College Filtering of High Schools

<p>Do the admission committees filter applicants based on high schools? For instance, if there are five people from my school applying to Dartmouth will it be harder for me to get in just because five other people are applying from my school?</p>

<p>I PM'ed you.</p>

<p>Most colleges deny that there is any such problem. I have heard specific statements that the college will take lots of students from the same high school most recently from Vanderbilt and from Duke. </p>

<p>This is a good question to ask at college information sessions. </p>

<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/530012-fall-2008-events-where-students-can-meet-admission-officers.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/530012-fall-2008-events-where-students-can-meet-admission-officers.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>My college counselor in HS actually told a different story...he said that if a lot of kids from our school applied to a certain college, it would hurt the chances of the worse applicants. I.E. someone with a 3.6 and a 1470 might have gotten into, say Notre Dame from my HS if they were the only applicant...but then if 3 more kids apply with 3.8's and 1500+ SAT's (yeah, I'm old, I took the SAT when it was /1600) the first kid probably won't be getting a nice fat envelope in April.</p>

<p>Oh, it always hurts to be outranked by other applicants, but usually an outstanding applicant can get in even if other applicants from the same high school are numerous. What is "outstanding" to one college may not be outstanding to another, because colleges are looking for different kinds of students as they build their classes.</p>

<p>This question is often asked. For my HYP alma mater, they've stated that they don't take account if there are multiple applicants from a single HS. Last year, a top urban school in my district had 3 admits. Two years ago, my local suburban HS had four admits. Both schools generally will have 0-1 admits yearly. They each had statistically unusual years -- I suspect that the individuals' strengths just caught the eye of the adcoms.</p>

<p>I've met kids who have had up to 15 people from their high school get into MIT.</p>

<p>Epiphany Private Message</p>

<p>The colleges (esp. the selective ones, like Ivies) will compare applicants from the same high school. Generally, unless your school has a strong history with a particular U, or unless your school is very, very large (several thousand students), the spots for any particular Ivy will be very few. Typically, they admit one or two from a school, if those one or two are competitive for the whole pool of applicants to Dartmouth, for example.</p>

<p>A school with about 1500 students -- if the school is well-known to that Ivy & has a good reputation (even if not a "strong history" with the Ivy) -- can have 3-5 students admitted, each, to a few Ivies. (A few to Yale, few to Harvard, etc.) And generally there won't be a full representation of all the Ivies.</p>

<p>You aren't directly compared to applicants from your school. Rather, you are compared to the applicant pool as a whole.</p>

<p>A Ivy took 4 from my D school, from a graduating class of 50 or so, if that helps.</p>

<p>what worries me is my class rank at my HS...because we have a lot of high-achieving students, my rank tends to be lower at my HS than it would be at perhaps another HS somewhere else</p>

<p>will this put me at a disadvantage? :/</p>