Despite a huge wealth of counterexamples, many people still cling to the idea that they have strict quotas for each school and there is only one spot reserved for X school and therefore the kids in the school are all competing for that one allocated spot. I think it’s doing the kids a huge disservice to promote this idea, making them feel all kinds of unnecessary stress and competition and guilt and resentment. Yes, they are competing against each other, but they are also competing against so many other students that on an individual level their particular competitions are insignificant. If it’s not a case of 10 kids competing for 1 spot, but 1000 kids competing for 100 spots, does it really matter if that other kid from your school chooses to apply or not? Add to that the fact that depending on their interests they may not be competing with one another at all (is the science geek competing against the poet? Is the tuba player competing against the harpist?) but with that more similar kid halfway across the state and it becomes even more implausible.
It’s definitely not “one kid per high school” for a lot of colleges. For example, from my daughter’s high school class (which included a magnet program, so there were a lot of well-qualified kids), I think five got into Northwestern and a similar number got into UNC Chapel Hill from out of state (which may very well be more difficult than getting into Northwestern). Four enrolled at Cornell and at least two or three others were accepted. At least two got into Dartmouth and at least two into Brown. Several got into UChicago.
But this was a school where there were easily 50 kids who had the academic qualifications to be viable candidates for every school I’ve mentioned. Would those schools have taken 50 kids from the same class? No.
My midwestern public, run of the mill high school sent several kids to HYP and other top schools every year. But, that is to be expected when there are 1500+ students in each graduating class.
It is likely that the one kid per high school is due to pure chance. I’d be shocked if there were quotas on all but a handful of elite schools.
This concern was one reason why some high schools like the one I attended instituted a strict limit on applications including a limited number of reaches, matches, and safeties when I was there.
When I attended, the limit was 8 applications of which one must be to our state/city public colleges*. And this limit tended to be applied much more strictly to students who fell in the approximate bottom 80% or so of the class than for those in the top 10-20% even though the HS didn’t technically rank students.
Someone here did post that Stuy did away with those limits recently after being challenged by parents. A reason why I wouldn’t be surprised if the level of college application competition among classmates is far more fierce now than it was in my HS days.
- One can apply to up to 8 4-year campuses and have it count as one state/city public application.
That’s likely due to a combination of Columbia’s rise in popularity and perceived prestige among many students and the fact Columbia wants to diversify its admitted pool beyond the NYC tri-state area.
That quote is amusing considering Columbia did admit around a bit more than 100 people from my graduating class of a bit under 700 if you combined the college and SEAS with more admitted to the latter than the former. Then again, back then Columbia…especially SEAS was considered on the “lower end” of the perceived Ivy rankings as opposed to now when it’s one of the most sought after.
Especially considering if a given student was heavily lopsided in favor of STEM…it was very possible for a student from the '90s or earlier to be admitted to Columbia SEAS and be flat out rejected by SUNY Binghamton because his/her HS GPA fell below their 90/100 minimum GPA cutoff(Except SEEK/Special Admissions Programs admits).
The number of Ivy/Stanford/MIT admits from the large suburban high school I attended (about 900 grads, more than 25 per year admitted) includes athletes, and many of the students do use athletics as their hook into elite schools. For many years, this school won almost all the state titles. It didn’t lose a boys tennis singles meet for 20 years. It’s won many football, lacrosse, and basketball championships. Now it doesn’t win everything, but always has competitive teams. It’s a wealthy public school, so the students are getting lots of academic tutoring and lots of sports coaching from an early age.
“Noone mentioned it to him. His class was only 80 students, with maybe 10 achievers. He had a better chance than his friend at getting into a certain LAC, and chose not to apply because his friend really wanted to go there” You can say that, but obviously he got the idea from someone that it would be detrimental to his friend if he also applied and that he was doing his friend some kind of favor by not applying. Either he invented this delusion, or, contrary to what you say, someone gave him the idea that is how admissions works. And he should not have had to feel that he had to make a choice between keeping a school he liked on his list or being kind to his friend.
I completely agree with @mathyone 's post #40. I’ve been actively and now very intimately involved for recruiting for my alma mater Yale for over 25 yrs. I see no quotas per high school. At least from Yale – extrapolate what you will.
Let’s look at the rationale behind setting a quota: don’t admit too many because you need to spread the wealth and ensure other HS get admits. Right?
