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Tue Dec 22, 1:08 PM


NEW HAVEN, Connecticut (AFP) - The Crouch quadruplets are used to being something quite rare but not this rare -- all four have been accepted to America's prestigious Yale University.

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Dean of admissions at the top Ivy League university, Jeffrey Brenzel, said the offer of places to Kenny, Martina, Ray and Carol, 18-year-old students at Danbury High School in Connecticut, was probably a first for the university.


"The living memory in the office here goes back about 35 years and to that person's knowledge, we've never had triplets, never mind quads," he told AFP.


"At the end of the day, the admissions committee said: 'Well, we want to take all of them,'" he said.


"They are all interesting and quite accomplished in their individual ways. They are extremely lively kids, very appealing, but clearly four different people. They are all in the top 10 percent of their class and their extracurricular activities vary in interesting ways."


The quads explained to The New York Times how they nervously logged on one-by-one to the Yale website to discover their fates.


First was Ray, who described how the screen suddenly turned Yale blue and displayed the university's bulldog mascot with the message "Welcome to the Class of 2014."


"We just kept logging on and screaming, logging on and screaming," Martina, last to find out, said in an interview with local television station WTNH-TV.


The siblings have until May 1 to decide whether to accept Yale's offers and part of the decision will come down to money, they told the Times.


Their father Steven works as a case manager with the Connecticut mental health department and their mother, Caroline, originally from Nigeria, is studying for her masters' degree in social work, according to the Times.


Ranked as the third-best university in the US after Harvard and Princeton, Yale's annual tuition fees can be as high as 36,500 dollars, which would land the Crouch family with a whopping bill of 584,000 dollars by the time they graduate in 2014.


Brenzel insisted the family would have access to financial aid if they required it.