Cate and Thacher 2015 Placement

Prep School Admissions
21

@jyc1230 I agree with you that there is some merit in looking generally at college placement, especially in assessing the peer group of any given school. However, I honestly believe that year & school-specific data isn’t useful (i.e. 5 to MIT this year etc.) There are just too many questions/unknowns: for example, is acceptance or matriculation more meaningful? I know kids who have turned down HYP for schools in a lower bracket, because of fit, financial aid, athletics, distance to home and so on. Also, how many admits are athletic recruits? Legacies/development? The list goes on…

What I would rather see is 5 years worth of data, broken out by class rank: top third, middle third and bottom third. So, over the past 5 years, where have the kids in the top/middle/bottom third of the class been accepted? To me, this would be a helpful and meaningful comparison.

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@GMC2918

I totally agree with you. I know that this kind of stat only tells us about the generic level. I also agree that the individual data does not tell you where your child can go. If school A has 5 Harvard admits, we don’t know how many of them had hooks (legacy, for instance). But saying analyzing the data is absolutely meaningless is an overstatement.

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To be clear, I don’t think that what I’m looking for would differentiate the “top” 10-15 schools all that much.

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@GMC2918 and that’s the point and a good conclusion to this tortured thread. Once you’re talking about the top 20 schools, if you’re still focused on college stats beyond a basic gut-check review, you’re focused on the wrong stuff.