This is the time of the year when high school seniors hear from colleges to which they applied earlier in the school year. In the news are three students who received acceptance letters from all eight Ivy League colleges. For good measure, a New Jersey senior also applied to Stanford. A North Dakota senior also got into all eight, plus Stanford and MIT. Most Ivy League Schools accept fewer than one out of every 10 applicants each school year. They reject thousands of students, even those with perfect GPAs.

Schools

There might be others, but three Seniors have been in the news for beating the odds.

They have already received letters from all of the Ivy League schools which include those on the list below.

  • Brown
  • Cornell
  • Columbia
  • Dartmouth
  • Harvard
  • Princeton
  • University of Pennsylvania
  • Yale

Three seniors

Ifeoma White-Thorpe of Morris Hills High School in Rockaway, New Jersey said Harvard was the first school she heard from. The senior is the student government president who wants to study biology and have a career in global health. Her parents, Andre and Patricia White-Thorpe, said they would leave it up to her to decide which school to attend.

Martin Altenburg of Fargo, North Dakota also received acceptance letters from all eight of the Ivy League schools. He said he applied to 20 schools including the eight Ivy League school, Stanford, and MIT.

Most of the schools are offering him full financial aid. He is leaning toward either Stanford, MIT, Harvard or Princeton.

Sarah Cameron of Jenks, Oklahoma joins the small club of those who received letters to all eight Ivy League schools. Cameron's first letter came from Yale. It is interesting that Yale is her first choice followed by Princeton and Harvard.

She narrowed down her list in less than a week.

It is a great honor for students to get accepted to all eight of the prestigious schools. Even though the odds are low, it has happened to seniors for the last three years. Kwasi Enin went to Yale in 2014. Harold Ekeh went to Yale in 2015. Augusta Uwamnzu-Nna and Kelly Hyles graduated from the same high school in 2016, and they both are studying at Harvard.