High schooler who won record $10m in scholarship offers heads to Ivy League

The 16-year-old American high schooler who set what is believed to be a US record after collecting more than $10m in college scholarship offers is bound for the Ivy League.

Barnes gained admission into nearly 190 universities and colleges across the US, with about 150 of them offering him a total of more than $10m in scholarship offers.

Officials at International high maintain that Barnes has attracted more offered scholarship money than any incoming college freshman ever in US history.

In 2019, when she graduated from Early College academy in Lafayette, Louisiana, Normandie Cormier received just under $9.5m in scholarship offers from about 140 schools and sought recognition from Guinness World Records.

He competed on the basketball and track-and-field teams at his school, which promoted him out of his sophomore and junior years as he maintained an unusually high cumulative grade point average of about 4.98.

Though he is younger than the typical US high school senior, Barnes has already started accumulating college credits through a dual enrollment program offered by Southern University at New Orleans.

Barnes has said he hopes the national headlines his record has drawn will inspire his peers to surpass academic expectations that others set upon them. He has also said he wants prospective college scholars to realize how much academic aid is out there, especially as the US student debt crisis has left more than 45 million Americans owing a collective $1.7tn.