Do colleges have quotas on how many students they can accept per high school? For example, will accepting one of my classmates have an effect on my likelihood of getting accepted? (asking about Boston College, USC, and Northeastern)
oft-asked.
oft-answered. No quota
None at all
There is no “quota”, but many colleges boast of their geographical diversity. So if you happen to have similar profile with an applicant from - let’s say Idaho - when the school has already taken 5 from your school, more often than not, the school will select the applicant from Idaho.
There is no quota that I’m aware of. However, understand (as viphan has suggested) that from a practical viewpoint there is a finite limit on how many students the Elites themselves are willing to offer places to from any particular high school. And this, as mentioned, is because of geographical diversity. The graphs of representation will often reveal that the distribution across the U.S. is hardly even. Rather, allowances are made for large-population states such as CA and TX. Upward adjustments are also made for a particularly large volume of applications from a region in any given year. Adjustments are also often made for particular campus needs or institutional preferences. (If the college is beefing up its tech departments, or aiding the local industry, it may favor tech applicants from CA for that purpose, or graduates of particular high schools for similar reasons. That will produce imbalances.) Finally, there tend to be courtesies extended to schools local to the college in question. Thus, Princeton High School receives a lion’s share of offers to Princeton, as opposed to equal high schools hundreds or thousands of miles away. That also is to be expected.
Despite that overall unevenness, no student should count on it during any cycle. During the Early Round several years ago, one top Ivy extended offers to an average of between one and two applicants for each of the many counties (not even schools) in our large metro region, and to an equal number in the Regular Round. Boarding schools are another matter. Many receive much more than that.
So yes, if a top-10 or top-20 college already is prepared to make many offers to students from a particular school, but there is space enough to add to the freshman class an equally superb student from KS or ND, chances are that the latter location will be favored over one more student from the same school. For some reason (or maybe this is just a disease in my region), students and parents seem to have great difficulty imagining that anyone outside their known universes can be even as accomplished as those they’re acquainted with. Geographical location does not override academic qualifications; it is merely a factor when other factors are equal.