<p>Guys, so much of this s very basic. Home field advantage? If the college is in your area chances are your school is full of staff kids and leagues. Colleges will often also reach out to URMs in their region. </p>
<p>Athletes are always best known to local coaches who follow them in local papers and on local stations. Their kids often attend the same school.</p>
<p>50% of kids at all of these top colleges have hooks, many of which are local connections.</p>
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<p>Why? In many cases the difference in GPAs among the top 5 students in a class is a few tenths and even hundreths of a point. I doubt top colleges will hold it against a #3 ranked student simply because he is not the salutatorian by a few tenths or hundreths of a point. EX: I got accepted to cornell and I am ranked 20/202 in my class. I have no hooks either.</p>
<p>(I’m not saying there is a small difference between the #1 and say #10 student in GPA (although there could be). I’m just speaking for a bit beyond the #2 spot.</p>
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<p>Citation needed</p>
<p>It’s really interesting that you brought that up. At my old high school, for the last 10 years, Yale has admitted exactly one early action (only) student every year. We have many (varying number of) people going to Harvard, Princeton, and other Ivies, but for the number seems to be set for Yale. Is there a possible explanation or could this just be pure coincidence?</p>
<p>In Rachel toors book on duke admissions she mentioned how duke would commonly take the valedictorian of a school and 1 athlete/URM so it’s possible other schools do the same or something similar</p>
<p>Colleges report the number of vals and sals in their classes and it is a US News factor. That is why they skew heavily to the top 2 in an average high school.</p>
<p>Dfree, do the math. a typical highly selective college has aprox:</p>
<p>13-17% athletes
10% AA
10% Hispanic
10% legacies
2-4% development
Staff kids, senator’s kids, internationals from unusual countries, kids from ND,SD, etc…</p>
<p>^ again, citation? That athletes figure can’t be right - at Stanford, for example, only 11% of the student body are varsity athletes. An even smaller proportion are in sports where they actually recruit or where recruitment can have an effect on admissions. (Stanford may be perennially dominant in synchronized swimming, but that doesn’t affect admissions.)</p>
<p>You also seem to assume that these hooks matter for all applicants. In other words, many of them would have gotten in regardless of that hook. For all you know, that kid from North Dakota could have had a far more impressive application than that kid from Andover.</p>
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As a result, a lot of selective/competitive high schools don’t rank. US News should drop this factor, since it doesn’t mean much any more.</p>
<p>^ exactly - Stanford says that only 40% of students reported a class rank. At Yale, it’s 34%. At Princeton, it’s 29%. (I have a feeling it’s lower at these schools than at Stanford because they draw more on private schools in the Northeast, who are less likely to rank students.) Harvard doesn’t report this because class rank is “not considered,” and rightfully so. Unfortunately, YPS all rate class rank as “very important” (the highest possible).</p>
<p>Besides many schools not ranking, there are certainly schools where the lower ranked kids will be better applicants than the top kids at other schools. I’ve seen evidence of this in Naviance. Accepted kids from our HS have lower gpas and test scores than the published accepted kid averages. I take that to mean that they believe it is harder to earn grade X at our school than it is at the school down the street.</p>
<p>When you consider magnet schools and very selective privates, I think the very bottom of the class is still likely to do better than the top at many other schools. </p>
<p>I’m not very sure what rank really says, except that you enjoy competition with your peers. Our HS does decile rank but without any weight (they do not weight at all) for APs or college/dual classes. Or even # of classes taken. Not sure how useful that number is.</p>
<p>Colleges do not recruit athletes based on what they read in the local papers. There are a number of ways in which they become aware of an athlete. Often, local coaches have relationships with people in certain colleges’ athletic depts. However, reading the papers is not how they become aware of elite athletes. </p>
<p>Edited to note- I was responding to Waverly- not Wavylays. Sorry!</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>I’m really interested in knowing the answer to this…
Any ideas??</p>
<p>I know a woman who is head of international admissions for a good LAC, next time I see her I’ll ask :)</p>
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<p>This is true. I don’t remember who said coaches recruit players they’ve heard of in “the local paper” but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Coaches have eons of ways to recruit athletes, whether its showcases (all around the country), recruiting websites, relationships with other coaches, and many other ways. If players were only recruited locally then the teams would be pretty bad.</p>
<p>^ True. My friend is on a basketball team that travels the nation and scouts usually go to her games to recruit players. She got recruited by UPenn through this.</p>
<p>Basically, your competing against the entire country or world for the matter of fact. Princeton could accept 25 kids from your school one year and 10 kids another year. This happens to a neighboring district school every year. This also does not just apply to the Ivy Leagues . Please respond to my thread. </p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-pennsylvania-2016/1291285-honors-vs-ap.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-pennsylvania-2016/1291285-honors-vs-ap.html</a></p>
<p>You are competing against the entire world. Those from foreign countries have an advantage. State schools are looking for those extra dollars. Did you know that foreigners are often not required to take the SAT or ACT? Did you know that they can take the toefl instead and you can not. Don’t you think that is pure discrimination against natives from the US. Further, in some countries there are networks designed to help students by substituting expert test takers for the actual candidate. That is probably why so many students in the lower level US colleges from other countries don’t speak English well enough to get As in grammar school.</p>
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<p>Citation needed</p>
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<p>Your school must be either incredibly competitive or unspeakably large. Princeton’s Class of 2015 enrolled 25 students from the entire State of Ohio!</p>
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<p>It is sometimes true that less selective colleges and universities are looking for students who’ll pay full price, and sometimes they’re looking for wealthy foreigners. But it’s decidedly *untrue *at highly selective institutions. It’s much harder to get into MIT, Stanford or Princeton as an international applicant than it is if you’re a U.S. citizen or permanent resident.</p>
<p>Yes, the competition is really intense, especially for the Asian of International students. Trying hard and hard to be top 1 or 2 is so difficult in our High school. But we are still assiduous and building ourselves better ones.
oh! Do you learn AP course, have you of will you?</p>