In most US high schools, top universities only takes one from the school each year. Let us say, it a top student applies to every top universities and gets admitted almost all. This basically ruins the chance of his/her classmates.
From Naviance of my school, Yale, Princeton, UChicago, each admitted one, but not enrolled, because the same student chose Harvard.
It is hard to blame the student as these colleges are a top reach for everybody.
If that student hadn’t applied, Naviance might well have shown a zero for all those schools. It’s not as if each selective university commits to admitting (and only one) student from your HS. It’s that each, independently, wanted only one particular student who applied that year and, not coincidentally, it was the same applicant.
I do think there’s a limit as to how many kids from a particular HS any given college will admit in a year, but it’s never 1 and it varies both with the school and from year to year.
When I was at a Columbia information session, someone asked whether Columbia had a limit on the number of students they would accept from a single high school. The admissions rep said no, but “of course, we’re not going to take 100 people from Stuyvesant.” Half the room groaned. There were that many people there from Stuyvesant.
I think the lesson here is that if you’re trying for highly selective colleges and you have a lot of very well-qualified classmates, it may help to be willing to travel a bit (and not just on the subway). If you’re from NYC, perhaps you should be thinking about Northwestern or UChicago – or Johns Hopkins or Georgetown – as well as Columbia and NYU.
My step-daughter’s graduating year, two kids applied, accepted, and attended Cornell. So what you’re saying isn’t always the case.
Admission officers do compare applicants from the same school. Although they do take several students from some well-known high schools. For majority high schools, they can only take one from each school. HYPS has never taken more than one from my high school each year in recent history.
This is something beyond your control anyway. You probably have enough to stress about. You won’t even think twice about these other kids in a few years. Just do you best, that’s all you can do. We stressed about this too.
If the college uses class rank as an admission criterion, then you are, to some extent, competing against your classmates.
More wrt recommendations than class rank, I’d think. Unless the difference in rank is really significant. If everybody applying is in the top 5-10% of the class, it seems unlikely that class rank would be a deciding factor.
My son knows 3 kids from the same high school in the freshman class at UChicago this year. A set of twins and one of their girlfriends!
DD’s school limits number of applications, saying 8 privates and unlimited publics.
At our local public magnet, 5 kids got into Stanford, 3 into MIT, at least 2 got into Princeton, and several into Columbia and U Chicago. The acceptances were spread over a dozen kids. This is not a STEM magnet, by the way. But the school also had 5 kids with 2400 on the SAT.
So I don’t think there’s limit on the number of kids from one school - it’s about the caliber of the applicants.
Cornell is probably not a great example (even though it’s my alma mater and my daughter’s). It’s much larger than most of the other schools that people on this thread are thinking about and not quite as selective. Also, it consists of relatively independent undergraduate schools that make their admissions decisions separately. Your chances of getting admitted to the School of Hotel Administration won’t be affected by the fact that 5 of your classmates are applying to the College of Engineering.
Actually, the super elites may take 0 from most US high schools in most years, and may take 1 or more from a few high schools. While there may be a super-star that gets into every school he or she applies to (one of my kids had a student like that in his class but he did SCEA at his top choice and so did not apply to any others), but more often the top kid may get into one and the next to top kid into another. Not sure what your concern is? Of course colleges limit the number of kids they take from any one school, which means there is competition, but they also compare applicants from similar HSs and rank them as well.
At our public HS, Naviance shows that at individual Ivies, some years there are no students taken, some years there’s 1, and other years there have been a couple. I don’t think a classmate being accepted automatically precludes acceptance of another student from the same class, nor do I think a classmate’s acceptance is usually the reason for another student in that class being rejected.
S’s class had 2 accepted to H and 3 to Cornell, 1 each at the other Ivies except Columbia, where to my knowledge no one applied. There were also acceptances at the U of C and Duke, IIRC. The only overlap was one kid accepted to H,Y, MIT and one to H and P. They ended up with 1 at each Ivy but Columbia and Princeton, and 3 at Cornell. There were multiple acceptances to elite LACs.
In most years, the number of Ivy and Ivy-equivalent acceptances is much lower. It really can depend on the class.
It all depends on school and class. At my D’s public magnet school, for example, 11 accepted to H, 11 accepted to Y, and 5 accepted to P out of 190 seniors last year and total matriculation to HYP is 19. The number is quite different compared to a year before. Anyway, those elite colleges cannot take large number of students from one high school but they accept reasonably good number of students from one school if they think students are good fit to the colleges.
It’s not really that they can only take one from each hs- there are lots of hs they will not take any from.
And despite Naviance or recent history, at any time, they can find a kid from another local hs is more compelling. This isn’t just about your individual high school.
We have two girls from my school’s class of 2015 at U Chicago.
There are something like 30,000 high schools in the United States. Most colleges are not admitting anyone from most high schools. If a college only accepts one person from a specific high school, then it is likely that they would have accepted no one from that high school if that one person decided not to apply.
I don’t believe the 1 per high school theory is true. Even at our public high school in Georgia we usually have 2 or 3 that end up going to UChicago and Princeton.