Website sells successful Ivy applications

A new website now permits college applicants to buy coveted admissions materials: successful applications to the Ivy League.

Founder and creator of WeGotIn.net Howard Yaruss, a 1983 Law School alumnus, explained that he created the site so high school students who cannot afford SAT prep or admissions counselors can get an idea of what is expected in applying to these schools.

“Basically [they] have no insight into what goes into a successful application,” he said.

Yaruss pays a fee — about $40 to $50 dollars — to students who are willing to sell their accepted applications, which “will be used to help students.”

WeGotIn.net launched on Oct. 1, and while it only features applications from Brown and Columbia universities, Penn and the other Ivy League schools will be represented in time for next year’s early-decision deadline.

Yaruss said the chance of plagiarism occurring as a result of his website is “extremely remote,” explaining that he will offer his database to universities for cross-checking and that the risk of an automatic rejection is too great for these students to take.

“I am not doing this for the money,” Yaruss said, since he is selling the applications to all schools posted on the website for one flat rate of $19.99 for each school, or $34.99 for both.

Yaruss’ idea for the website came from his own experience, because in applying to colleges, he “had no idea. I did the best I could.”

According to Dean of Admissions Eric Furda, the University does not own a student’s application but rather “it’s up to the student, it’s their property.”

While Furda called the website “more sophisticated than books about essays that have worked,” his concern is that students who purchase these essays may send in something paraphrased from an essay they were told worked.

If WeGotIn.net applications are too closely interpreted as the key to getting in, Furda worries they may influence the choices high school students make in selecting extracurriculars, although he said this would seem “rather disingenuous and borderline stupid.”

Senior adviser at College Confidential Sally Rubenstone wrote in an e-mail that she “fear[s] that this new website will do more harm than good.”

Though the materials purchased may encourage students that they are just as good as those who get in to prestigious schools, Rubenstone worried, “It will muddy the already-murky college-admissions-process waters by adding unnecessary must-have items to applicant to-do lists.”

College sophomore Anne Delmar said she would not sell her application to the site.

“While I like the idea of helping people achieve their goals I don’t think that a) the applications should be sold and b) that the form of ‘advice’ being given should be handing out applications,” she said.

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