts of my life and personality I should highlight in essays, because she knows what things college admissions officers are looking for.

Q: What advice was the most valuable to you this fall?
A: I appreciated the perspective of a former college admissions officer. Working with Rachel made me realize that college admissions officers are real people with real lives. They can see right through a cliché essay, so your writing has to be genuine and passionate, not necessarily super academic or serious.

Q: How have you grown and/or changed since you started planning for college?
A: I think I’ve gotten much better at the time management skills I will need for college. Balancing studying for AP tests, the ACT, working on college essays, schoolwork, music, volunteering, etc. I’ve learned to prioritize. Also, I’ve had the opportunity to go on several fly-in visits to colleges, which I highly recommend. It gave me a great chance to figure out if I could see myself at a school, to learn more about what college is really like, to meet current students, and to get to know the admissions officers. I also made amazing friendships with other high school seniors at those fly-ins; we are so alike in so many ways, and we are each other’s cheerleaders during the college admissions process.

Q: What advice would you give to students preparing for college?
A: I would remind them to start early. This is pretty common advice, but it’s so important. During summer, there is so much free time and many of the essay prompts are already available. Once school starts, I found it pretty challenging to balance extracurriculars, school, and college applications. The process would have been much easier if I had started all my essays during summer.

Want to learn more about our amazing pro bono students from this class of 2017? Check additional videos and diaries below!

Want to know more about how IvyWise can help you reach your admission goals? Contact us today for information on our team of expert counselors, our long-term and short-term counseling programstutoring, and more!

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