<p>lets say i wanted to go to harvard. every year for the past 5 years exactly 2 kids have gotten in to harvard from my school. does this mean i have to just be top 2 at my school (for whatever harvard is looking for) or am i still competing against everyone applying to harvard? obviously im not only talking about harvard, but it was the best example i could come up with. do colleges generally compare you against the entire application pool or more specifically with the applications from your school? thanks</p>
<p>Not the entire applicant pool but they divide the pool into large regions. That’s the group you’re vying with. The one or two each year from your school is just coincidence. They could admit fifteen this year and zero for the next ten years if they saw fit. It’s really up to the strength of the individual applicants – not what you perceive as some “admit quota” at your school. It doesn’t exist.</p>
<p>T26E4: can you explain what those regions are?</p>
<p>T26E4 is right (I’m sure you don’t need to hear that from me though haha), at my friends school for example, usually 0 kids get into Harvard but 2 years ago, 4 kids got accepted, then the next year only 1 got in. So it’s unpredictable</p>
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<p>When I was a senior at Harvard, I worked in the Sociology Department library. On a couple of slow nights, I read somebody’s old senior thesis on Harvard admissions.</p>
<p>The applicant pool is divided into “dockets.” Dockets are a little bit like congressional districts: they may vary widely in area, but they are supposed to have roughly the same population. “New England prep schools” was a docket; “Boston area” was a docket; “New York City” was one docket, and “New York suburbs” was another. My docket was called “Midwest Corn and Oil States,” and it ran from northern Texas, up the Great Plains and then east to include Iowa (and maybe Indiana, I forget). This means there were about the same number of applicants from Midwest Corn and Oil States as there were from New York City or New England prep schools. The folks in admissions say that it’s no harder to get in from New York suburbs than it is from Midwest Corn and Oil, but I’m a little skeptical about that.</p>
<p>It is fact that most accepted students from more average high schools are top 2. However, if you’re a recruited athlete, URM or have a phenomenal academic feat or EC, rank matters far less. If you’re competing on pure academics, rank really matters.</p>
<p>Let’s use Penn for an example…</p>
<p>In the past 4 years, the acceptances from Penn have gone like this:</p>
<p>2011 2
2010 6
2009 4
2008 3
2007 0</p>
<p>As you can see, it’s not like there’s some set number of kids who get in per year. I’m really surprised that Harvard has accepted exactly 2 per year from your school, that’s almost unheard of! Like another poster said, they do admissions by region. I don’t have the stats but I bet if there was a region like “NY suburbs” then the applicants accepted per year from that region would remain fairly constant.</p>
<p>There is probably some sense that can be made of this. I’m guessing perhaps you live near Penn and some years they get many faculty kids they need to take and not so many other years? Recruited athletes are best known locally, there are a slew of local legacies. We’d need the whole picture.</p>
<p>The colleges divide up the workload. How those regions look like is up to individual college tradition/practice. There’s no template.</p>
<p>Basically your question is one about “quotas”. Does a school like Harvard have a quota at yours or any other school? I would posit “absolutely not” these days. Why? </p>
<p>What would be the purpose of maintaining exactly two admits from your school year after year? To please your school administrators? To not award too many from one school to reserve slots to another HS? For what reason? Harvard is not in business to please any HS principal or guidance counselor. If any particular year, the applicants aren’t attractive, then the HS gets zero. To have a quota system assumes Harvard is “setting aside” slots for some schools just to do it. Harvard doesn’t care – they want a great incoming class. Period.</p>
<p>That’s my take on it (and what I’ve observed from my HYP alma mater’s admit patterns)</p>
<p>What T26E4 says makes sense…but…my observation of a school that sends quite a few kids to the Ivies suggests that different top colleges might view a high school differently. Otherwise, it’s hard to explain why one top school often takes multiple kids from this school, while another almost never takes any. I’m not saying that there is any kind of quota, but some colleges may have a better relationship with the guidance department at your school, or there are more legacies, or who knows what.</p>
<p>^ What Hunt says is absolutely true as well. Some HS have great reputations for submitting great applicants. This “history” with a college would carry weight. You can imagine the headmaster of a top prep school saying, “These three are my best, the next four are as you see them, the last two are unlikely” and this being taken as gospel by a college.</p>
<p>I also have to wonder how much colleges pay attention to whether the students they admit from a particular high school actually matriculate. If (say) kids from a particular east coast high school who were admitted to Stanford over a number of years all chose to attend elsewhere, that might affect Stanford’s attitude toward that school.</p>
<p>WashU has basically stopped accepting many of my school’s top students because in the past these top students treated WashU as a safety. They applied to HYP and matriculated into one of those school over WashU constantly. As a result, few kids get into WashU, especially if you are HYP material. </p>
<p>Or at least that’s what I’ve been told.</p>
<p>WUSL has a history of waitlisting over-qualified applicants. As an anecdotal example, my brother was waitlisted at WUSL, but got likely letters from Columbia and Duke (he went to Pomona in the end), waitlisted at Harvard and Princeton, etc.</p>
<p>All of those history factors - past success of enrolled students, yield rate of admitted students, accuracy of info provided by counselors, etc. - will influence the admit rate for each school, and no doubt account for institutional differences.</p>
<p>While it’s unlikely that any college has a firm quota, I think that if the applicants from several similar schools are well-qualified but mostly indistinguishable, there might be a tendency to spread the acceptances among multiple schools vs. digging deeper into one school.</p>
<p>Note that the whole “top” applicant thing is very subjective. Every year we get posts about high schools who had multiple applicants to a very selective school and the only one accepted was lower in rank, had lower SATs, and had (seemingly) weaker extracurriculars. That applicant had something that the school liked or wanted, and that’s not always academic rank.</p>
<p>What kind of freak schools do you guys go to?!!!</p>
<p>At my school, the #1 kid hopes to get into Stanford, but #2-10 usually go to A&M and UT. Not just because they want to, but because that’s the only place they get accepted!</p>
<p>There may be also a bit of a home field advantage. Yale admitted 5 students from New Haven public schools last year–4 from one school, two of whom were valedictorian and salutatorian. All went to Yale despite being accepted at other Ivies. This is about par for the course–at least the top two, but more if qualified.</p>
<p>I have a question concerning regions: How are international students compared to each other? Are they compared by region, country, continent, or all together (i.e. Indians, Chinese, Europeans, and South Americans compared with each other)?</p>
<p>there are roughly 25000 high schools in the USA and the vast, vast majority of HS students never even consider the kind of school often discussed here on CC. On the other end of the scale is my nearby urban school district where just over 20% of ninth graders graduate in 4 years. Where only one in ten of those will matriculate a 4 year college. That means 2 out of 100 ninth graders in the HUGE urban district (where I attended HS) will be in a 4 year college classroom Sept 2015. How about that?</p>
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<p>No, I live in CT actually. I go to a very good public school, and I think 3 or 4 of the total admitted students to Penn (in the years listed) were recruited athletes.</p>