MELVILLE, N.Y. — Seventeen-year-old Kwasi Enin of Shirley, N.Y., took a shot at – and won – what amounts to an academic royal flush: He applied to and was accepted at all eight Ivy League schools.

But the William Floyd High School senior said he never thought he’d land slots in the class of 2018 at Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale. He hasn’t decided where he’ll attend, but would cross Long Island Sound to attend Yale in New Haven, Conn., depending on the financial aid package offered.

Kwasi said he thought he’d just give it the old college try and “maybe two or three of them” would bite, he said. The eight Ivy League colleges are among the nation’s most selective institutions of higher education. As an example of what Kwasi accomplished, Harvard has one of the lowest acceptance rates in the country at just 5.9 percent for the fall of 2014 – 2,023 students out of 34,295 applicants.

For Kwasi, applying to a competitive college wasn’t exactly a gamble. He has an SAT score of 2,250 out of 2,400, which places him in the 99th percentile for all students taking the exam.


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