Cate and Thacher 2015 Placement

Prep School Admissions
1

Interesting to see the placement this year at the two best California boarding schools at highly selective/top colleges (tried to be objective here and break it down by tiers):

To give you an idea for 2015 –

Cate

5.19% of class - Stanford, Princeton, Yale

20.78% of class - Columbia, Dartmouth, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Princeton, Stanford, U Chicago, U Pennsylvania, Yale

38.96% of class - Barnard, Bowdoin, Carnegie Mellon, Claremont McKenna, Emory, Haverford, Middlebury, NYU, Tufts, U Michigan, U Virginia, West Point, UNC – Chapel Hill, USC, Vanderbilt, Washington & Lee U, WUSTL, & Wellesley

59.74% of class - Columbia, Dartmouth, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Princeton, Stanford, U Chicago, U Pennsylvania, Yale, Barnard, Bowdoin, Carnegie Mellon, Claremont McKenna, Emory, Haverford, Middlebury, NYU, Tufts, U Michigan, U Virginia, West Point, UNC – Chapel Hill, USC, Vanderbilt, Washington & Lee U, WUSTL, & Wellesley

77 graduates

Thacher

10.77% of class - Stanford, Princeton, MIT

24.62% of class - Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Georgetown, MIT, U Pennsylvania, Princeton, Stanford, Williams

30.77% of class - Barnard, Bowdoin, UC Berkeley, Carleton College, Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd, Middlebury, Pomona, USC, Tufts, WUSTL, Wesleyan

55.38% of class - Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Georgetown, MIT, U Pennsylvania, Princeton, Stanford, Williams, Barnard, Bowdoin, UC Berkeley, Carleton College, Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd, Middlebury, Pomona, USC, Tufts, WUSTL, Wesleyan

65 Students

2

As a comparison, I have provided the numbers for Deerfield Academy, which used to have one of the strongest matriculation records in the country at least for boarding schools (but no longer provides that data likes its peers continue to):

Class of 2014 placement* (couldn’t find the 2015 information anywhere) –

9.38% - Harvard, Stanford, Yale

36.25% - Amherst, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Northwestern, Stanford, U Chicago, U Pennsylvania, Williams, Yale

31.88% - Boston College, Bowdoin, Carleton, Emory, Harvey Mudd, McGill U – Canada, Middlebury, NYU, Pomona, Tufts, UC Berkeley, UCLA, U Michigan, U Notre Dame, USC, U Virginia, Vanderbilt, Vassar, Washington & Lee U, WUSTL, Wellesley, Wesleyan

68.13% - Amherst, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Northwestern, Stanford, U Chicago, U Pennsylvania, Williams, Yale, Boston College, Bowdoin, Carleton, Emory, Harvey Mudd, McGill U – Canada, Middlebury, NYU, Pomona, Tufts, UC Berkeley, UCLA, U Michigan, U Notre Dame, USC, U Virginia, Vanderbilt, Vassar, Washington & Lee U, WUSTL, Wellesley, Wesleyan

160 students attended college

3

If you want to do such a comparison, compare oranges with oranges at least. For example, HYPSM, top 10 univ + top 3 LAC, top 25 univ + top 10 LAC, top 50 universities + top 25 LAC etc.

4

Or you could not care about little distinctions. Looks like all three schools send their folks to many great colleges and universities.

5

Try this: http://web.archive.org/web/20140520072322/http://matriculationstats.org/boarding-school-stats
It’s a bit dated so don’t take the numbers (multi year average) literally but I think the relative positions of different schools remain stable over time.

6

@panpacific - the phrase “can’t see the forest for the trees” is coming to mind!

7

@Parlabane It is what it is, not the forest and not the trees either. But that’s just me. We just have to trust people know the differences between trees and the forest and whatnot or otherwise freely choose to see trees or the forest as they want to see

8

My friend’s daughter is a graduating senior at Thacher and I was told this year is one of the best years ever for Thacher including 4 ending up at Harvard. (5 admitted, 4 enrolled so far)
Other schools: Yale (3 admit/2 enroll), Stanford (2 admit/2 enroll). This is an amazing stat given it has only 60 students.

9

(:expressionless:

When will people realize that colleges don;t admit boarding schools, they admit students? There is nothing to learn from analyzing these numbers.

10

Repeat after me…

11

Repeat that to boarding schools. Maybe they will stop publishing any numbers.

12

This is not unique to boarding schools. Virtually every US HS includes this info as part of the school profile.

13

Agreed. The schools with decent to excellent numbers in particular do. Apparently none of them believe those are meaningless numbers and that their schools are irrelevant to their students colleg outcomes. Boy, they need to be educated.

14

The point isn’t that schools publish them but that some people mistakenly think they are predictive of anything.

15

The point is that when there’s public info/data, there will be different interpretations. It is NOT a given that one interpretation is automatically a mistake. It just is to some people who hold different opinions.

16

Agreed. And it’s my opinion that it’s pointless to analyze this data. :slight_smile:

17

Then why do almost all top boarding schools release those meaningless data?
Why do you think many parents spend a big money and send their kids to costly boarding schools?

While there is much more than college prep, it is also an important criterion to make a decision.
It is true that it is the individual student that the colleges admit, not the boarding school.

But this kind of data shows the level of students and quality of education and I don’t think there is nothing to learn from it. Would you send your kids to a boarding school with absolutely miserable college data?

18

Every school is going to try to sell itself to prospective students and their parents. 4 years later, the same schools are going to sell their school and its students to colleges. Marketing 101.

19

@skieurope It is not that simple. Its true that for the mass majority of HS in the US, school A and school B don’t make much of a difference in terms of their impact to students’ college destinations. The elite private schools however do help with their excellent college counseling, their reputation for academic rigor and their long standing relationships with elite colleges. In particular, to those who come from backgrounds with limited opportunities such as first generation and rural areas as well as international students, a school with name recognition opens doors otherwise closed. Even to those from the affluent suburban competitive public schools, attending such a school might not be noticeably helpful for admissions to he super selective but it wouldn’t impact one’s college choices noticeably either. While the college matriculation numbers alone do not tell you that much, they are nonetheless a data point that could be useful to those who are also familiar with other aspects of prep schools.

20

@panpacific I never said it was that simple; in fact, there is nothing in the college admissions process that’s simple (OK, maybe paying the application fee is relatively simple). I was simply (no pun intended) responding to an inquiry regarding, as you put it, “a data point.”