Dave Berry - Extended Biography

Director of Counseling, Senior Contributing Editor, and
CollegeConfidential.com Ivy League Admissions Expert

Dave Berry has been helping students get into the right colleges for over two decades. Thanks to the Internet, his clients come from all over the United States. Over the years, Dave has helped a broad array of high schoolers, including his own daughter and son, get into the Ivy League and other elite colleges and universities. In addition to specializing in Ivy League and Top-25 admissions, Dave is an expert in the areas of college application essays, personality and temperament assessment, and distance counseling.

Dave has won national awards for his writing on higher education issues, marketing campaigns, and communications programs. He brings this expertise to the discipline of college admissions planning and his role as student advocate. A College of Arts and Architecture graduate of The Pennsylvania State University, he is also qualified to administer and interpret the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator™ and other psychological assessment instruments.

Dave's College Quest newspaper page has been awarded the Newspaper Association of America's 1997 Program Excellence Award, the 1997 Pennsylvania Newspaper Publisher's Association Newspapers in Education Award, the 1996 Thomson Newspapers President's Award for Marketing Excellence, and the Inland Press Association-University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Mass Communications Inland Innovation Award for the Best New Page of 1996. His pioneering journalism program for teenagers, PRO-TEENS, also received recognition in the national media. In 1995, he won the Newspaper Association of America's Program Excellence Award for Celebrate Diversity!, a program teaching junior high school students about issues of tolerance. His College Knowledge question-and-answer columns have been published in newspapers throughout the United States and his television series of the same name has appeared on cable systems in central Pennsylvania.

Dave co-authored America's Elite Colleges: The Smart Buyer's Guide to the Ivy League and Other Top Schools, published by Random House-Princeton Review in August 2001.

Dave devotes much of his time to researching what it takes to get into college. He knows that getting in is not the straightforward process parents and students sometimes imagine it to be. Inside knowledge, well-planned marketing strategies, and attention to detail can make a big difference when seniors enter the race for those coveted spots at selective colleges and universities. Dave oversees every college counseling project at College Confidential.

Write to Dave Berry.