<p>Shuman</a> to Slow Fall in Admit Rate | The Phillipian
According to this article, Andover is to take measures to "halt the decrease of its admit rate". Wonder what everyone here thinks of this move. Its apparently more geared to increase the quality of the school's applicant pool. Will it have any significance to future applicants?</p>
<p>Harvard has a 5% admit rate. PA has a long way to catch up to that. This looks like bunch of BS to make the middle schools do more screening for them. Are they saying that they are not getting good quality people now? I always thought they got nice kids. They will always get some low quality people because they have to say yes to the rich and connected people.</p>
<p>I agree Benley, this is puzzling, why would a school want to discourage applicants. </p>
<p>Maybe they think less kids are likely to apply because the odds are so poor?</p>
<p>Last year the Phillipian reported they were advising parents whose kid’s basic scores/tests were low on the common boarding school on-line site not to even proceed with the Andover supplement. </p>
<p>On the other hand, for admissions offices it must be a momentous amount of effort going through all the applications, especially knowing almost 90% will be turned down. Yet “selectivity” is important for rankings.</p>
<p>Maybe they will start trying to decrease the number of spurious “tourist” applications by making a separate application that requires long hand-written essays to be mailed in, (like some closely related school does) ;-)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>As of yet (thank goodness!), there is no USNWR for ranking of prep schools. Therefore, arresting the fall of its admit rate is not going to knock Andover off its perch in the pantheon of prestigious prep schools. </p>
<p>How many Chances threads have you read of kids w middling profiles and no hook but earnestness, who are in complete denial about their likelihood of being admitted? You diplomatically implore them to cast-a-wide-net, when your real thought is, “honey, you haven’t got a hope in hell (or Hades)…” Discouraging OBVIOUSLY uncompetitive candidates from applying will save heartbreak and hassle all around.</p>
<p>A few selective colleges are also deliberately reducing the number of applicants, by adding another essay. They know they will be slammed by USNWR for it-- but kudos to them-- they are refusing to participate in the rankings rat race to nowhere.</p>
<p>Some of us asked Mr. Palfrey about this some time ago, actually. His point was mainly that Andover doesn’t want to actively discourage kids; rather, they want middle schools to encourage those who they feel will fit in best and enjoy their experience at PA. </p>
<p>Sometimes, this will result in less encouragement for other students which means they may not apply. The admissions people (I think) feel that having a very low acceptance rate (anywhere near Ivy League acceptances, for example) might discourage otherwise good applicants from applying, though, so less applicants isn’t viewed as a bad thing.</p>
<p>I feel another reason could be that the administration would rather give more attention to individual people to better judge if they would fit or not. Come winter term, many (possibly most) of teachers and staff are swamped with reading applications. I think that if we get a ton more applicants, some people may be tempted to just skim. It would be padding the statistics, but it would also increase the chances of rejecting someone who would fit very well.</p>
<p>(Disclaimer: none of this is quoted or set in stone and may not even represent the general idea of anyone affiliated or involved at PA. This is just my interpretation from my knowledge.)</p>
<p>I think they made it clear in the article that the main purpose of trying to halt the admit rate is that for people who have little knowledge about boarding schools, a super low admit rate could be intimidating as they don’t yet know the “sophistication” (e.g. the holistic review of applications) when they initially explore BS as a high school option. Not actively encouraging applicants who are obviously unqualified or very likely wouldn’t be happy or thrive in the school seems to be a win-win strategy for both the school and the applicants, as GMTplus7 and TheTester analyzed above.</p>
<p>What about kids whose middles schools have no placement offices and/or those who wouldn’t dream of recommending a top student leave their district? </p>
<p>The article said that some recruitment events would still be open to the public so that they don’t pass up any “diamonds in the rough.” I found that personally a little off putting. So kids who don’t go to a fancy private middle school with people to advocate for them are “rough”?</p>
<p>I don’t blame them for trying to stem the tide of applicants. It must be harder and harder to find the very best candidates when apps can only be given a few minutes of review. But how really to do this? If it really is all about fit, the interviewer could have a candid chat with parents. “Jimmy seems like a really NICE kid, but I don’t know how well he’d fit here.” Or “Sally seems like she would really make the most of the opportunities here. If here academic profile is ______________, we encourage her to proceed with her application.”</p>
<p>GMTplus7, FYI, for US News college ranking (both for national universities and LACs) student selectivity takes a weight of 12.5%, and in the category acceptance rate is just 10% (SAT and class ranking take the remaining 90%). In other words, acceptance rate takes 1.25% of the weight of the overall ranking. It really doesn’t make “business sense” for colleges to work so hard to focus on this one metric.</p>
<p>This is not practical. All the applicants who apply to Exeter or HADES cross-apply to Andover regardless of PA wants it or not. So it won’t stem the number of applications. This will also lead to MS guidance counselors pushing their favorite pets to PA. How in the world are the guidance counselors in Idaho who never set foot on PA campus or went to BS, supposed to know which students are a good fit for PA, seriously?</p>
