I go to an East Coast public HS. It is a fairly competitive school which is known in the area for providing a good education, but it’s no famous magnet school or anything. This aside, a lot of top schools in the area seem to understand the rigor of our curriculum and let in a fairly high number of kids… on any given year we get at least one kid into Harvard, Upenn, MIT, Cornell, Brown, Princeton etc.
I have noticed, however, that the same top kids who get into these schools NEVER get into certain schools of the same caliber, like Stanford or Columbia. According to our naviance, in fact, no one on the graph has ever gotten into Stanford or Columbia. Do colleges actually not know or respect certain high schools? I really like Stanford especially and will probably apply anyways, but does this mean my chances are very low? What could possibly explain no students ever getting into certain schools?
I’m sure the schools “know” your HS, they just may not have a strong relationship with the guidance department, they may not see applicants that appeal to them etc. I doubt anyone really knows. But maybe ask your guidance counselor in the fall if he/she knows of a reason for this pattern.
You need to remember that each of these places is distinct. Getting admitted to Harvard, does not mean that you also are an appealing candidate for Stanford.
Those top tier schools can only admit so many students. They may have preference for students from certain schools. At the same time, every student can only go to one school. If students from your high school are not preferred by Stanford, there are many Stanford like schools. You should still apply to Stanford, but find other schools that can be just as good of a fit.
While this applies to me personally, I was wondering if it was common across the board in other areas too. I know private schools often have close relationships with admissions officers, but for public schools that don’t are there still general preferences, or is this just a coincidence?
I’ll bet the percentage of students from you east coast high school is much higher at the east coast prestige schools, higher than the number who apply to Stanford or CalTech.
We have a similar problem here in Texas for both coasts. We have a few great HSs in the state that seem to be recruited by the Ivys but the students from HSs that are just good have a hard time getting in even with the same AP scores, test scores, strength of schedule and great ECs. The group of students that do get in are the student athletes.
We have same phenomenon here at our public school. Certain more local Ivies will take many students (maybe 20-25 go ivy out of 325), while none get into Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth.
Kids from D’s high school get into Ivy’s all the time. No one has every gotten into Duke. Ever. At one point D toyed with the idea of applying to Duke and I told her we would not waste our money.
Ours sends ~15 kids out of 220 a year to Princeton while only 1-2 to Stanford that are non-athletes. Many Princeton kids from my HS are actually Stanford rejects haha.
Relationships do count but so does the rigor of the high school. Most admissions committees are very much in tune to the fact that an A from one particular high school does not equal an A from another school. And admissions is GPA driven to a large extent.
And a high school that is getting 15 into Princeton every year is almost guaranteed to be one of the elite boarding or other private schools which have both advantages - highly rigorous curriculums and established relationships with admissions committees. The admissions results of schools like theses along with schools like TJ High School for Science and Technology cannot really be compared to results of other schools. That comparison will lead to misleading conclusions.
Just an FYI- our 4 local public schools each send over 20 to Ivies. These are not magnet schools. They take all comers. People from all over the world move here to attend out school. It is an extremely stressful academic environment for the students but they are certainly prepared for college.
In the last year at my Ds high school (suburban Chicago–525 graduates), there was 1 Ivy, 1 Duke, 1 Johns Hopkins, 1 Georgetown, 2 WashU, 2 UChicago, 5 Northwestern, 1 Vanderbilt.
“Our local HS seems to be able to get kids into Harvard, Yale and Cornell. But Princeton … no.”
My local district gets kids into HYSM, Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell, all the little Ivies, Seven Sisters, etc, etc, etc, but never Princeton and I’ve been living in the district for 24 years. I have no idea why. It cannot possibly be that they don’t know my district - which is one of the top in NYS.
@naviance right but the above poster cited 15 to Princeton alone which means they are getting many more than 20 total into the ivies. From an earlier post in another thread I believe he or she said the high school gets 40% into Ivy+MIT+Stanford +Duke. Just guessing it is a boarding school.
I’ve heard many admissions officers for elite colleges talk about how they “know” the high schools in their assigned region. I’ve always thought this a somewhat preposterous claim. There are something like 30,000 high schools in the U.S. There’s no way they can really know more than a small fraction of them. What’s telling is that when admissions officers for elite colleges and universities come to our area, they all do their little dog-and-pony show at all of the most exclusive private high schools and at a handful of the wealthiest suburban schools. They generally don’t bother with urban schools except for an occasional foray specifically seeking out potential URM candidates. As best I can tell they spend little or no time in public schools in less affluent suburbs, or in small town and rural Minnesota. In some ways this is just efficient from their point of view; it’s the high-end private high schools and most affluent suburban public high schools that are going to have the largest concentrations of potentially qualified applicants, so they might as well invest their time and energy where it’s likely to yield the greatest rewards. So the admissions officers cultivate relationships with the GCs at those schools, and the GCs are only too happy to reciprocate because it gives the kids coming out of their schools an inside track over some random perfect GPA, 1550 SAT CR + M kid with great extracurriculars and impressive academic drive coming from some less distinguished school where such stats are more of a rarity and therefore the school rarely, if ever, sends its graduates to elite private colleges. It’s no wonder that half or more of the student bodies at most elite private colleges are full-pays, given where those colleges do their heaviest recruiting. Bottom line, I think when admissions officers say they “know the schools” in their region, they pretty much just mean they know and have relationships with the schools they consider to be the top feeder schools–elite private high schools and public schools in the most affluent suburban districts–and they relegate all the other schools (a far larger number) to a generic classification of “other.”