I trust folks to handle information in their best interests.
BTW - something interesting to read is the research from the Grant Study @ Harvard - What makes a good life? The study followed 80 years of graduates to track health & happiness - you can check out what really matters - puts March 10th into perspective, also, and gives us hope.
There must be other threads that debate the merits of lists and stats and an Ivy League education (or a Prep School one for that matter).
Somehow this thread has moved away from what I thought was a place to encourage people post 3/10. I vote for making it a thread that is truly about sharing advice: stories of how âMy kid didnât get in but then X great thing resulted . . . ,â or âMy kid didnât get in last year but did this year.â âMy kid got off the wait list by . . .â â oh wait, thereâs a thread for that already.
How about some stories/advice re: helping kids and parents share their good news with their friends in a humble, compassionate way? Or ways to help kids handle a rejection? I saw a post in a dift. thread where a parent planned to take his/her kid to the childâs favorite restaurant on 3/10 no matter what news he/she got to celebrate the hard work of the application process. Nice. Maybe some tips from parents (or kids) whose child returned yesterday to a school where nearly all their peers applied to BS/Prep. School and are now dealing w/who got in and who didnât. How have you handled that? Weâve had to have a lot of conversations w/our kid re: not judging kids and having compassion for those peers who are feeling angry âthat other kidâ got in . . . In our observation, the kids who are having the hardest time right now are the kids whose parents are having the hardest time. So howâs this for advice? If youâre a parent, try to keep your disappointment/fear/anger to yourself. I cried every day for a month (in secret, when my kid wasnât home) when that kid decided to try boarding school. So far away! How could he leave us? Perhaps go to the Official Freakout Thread if you need to vent/process. That one opened with the word, âLet it Rip.â Yes.
Anyone whose kid got only ânoâsâ have any stories for how they helped themselves or their kid move on?
ChoatieMom, Matriculation information is extremely important to me, and I imagine to most parents looking to invest a quarter of million dollars in their childâs education. The list above is outdated and woefully incomplete.
What is needed, and what should be required of every private school, is complete, updated and transparent information for 5 year matriculations that includes the number of students attending specific schools. This would allow parents to do what I did today, which is to compare the schools to which my son is considering attending next year.
I am not only interested in where the top end students go, I am interested where everyone goes to college. How students fare in the bottom half of the class is a mark of the quality of the students that have attended and what the school has done academically and through college counseling with them. Many schools do a poor job with this group.
Matriculation is not the only variable in considering which school to attend but is, for me, part of the mix. Any parent that ignores it is either checked out or indiscriminate in how they invest in their children.
Itâs gotten to the point where I have the following saved on a Word doc to cut and paste.
If you are looking to send your child to a boarding school solely as a way to get into a top college, then you are wasting $200K that can be better spent elsewhere. No boarding school can guarantee admissions to any college. As mentioned many times on this site (often by me), there are many reasons to go to a boarding school, but doing so as an HYPMS strategy is generally folly.
A boarding school may give a student the tools with which to develop him/herself into a viable candidate, but others schools may as well. Colleges admit students, not boarding schools. While the professionals at the schools are ready and willing to assist in the process, they will not, and should not, do the work for the student.
I read Choatie momâs post(s) a little different than you did. I read the post as criticizing creating a ranking list from this matriculation data for the reasons many in this thread have already pointed out. I think BS schools all understand that matriculation information is important to parents paying the fees we pay. Schools like Choate provide the information you seek, 5 year matriculations including the number of students attending specific schools. I think Choateâs matriculation data is impressive, but I understand others have a different opinion.
That said, the primary product BS schools sell is a high quality education in and out of the classroom. In my opinion that is the only thing the schools can control.
I also think the direction that some of the most wealthy and universities want to take with their student bodies, makes admissions somewhat less favorable than they used to be for BS students. I think every BS knows this and it is one of the reasons the schools are trying to de-emphasize matriculation at certain name universities and colleges.
Good luck to your son!
Please donât get mad if I ask this question - sure itâs asked each yearâŠwhat do you think about schools that have no AP or have done away with AP courses? What concerns did parents have related to college matriculation? Do colleges really care? More race to nowhere?
Colleges want rigor. AP is not the only way (and has, in fact, been criticized as leading to shallow teaching to the test).
skiereurope. I did not say that I was interested in matriculation because I solely wanted to get my child into a top college. READ THE POST. And it is $250,000, not $200,000. Get up to date.
bosdad. I know Choate provides the data in ways I say all schools should. But some donât. And I understand the shifting nature of admission has made it less favorable for all privates schools. But that shouldnât mean that schools should deemphasize matriculation or, dare I say, disguise it as some do by listing only acceptances or by listing matriculation by simple listing schools without the number of students attending. Not cool! Discerning parents want to know what are there are investing in and need to make comparisons of different investable propositions.
