A student who got into all 8 Ivy League schools explains a trick for bargaining with colleges to lower the cost
Reddit hosted an AMA, or Ask Me Anything, that featured Kwasi Enin answering questions about his incredible feat of being accepted into all eight Ivy League schools.
Enin, now a junior at Yale, provided one response about how he settled on his choice that was truly surprising for those who don't know that you can bargain with schools over their financial aid offers.
"For me, Yale had one of the best financial aid offers (after bargaining a little bit)," he wrote.
Business Insider reached out to Enin to have him explain exactly how he was able to negotiate with Yale to offer him a better financial aid package.
Here is what Enin told us over the phone:
When it comes to financial aid offers, in comparison to other schools, you can bargain with schools so long as the offer is the same type of offer. For example, among the Ivies they all give need based financial aid. So you can't take a scholastic scholarship from one school and compare it [to an Ivy League school].
You also have to compare schools that are similarly prestigious, similarly ranked. You wouldn't take a community college and compare their offer to a Harvard offer.
In essence you write an email to the financial aid office. You take the [financial aid offer] letter from your similarly compared school.
So for me, I took Princeton's letter and I emailed that to Yale, Columbia, and Penn. Within like a week, they all sent me a new financial aid offer on their financial aid website and they matched the same offer.
You got to send them a nice letter talking about "I love your school but I have a better offer at a similarly ranked school called 'X' and if you can find a way to make it possible that I can attend this school by making the aid work out, that would be wonderful."
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