The Wade children did not take it for granted that they would do so well with their admissions. They all say they were shocked at being admitted to so many schools, especially Ivy League schools.

The young men applied to as many as they could — Nicholas and Aaron to about 20 and their brothers to a dozen or so each — because they were trying to get the best possible financial aid package. Sending four children to college simultaneously is not easy, even for an upper-middle class family like theirs.

So far, Yale has given them the best financial aid deal, they said, and has assiduously courted them, offering to fly them to New Haven to visit the campus, something they could not afford to do before they were accepted. (Yale admitted another set of African-American quadruplets, two boys and two girls, in 2010.)

But they are not sure whether Yale’s offer is a package deal, and whether, if Aaron breaks away and goes elsewhere, as he is considering, that will compromise it. He favors, and has been accepted by, Stanford.

“One of the majors they offer is called symbolic systems,” Aaron said. “I want to go into artificial intelligence. I love how they have this really huge interdisciplinary focus — computer science, cognitive science, linguistics, philosophy, mathematics — I just love all those ideas bubbling together.”

Nigel, who wants to study neuroscience, was wait-listed and Zach, who is thinking of chemical engineering, was rejected by Stanford, so perhaps for the first time in their lives, the interests of one is pitted against those of the others. Aaron was accepted by Ohio State, Miami University (known as the “public Ivy” of Ohio), Case Western, Jackson State, Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan, to give just a partial list, and rejected by Northwestern and Tulane.

Nick, the future diplomat, is the only one who has not yet been rejected or wait-listed by a single college. Laughing, he said that he was the least academically prepared, but that he thought admissions officers were impressed by his State Department scholarship to Morocco. It was his first trip out of the country. He studied Arabic and was often called “Obama,” he said.