Ivy League "Grade Boost" (Incoming Recruits)

Did either of your parents attend the schools you're looking at? Can your parents pay cash? Any connections inside the admissions offices? These things make a huge difference. Are you a minority?

You sound like a solid all-arounder, but your GPA and ACT aren't high enough to get the attention of an Ivy, and your times aren't fast enough to get coaches to go out of their ways to get you in.

Qualify for Foot Locker Nats or win a major running state championship this fall and you could get just enough cred to get a coach to advocate for you.

My dad went to Cornell undergrad, and my family would be fine to pay for an ivy level school

You need to run under 9:10 to get favored admission. It's all or none. You either get a waiver or you don't. (As a legacy they might go easy on you at Cornell but not as easy as an athlete.) Ability to pay means absolutely nothing to admissions. ACT means nothing. Take an SAT and get over 2000. (I know 2000 seems very low for Ivies but as a recruit, it will get you in.) If you break 9:10 that will be enough. Now, most Ivies have their short list already. Indoor will probably be too late so the 3200 becomes less important than XC. Qualify for NXN or Footlocker and you will get recruit status.

15:30 will not do it unless it's on a monster of a course. You need to be sub 15 on a fast xc course. What part of the country are you from. I've had six runners go to Ivy league schools in the last ten years and I'm speaking from that experience. I'm guessing you're going to want to choose a division iii school that will give you more leeway with your times.

Unless they've changed the ACT over the years, a 32 is a solid score and not at all bad for an Ivy. I think that my roommate at the #1 D3 school scored 31 or 32, and he went on to a Rhodes Scholarship. Your father being a Cornell alum will help you a lot there. Your family being able to pay is historically valuable at Ivies, but it may not help now unless you are a foundation case (your family is incredibly rich), because the Ivies did go to a need-blind form of admissions a few years before the recession, although it is possible that some or all of them have abandoned that policy. But if you ran 15:58 on 30 mpw genuinely, then 60 mpw should get you under 15 and under the 9:10 you need to get the athletics waiver--my one question would be whether senior track times, unless run indoors, will be too late to factor into admissions.

If a division 3 school would favor me better, can someone explain why I've gotten letters from schools that have finished 5th and 6th in their respective D1 XC region, while some Ivy League schools border around 10th in their cross country region? I know the regions aren't perfectly even, but it seems ridiculous that I can't get recruited by Brown (11th in region) without running under 15, but I get a letter from Butler (5th in region) based on my 15:58 from last season.

Ivy League wrote:

My dad went to Cornell undergrad, and my family would be fine to pay for an ivy level school

You'll get in to Cornell. You'll to really kill it in XC to get a boost from running that will get you in to other ivies (as others have said, it's all or nothing, not a sliding scale). Try NESCAC - you should be competitive at most of those schools.

You might also want to consider D III schools in NESCAC and UAA, as they are similiar academic/athletic models.

Letters mean nothing. A good recruiting school, Butler for instance, will shoot letters off a database of top state finishers. Coach doesn't even know the letter went out. I like the coach at Brown but he is a terrible recruiter. Yale too. I've had kids have an impact at better Ivy programs than those whom Brown and Yale totally ignored. That being said, I doubt a school like Bucknell will offer you an official visit.

As to your question about DIII schools, I don't get how your subsequent writing had anything to do with DIII schools. Point of DIII schools is you can get an admissions waiver off of 1:56, 4:20, 9:30 at a DIII school that is harder to get into than Brown, Cornell, Yale, etc. but the latter schools won't give you that waiver until you're down to 9:10 or so.

Oh, for goodness' sake.

Someone implied that your ACT is useless at Ivies. We have to give Ivy adcomms a *little* more credit than that!--they know how to compare ACT and SAT scores. Your 32 is worth 1400+/1600 on the SAT: not a killer score, but a solid one.

Your GPA is more of a question mark, just because I don't know what a 3.86 means at your school. I know of schools where a 3.86 would place you outside the top quarter of the class; and other schools (mine included) where a 3.9 was #1.

Regardless, your fall-semester grades may be key--I know you're really looking for a dynamite xc season, but you've got to make a similar commitment to nailing every one of your courses. An upward trend in GPA really matters to your chances.