But Yale doesn’t care if other high schools don’t get admits. Like someone said, the vast majority of schools never get admits. Yale isn’t beholden to the feelings of principals and counselors at the local high schools. It can admit 5 one year and zero for the next ten years – it’s simply the result of the quality of the individual applicants from that individual school.
I’ve seen comments like, “Let’s take one from this hs, this year, it’s been a while.” Or.“We haven’t before.” It’s one of the wildcards kids have to be aware of. They spend years building their records at their own hs and forget. When my first was applying, I suggested she do her best to find the right matches, CYA with happy safeties, mind her app and supps. After that, when she hit the Submit button, it would be in their hands.
I think that the point of my story is that not all atmospheres are competitive, and that kids themselves can take actions to change the vibe of their school. Tha['s all.
That group of kids were not exposed to the kind of competition that many other schools have and their reactions during the application process were more coorperative. So if kids are stressing over the competition, tell them to take an active role in changing it.
My daughter drew up a joke contract with one young man in her class that he would not mention GPA again for the rest of the year. Kids do not have to know their GPA. They do not have to know their rank. Kids can affect the atmosphere themselves.
This past year Dartmouth accepted two students from our high school, one purely on the basis of his academics, and the other was a football recruit. So we were left with the impression that the decisions were made completely separately, with one program probably not having any idea what the other program was doing. The football program needed the one guy, and the other guy had whatever else they were looking for, but it was pretty astonishing that that small school accepted two the same year from our school!
What makes you think that the Dartmouth Admissions Committee didn’t control the admission of both students?
Our high school seems to have about 10 - 15 students enrolled in Ivies, Stanford, and MIT in most years. Many of them will have multiple acceptances. However the number at individual schools bounces around a bit. It doesn’t seem like they care about the number.
A large part of admissions is based on which HS you attend and their level of feeding into that particular college. The year that my D was accepted to Y, we could see all the admitted students and which HS they come from on a cute little map of the world. In so cal, if you saw the list, there would be 1 kid from different HS, but many HS were not on the list; so it’s not like a quota, it’s just that there are so many HS that at most, 1 would come per HS ; and for some of the super elite privates or magnets there were many kids. At the elite privates, the GCs mold the class so that the top kids are applying to different colleges etc. but at a public school that generally sends only 1 per year, there are possibly a lot of applicants from that school vying for the perceived 1 spot and I don’t think that the GCs make the kids apply to different schools like they do in a private. Everything is so random anyway. Who is to say that a few slots down in rank would be what keeps you and and lets in someone else. If it makes your feel better, of the 5 kids who applied scea to Y in my Dd year, she we probably ranked the 2nd or 3rd in stats, but she was the one who got accepted early: and 1 was a double legacy. So you never know.
Our HS is very different year to year. A few years ago there were 4 admitted to Princeton and then none since then. I think we are 5 out of 40 applicants to Penn. Usually 1 person gets into MIT every year out of 2 applicants and only 1 year there were 2. This year though there are 6 applying which has never happened. We rarely have any National Merit finalists though as we have a magnet school that draws a lot of the better test takers away. The 6 applying to MIT have no other overlapping schools except for state schools which they should all be easily admitted. 5 of the 6 got their STEM rec from the same Calc teacher who doesn’t write super personalized letters from what we’ve heard. Hoping going with a different teacher helps who wrote a superb rec and has written the recs for 3 of the 4 most recent acceptances plus just dumb luck of having a different counselor too who writes distinct personal recs. If you are in competition within your school then doing things that show why you are the best candidate for that specific school from your school could make a huge difference.
@JustOneDad all I meant was that the football decision, which was made much earlier than the regular decision, took place before the admissions folks could have compared the two candidates. So they were separate decisions, made at separate times, and although I’m not familiar with football recruiting I would imagine the coaching staff had some say in the one student’s process, and none whatsoever in the other’s.
You mostly all seem to be writing about high achieving schools. Our school was small and mediocre and rarely sent students to what might be considered good schools. Most went to community state colleges, not even the state university.
The other thing is that it matters if students who both want the same school are similar in profile. It is different if it is a scholar, and a football player, for instance. But I still think chances are that two students with good grades, similar activities, similar recommendations, may not both get in to a given school.
It also depends on the size of the college in question. A very small LAC may not take more than one from a given school- but that is anecdotal and I certainly cannot prove it.