Aaron Shipp is the Founder and CEO of Y-Apply, Inc., a national nonprofit dedicated to helping high-achieving public school students and their families with financial aid options and the application process to top-tier colleges and universities. To date, Y-Apply has served over 500 students across the country and has helped families negotiate over $46M in financial aid packages. Students of the Y-Apply program have been accepted to such schools as Cornell, Duke, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale. Participants consistently credit Y-Apply as playing a key role in their acceptance to these prestigious institutions.
Aaron is a product of the North Carolina public school system and is the first person from his home country to ever be accepted to Yale University, his alma mater. Concerned about the declining rate of minority and low-income students attending highly selective institutions, Aaron co-founded Y-Apply in partnership with the Undergraduate Admissions Office at Yale University as a volunteer initiative. He was elected as Chair of the Y-Apply committee in 2011, and, sensing the need to formalize the program so more students like him would become graduates of highly selective colleges and universities, spearheaded the effort to incorporate Y-Apply a not-for-profit organization. Y-Apply’s Board of Directors formally named him as CEO in 2012.
In addition to Y-Apply, Aaron spent many years as an executive coach in New York City. Aaron earned his Professional Certified Coach (PCC) credentials from the International Coach Federation in 2013. Aaron worked with senior-level executives from Fortune 100 companies such as Ernst & Young, Goldman Sachs, KPMG, PwC, and SAS to develop their leadership and communication skills. Aaron also spent a few years in the Corporate and Investment Banking division of Wachovia Securities as a member of the operations team.
Aaron used his corporate coaching and training background to develop the curriculum for Y-Apply and credits this unique approach to the college application process as a part of its success. Aaron has also applied this same approach to his for-profit college admissions consulting firm, The Ivy Edge LLC, and has produced similar results in helping students gain acceptance to the best schools in the country.
Aaron has also invested a significant amount as a volunteer in the Yale alumni community. He is the former Vice-President of the Yale Alumni Association of New York City and is a founding member of the Yale Black Alumni Association. He is a member of Yale University’s Alumni Schools Committee and has interviewed hundreds of applicants to his alma mater.
Aaron is passionate about issues of diversity, inclusion, and equality in the workplace, and while at Wachovia, served on several working groups for Corporate and Investment Banking’s African-American and LGBT diversity initiatives. Aaron is a highly sought-after public speaker who has been invited to speak at seminars and conferences across the country about diversity and inclusion as well as post-secondary education opportunities for students from disadvantaged socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds.
In his spare time, Aaron is a self-confessed gym rat and bookworm. Physical fitness, health, and wellness are all very important to him, but his life-long thirst for great literature is unquenchable. He enjoys taking in cultural activities such as museum trips, dance performances, theater and the occasional opera. He enjoys listening to podcasts for recreation, and every now and again will slip to a local comic book store to read up on his favorite characters from the Marvel and DC Universe.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]