Not all elite colleges observe if applicants take additional action besides applying to show that they are already interested in becoming students of a given college. However, there are several, such as Dartmouth, Duke & Northwestern, that supposedly pay some degree of attention. While applying early is the strongest sign that an applicant really wants to join the student body, there are a few other ways to demonstrate interest:
As a follow-up to the previous post, here are examples of the difference in acceptance rates between the two application phases.
| Early acceptance rate | Regular acceptance rate | |
| Brown University | 14.6% | 3.6% |
| Columbia University | 10.3% | 3% |
| Dartmouth College | 21.3% | 4.7% |
| Duke University | 21% | 4.6% |
| Harvard University | 7.9% | 2.3% |
| Yale University | 12.1% | 3.2% |
(Nothing to do with April Fool’s.)
The Ivy League is an athletic conference comprising of eight colleges in the northeast with seven of them founded before the United States. Their long history and well-placed alumni have turned the name of an athletic conference into a popular cultural term for elite colleges. These eight schools are Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania & Yale. In recent years, the emergence of elite colleges outside the group of eight gave rise to a new group: Ivy Plus, which is the Ivy League plus Duke, MIT, Stanford and University of Chicago.