I clearly stated
âI am not only interested in where the top end students go, I am interested where everyone goes to college. How students fare in the bottom half of the class is a mark of the quality of the students that have attended and what the school has done academically and through college counseling with them. Many schools do a poor job with this group.â
Because of this:
I would have to agree that matriculation data is not the most useful way to assess this:
For these things I would suggest digging deep by reviewing the materials provided by the schools and asking lots of questions about how the school operates @GreenIndian. There are just too many other factors at play to make any practical use of matriculation data. On one hand youâve got the the so-called hooks and similar factors that may help some applicants gain admission to higher ranked/more selective/[insert your desired qualifier] schools that may otherwise seem to be a reach, and on the other hand you have factors like personal finances, circumstances and preferences which may lead some applicants to attend schools which may be lower ranked/less selective/[insert your less desired qualifier] than what one would expect of them given their other qualifications. Schools shouldnât get all the credit for the former, nor should they be discredited for the latter.
Go to all the âTopâ 20-25 BS websites. Print all the Matriculation Lists and remove the name of the school at the top. Next- mix them up well and throw them up in the air and let them fall to the ground. Now scoop them up and try to identify the school or tell them apart. Let me know how you make out. 
I understand and appreciate the expense that goes into this grand adventure but obviously I look at it thru a different lens- and I know Iâm not alone . For three kids JBS-SS ( 6 years each ) our total tuition cost for everyone was somewhere around 850- 900K. I had absolutely no problem paying for their BS experiences because ( as an alum) I knew what I was paying for and what they would get out of it and it had absolutely nothing to SS college matriculation lists or college placement . I could care less - wasnât even on our radar because we understood the value of what they were getting at BS ( which went deeper and far beyond the academic piece ) and I knew theyâd have the intelligence to ultimately figure out college on their own later on- which they did and I had the pleasure of paying for that, too. College Results: Two Ivy- One LAC- all ED⊠so Iâm not sure what " indiscriminate " or " checked out " means⊠but youâre correct that I didnât do anything ⊠except maybe cheer them on and pay the billsâŠ
It also appears that some people donât understand what a BS matriculation list is. Itâs actually a celebration of every student and classâŠand theyâre not put out there to impress anyone. Every class is very different and has a unique personality. Itâs a brag sheet for every kid who crosses the finish line . Itâs not for a prospective parent or incoming III Form parent to judge, speculate , or drill down on because it has absolutely NOTHING to do with them or their kid. Honestly? Schools should consider locking the lists up - especially when so many people misinterpret the spirit and meaning behind them.
With four years of BS in front of your kid- you have much bigger fish to fry right now. Cheer on your kid and see what happens. To me- thatâs time and money well spent.
What happened to âbest fitâ for college? Itâs only a hunch but I have a feeling that BS is now more âcollegiateâ than any college/university my kid will attend :-B
Hear, hear, @PhotographerMom !!
Do boarding schools invest to grow their endowments?
I donât believe APs have any place in good boarding schools as these are the schools the APs were designed, in part, to measure against. I sent my kiddo to BS to avoid scripted teach-to-a-test curriculums; he could get that, in spades, at our local schools. Also, at BS, itâs generally the teachers who draw the short straw who end up in those boring classrooms. The best teachers do not want to waste their time and talents on APs. Choate only started offering an AP curriculum in response to parental pressure and has recently eliminated it after (re)educating parents on why it is unnecessary at a school whose rigor the colleges know well and whose regular curriculum is far richer, deeper, and more challenging. I scratch my head trying to understand why on earth anyone would dumb-down their experience at BS with AP classes that they could take at home. BS students can sit for any AP test they want if they want the credit and are applying to colleges that accept them, but the fact that some of the more selective colleges are questioning their value or not giving credit for them speaks volumes to me about their worth. I say if you want your BS kid to take AP classes, youâve missed the boat on what a BS education is all about.
My D21 will be going to a day school with no AP classes after having come to the same conclusion two years ago. DD understands that the entire curriculum will be rigorous and not taught to any test. She is most thrilled with not having to take the MA equivalent of PARCC.
The AP system is purely a money making machine. Kids at rigorous boarding schools do quite well with out them. Neither of my kids took AP courses or tests. Neither did most of their peers.
As far as the original post, even if I did care about some kind of matriculation ranking (I donât), I find this one meaningless because a) there is no stated methodology or criteria for the ranking, the absence of which means it should be automatically rejected and isnât worth further discussion and b) it is quite dated since it is from 2011. Do you know how much the admissions landscape has changed in the past 7 years?!
Boarding school rankings are even more meaningless than college rankings. You just canât reduce a complex set of measures and criteria to a single number that works for everyone. In the boarding school case, even the underlying data that produced the ranking are few and out of date.
@GreenIndian Your snark is unwarranted and unbecoming. But thank you for your concern about my understanding.
Yes.