Brilliant teen accepted by all eight Ivy League schools

In case you didn't already feel poorly enough about your contributions to the world, here's a first-generation American in New York who has accomplished the rare and impressive feat of being admitted to all eight Ivy League schools. Most students who think they might be Ivy League material don't even apply to all eight institutions, let alone gain admission to each and every one, but Kwasi Enin has his pick of the litter.

Enin's test scores and Advanced Placement performance while at Long Island's William Floyd High School helped him stand apart from most of his peers.

But Enin has "a lot of things in his favor," says college admissions expert Katherine Cohen, CEO and founder of IvyWise, a New York-based consulting firm.

For one thing, he's a young man. "Colleges are looking for great boys," Cohen says. Application pools these days skew heavily toward girls: The U.S. Department of Education estimates that females comprised 57% of college students in degree-granting institutions last year. Colleges — especially elite ones — are struggling to keep male/female ratios even, so admitting academically gifted young men like Enin gives them an advantage.

He ranks No. 11 in a class of 647 at William Floyd, a large public school on Long Island's south shore. That puts him in the top 2% of his class. His SAT score, at 2,250 out of 2,400 points, puts him in the 99th percentile for African-American students.

He will also have taken 11 Advanced Placement courses by the time he graduates this spring. He's a musician who sings in the school's a capella group and volunteers at Stony Brook University Hospital's radiology department. Enin plans to study medicine, as did both of his parents. They emigrated to New York from Ghana in the 1980s and studied at public colleges nearby. Both are nurses.

Enin will make his decision by May 1st as to where he will go in the fall to pursue a life studying music and medicine. [USA Today]