SITUATION

While it’s absolutely true that elite college admissions officers are indeed overwhelmingly liberal, too many college applicants give admissions officers what they think they want to see: liberal politics on issues like the Israel-Hamas war and policing in our cities. In reality, elite college admissions officers truly wish to admit students with a diversity of reasonable perspectives.

Besides, the activities that Vikram was involved in before he came to Ivy Coach were entirely cliche since so many other young people fancy themselves to be social justice warriors on these very issues (heck, New York City’s mayor even successfully ran on such a platform).

CHALLENGES

Social justice warriors are dime a dozen in elite college admissions because so many college applicants think that’s precisely the sort of profile that admissions officers eat up. But they’re entirely mistaken. After all, admissions officers want students who can respectfully disagree with fellow students. They want students who can find commonalities across differences. It’s in fact why so many elite colleges have added an essay question to their applications asking applicants to write about a time they disagreed with someone. Here are a couple of examples (notice Columbia, unsurprisingly, asks the question after the school’s disastrous response to insidious antisemitism on the Ivy League campus and all of the negative publicity that stemmed from their administration’s lack of moral clarity):

Schools With New Disagreement Prompt in 2025-2026	Prompt
Emory University	In a scholarly community, differing ideas often collide before they converge. How do you personally navigate disagreement in a way that promotes progress and deepens meaningful dialogue?
Columbia University	At Columbia, students representing a wide range of perspectives are invited to live and learn together. In such a community, questions and debates naturally arise. Please describe a time when you did not agree with someone and discuss how you engaged with them and what you took away from the interaction.

After the events of October 7th, so many of the protests against Israel’s ensuing war in Gaza included antisemitic chants. So many of the protests made Jewish people feel utterly unsafe, and that is not the aim of elite college admissions officers. Rather, they aspire to admit an incoming class in which everyone feels safe and seen. They wish to admit an incoming class in which students can realize we’re all more alike than we are different.

While it took some time for us to convince Vikram that his activities would do him no favor in the elite college admissions process, with our urging, he ultimately wisely came around.

HOW IVY COACH HELPED

We helped Vikram zero in on his interest not in controversially defunding the police but in how interactions between police officers and citizens could be improved. We helped Vikram get involved in research on nonverbal behavior in police-citizen dyadic interactions (much of the research focused on the importance of a smile when police approached citizens). We helped him land an internship with a former FBI officer whose speciality was decoding nonverbal behavior, particularly with respect to our feet, in addition to volunteer work with the NYPD and New York City Council, where he advocated for police training in nonverbal behavior.

COLLEGE RESULTS

Vikram applied Early Action to Harvard. He did not earn admission. But Ivy Coach, you had a deferral? Yes, we did! In fact, across all highly selective universities that admissions cycle, Vikram was one of only two of our students who didn’t earn admission in the Early round. We then helped Vikram with his Letter of Continued Interest to Harvard and we of course had already helped him craft powerful Regular Decision applications to his top choice universities.

He ultimately earned Regular Decision admission to Stanford, Yale, Columbia, Brown, Penn, Duke, and, yes, Harvard. While he initially seemed to lean towards attending Stanford since he was still upset at Harvard for kicking the can on his decision until the Regular Decision round, we implored his parents not to let sour grapes influence his final choice if he truly preferred Harvard to Stanford. Vikram ultimately chose to attend Harvard. You see, Vikram always got there in the end. He just needed a whole lot of pushing.