How Rich (or Not) Do You Have to Be to Get Into the Ivy League?

Linda and Roman first discovered their income was a school-admissions albatross when their daughter was 4 years old and they began applying to private kindergartens in Manhattan. The couple interviewed at one particular elite co-ed school, and at the end of the conversation, the admissions officer was blunt. “She said, ‘You seem really lovely, and your daughter seems lovely, but I just want to be straight with you: You’re in a dead zone,’” recalls Roman. She went on to explain that the couple didn’t make enough money to be considered potential donors and Olivia wasn’t a kid the school could lift out of poverty. Roman worked at a corporate-law firm but wasn’t an equity partner. “We were just barely scraping by, by Manhattan standards,” he says of the family’s low-six-figure income, which placed them in the top 10 percent nationally but in the bottom 20 percent of tuition-paying private-school parents in Manhattan, he estimates.

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