So I was looking to see if there was a site showing the percentage of high school graduates attending Ivy League colleges and I stumbled on a website called IvyLeagueFeeders. Is their data accurate? I don’t know if I can post the link here because of forum rules but that is the name of the site (it’s a .com). Please help because I don’t know if the numbers match up.
Thanks
It seems like there should be more schools on the list. I don’t think it lists every school with 8% or higher matriculation.
I’d warn you that a lot of the NE schools have higher numbers because of parents that work at an Ivy.
Here is another site that shows the HS of graduates from Harvard, Princeton, and MIT. https://www.polarislist.com/
And/or are alums
It’s based of the HS data. Not every HS makes matriculation data public.
But the biggest question is what do you think this info tells you?
I’d take any school claiming to be an Ivy League “feeder school” with a heavy dose of suspicion, especially given that Admission trends vary every year. While many elite prep schools send many students to T20s/Ivies, a good percentage of them are students with hooks (legacies, recruited athletes etc.) which skews the numbers. % are also skewed as elite prep schools tend to have more students going to college, more high-income students, as opposed to large public schools like mine that still send 20-30 students to T20s but not everyone goes to college.
Harvard-Westlake does a good job of separating Admissions with and without “distinctions:” what they call legacies, recruited athletes etc.
From page 28 onwards: https://students.hw.com/Portals/44/Handbook2021.pdf
Many public schools do extremely well in sending students to T20s----while there may be more opportunities that are easily accessible to students at elite prep schools, that doesn’t mean that students at public schools can’t and don’t work hard to find their own.
Yeah if you can post outside sites, businesses like polarislist then the website is to be clear. I found the polarislist data to be VERY INACCURATE and incomplete so I don’t think it is a reliable source. I personally know the data from my high school is wrong in terms of Harvard, Princeton, MIT placement and that holds true for other high schools as well. But, I don’t know if high schools that publish their matriculation statistics ever cook the books or lie so it’s nice to have an outside source to compare.
The polarislist info is scraped from Harvard, Princeton, and MIT’s graduation info. That’s very different than HS acceptances.
Would only be useful data if you could actually separate legacy, big donors, athletic recruits, employees children and unhooked candidates into distinct categories see who got in based on which category you belong to. You cannot so these sites are essentially useless. Also, even with clear data, why someone gets in or doesn’t is often just one of the many factors used by admissions staff.
A bit dated, but an article dated October 15, 2015 from the street.com titled: “Top US Private Schools with the Most Graduates Getting Into Ivy League Schools” listed the top 14 schools in the US with the highest percentage of graduates entering Ivy League schools. Half (7 of 14) were private schools in New York City. Only 3 boarding schools made the top 14 list:
Phillips Academy at Andover, Mass. had approximately 33% matriculate to Ivies;
St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire had about 30% matriculate at Ivies;
Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire had about 29% matriculate at Ivies.
There are many contributing factors, but I expect the most influential one is a higher rate of applicants. Students attending selective private high schools in the northeast are tremendously more likely to apply to selective private colleges in the northeast than the general population. If the well qualified kids from a particular HS do not apply to Ivies, then that HS will not have many students attending Ivies.
The 2nd most influential factor is probably having a higher rate of well qualified students among the HS population. This often relates to the HS being highly selective. For example, the highest ranked HS on the IvyLeaguFeeder website is Trinity, which is a selective private HS in NYS. To get into Trinity, students need to do well in an admission system that involves grades, test scores, LORs, essays, hook status, etc… a system that has a lot of similarities to the Ivy League admission criteria. Students who are accepted to Trinity are pre-screened as kids who do extremely well in an Ivy-like admission system. According to the Trinity school profile, the middle 50% ACT among Trinity students was 34-35 – higher than Harvard or any other Ivy. The lower end of the class at Trinity is the 99th percentile among HS students overall.
It is likely that the vast majority of the class at Trinity is well qualified for Ivies, which is very different from typical non-selective HSs. I attended a non-selective public HS in NYS, where hardly anyone has test scores as high as Trinity kids. If you compare students with similar stats and hook status from Trinity to my HS, I’d expect the students from the basic public HS I attended who apply to Cornell have a much higher acceptance rate than does Trinity. My HS doesn’t have a large enough sample of kids who apply to Ivies other than Cornell to speculate on other Ivies.
As has been noted, another relevant factor is different rates of hooked kids. The top ranked HSs tend to have higher rates of ALDC type hooks than the general population, although the overall HS population generally has higher rates of URM hooks than highly selective private HS.
In my opinion being a so called “feeder high school” is generally far less influential than any of the above. In many cases, attending a “feeder HS” offers no advantage in chance of Ivy admission over non-feeder HSs. For some students, attending the “feeder HS” can be a disadvantage, such as kids do better as big fish in a small pond.
Being a graduate of a ‘HADES’ school on that list, I can certainly say that the inflation of their statistics because of legacies is very real. Call me bitter, but it’s just absurd how stark of a contrast I’ve seen between students who were accepted purely off their merits and those clearly boosted by their legacy status.