Depending on that, and the major you're interested in, you should have a good shot at Cornell. (I'm going to assume you're not an underrepresented minority--if you were, your ACT would pretty much be enough at most/all of the Ivies, as long as you didn't have a felony record.) And because Cornell's a larger school, it probably has somewhat more "boosts" to use.

But of course, as others have pointed out, your cross season will mean a lot. But don't wait until after you've done well in cross, before you get in touch with coaches. Get on their radars now, if you haven't already: fill out their online questionnaires, and get in touch with them directly as well with a *brief* recap of your performances. The degree to which they respond may give you an idea of the likelihood of a boost later.

And don't go nutso this summer. (A doubling of your previous mileage, from 30 to 60, is plenty!) Just try to be steady and consistent, so your best races are in November, not September.

Good luck.

Been There Many Times wrote:

Letters mean nothing.

So schools send you a letter and don't want you to come to their school?

You're all feeding this kid quite a bit of BS. If his 2 mile time is 9:28 and he runs well in cross, he should be recruitable, and let me tell you that grades have basically nothing to do with it. I'm a current runner at one of the top Ivies for distance running and I got recruited with a 9:23 PR and no remotely decent mile PR. I was better in cross, but not by much (maybe as good as a 9:18 to 9:20 runner). My grades we're very good, but that factored relatively little in my recruitment. I got offers to take officials to Brown, Cornell, Penn, Dartmouth, and Columbia. Remarkably, even though the HYPs are not stellar at XC, with the obvious exception of Princeton, they're the hardest to get officials at and land the interest of the coaches. I know kids on my team who had significantly worse than 32/~1400 and maybe a 1:54 800 or 4:16 mile but were given full recruitment privileges. It depends on the coach, the specific year and how good the other recruits are predicted to be for the school, how much potential/upside you have, whether the kids give you a good review on your official, and ESPECIALLY how well you sell yourself and make the coach see your interest in the school. But if OP runs well in cross (say he gets top 15 at FL regionals and/or gets either top 10 in the biggest states (e.g. TX or CA), top 5 in a medium sized state (NJ, NC, OR, etc.) or wins a small state) and he sells himself well to the coaches, he can almost guarantee that at least one Ivy will give him some sort of offer. It worked for me, and even if he can't get recruited he has a strong shot at getting into Cornell on his own and being a walk-on, if that's what he desires.

I am at an Ivy League school running track and I was on the lower end of the spectrum grade wise. It took a lot of hard work from me my senior year in high school to work up the grades a bit, but basically, if the coach wants you enough, they'll find a way to get you in.

Also, a 15:58 in XC should be enough to get you recruited to Brown, Penn, Cornell, and Yale (Columbia and Princeton are pretty far and above the others in XC currently) and I can speak from experience that a good xc season senior year of HS can get you recruited no problem. A friend of mine from HS was a 16:20, 9:26 guy his junior year, didn't get any big looks. Trained hard all summer, had a great run at the xc state meet and started getting looks. (He started getting much more when he qualified for FL Nats, but any good race on a big stage will look good.) Now he's going to Yale this coming fall.

konami code wrote:

You'll get in to Cornell. You'll to really kill it in XC to get a boost from running that will get you in to other ivies (as others have said, it's all or nothing, not a sliding scale). Try NESCAC - you should be competitive at most of those schools.

Please email me if you'd like college admissions advice. Since I did it for 10 years, I have a good idea as to how the admissions 'game' works.

1) In terms of recruitment, you basically either are 'on the list' or not. If not, your 9:29 might as well be a 11:29. It's the same thing as saying you are in the orchestra.

In general, the schools want to recruit the top student athletes in the country. Times in xc mean nothing. I used to think I wanted sub 420/sub 930 as a junior in HS as I wanted sub 415/915 as a senior but times have gotten way faster in the last decade.

They generally want kids that are the best in the state - maybe top 10 in a really good state.

But they also want someone who is passionate about running, not someone just looking to get into an Ivy.

In terms of how common are these 'academic boosts', at most schools, the coach is probably going to recruit 4-6 distance guys, 2 mid-d guys unless it's columbia and that number might be doubled or tripled.

2) I think it's far from certain that you get into Cornell on your own. It depends on what you apply to, whether you apply ED or not, letters of recs, where you are from, etc.

Feel free to email me.