<p>Last year, there actually was no rise in applications, but an actual drop from the previous year. The admit rate looked better only because they admitted fewer students than the previous year.</p>
<p>It sounds to me as if the pressure will be on pre-prep counselors to choose a group of students most likely to yield:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>In other words, the guidance counselor should not present students with strong ties to St. Paul’s, Exeter, etc. to the Andover admissions people. </p>
<p>This would artificially increase the admit rate and the yield rate. Win/win…except for the 13 year olds who might have liked to think that they, too, might have the luxury of a choice in where to apply. Nope. The adults in charge will take care of it for them.</p>
<p>Less choice to students and more control by the politburo.</p>
<p>
Where did you get that? It isn’t at all obvious to as “in other words”. Could it be you are reading into it too much? Besides, yield shouldn’t be a concern of Andover’s last time I checked. It has been the highest for years among boarding schools.</p>
<p>Ahh Benley questioning Periwinkle’s wisdom. It ought to be interesting. :D</p>
<p>@neatoburrito: Andover has always had a tendency to get kids from “fancy private middle schools”. Part of that is simply that they know and trust the guidance counselor. It is most definitely a flawed method, but it’s better than deciding to put all their trust into a counselor from a school they’ve never heard of and with whom they’ve never had any contact with before. Their new policy actually seems to limit the kids encouraged to apply from “fancy private middle schools”; they’re only going to encourage some people. Again, a flawed method, but hopefully a better one.</p>
<p>In terms of a candid chat with a parent; for some, it would work. In the hands of a slightly more “pushy” parent, “Jimmy seems like a really NICE kid, but I don’t know how well he’d fit here” could be rebuffed by examples of how Jimmy has always been a model student and an exemplary example of community or whatever the interviewer may feel aforementioned Jimmy is lacking. The interviewer has only spent thirty minutes, maybe an hour, with the child; the parent has spent, what, thirteen years? It would be difficult for the interviewer (even more so if he/she is an alumni interviewer) to discern if the parent is being genuine or just padding her child a little. </p>
<p>If the interviewer personally knows the parent and finds him/her very trustworthy, this would be a different story. That’s basically what happens with a lot of guidance counselors with those “fancy private middle schools”. The admissions team has probably worked with them before, and more likely than not have matriculated good, successful students. Andover (generally) has more reason to believe the guidance counselors than the parents.</p>
<p>(Again, disclaimer: I don’t really know anything and this is what I’ve gotten from talks with random staff and my own interpretations.)</p>
<p>Benley, just a quick aside, Thacher’s yield has been the highest for the last several years at 83%, although this past year it was 78%. Sorry to interrupt!</p>
<p>The placement offices at the top feeder middle schools to the top prep schools do indeed actively manage the yield. They want to maximize the number of good outcomes for their student body as a whole, not just to maximize the number of good outcomes for each student. The “connected” middle school counselors will disclose to the prep school AO’s who the likely yields are.</p>
<p>What was so off putting to me was the idea that if a kid wasn’t preselected by a placement officer at a middle school, they were “in the rough.” Though I’m sure it wasn’t intentional, it smacked of elitism. It’s almost like they have separate pools, those sent to them from feeder schools, and the unwashed masses in whom they must search for the diamond.</p>
<p>I honestly don’t know how they could curb them any other way than through the schools with which they already have relationships. Andover will always be one of the brass rings because it’s Andover. What’s funny is that I think Andover is probably one if the least socially elite schools out there, thanks to their generous FA policy and youth from every quarter philosophy - just like Exeter up the road. But every so often, a facet of the social divide sneaks out.</p>
<p>Maybe I’m just being overly sensitive.</p>
<p>neato, if it make you feel any better, the feeder middle schools may consistently send students to Andover, et al., but it will only be a small percentage of kids in the middle school. Just as graduating from Andover is no sure ticket to getting into HYPMS, graduating from feeder middle school is no sure ticket of getting into ACRONYM prep school.</p>
<p>I don’t think that was what Neato was getting at. We’re both parent of those “rough diamonds” who come from the backwater of small public schools, and I agree with her that the tone of that sentence is just off-putting–as if private middle school always hones and polishes a kid in a way that other environments can’t. </p>
<p>I do find this focus on private schools interesting though–it helps confirm my ideas about how Andover has always been able to be “need blind” with roughly the same percentage of students on fa as Exeter. It will be interesting to see if they can reach out in the way that they are describing in the article and maintain their need blind policies. </p>
<p>I think the point about pulling select students into the guidance office was not so much about steering certain legacy students toward certain schools as skimming off the cream and presenting them to the Andover AO. I can’t see it happening though, honestly–I foresee way too much parent protest when Johnny comes home and says he wasn’t invited to the meeting. </p>
<p>There are other ways to keep the applicant pool down–to me, one of the best is to limit the pieces of the application that students can share with multiple schools. I suspect Exeter’s requirement of a handwritten essay may be responsible in and of itself for preventing a number of “might as well give it a shot” applications.</p>
<p>I guess it’s no surprise that a topic gets sidetracked on an Internet board as it’s typically does but it’s a surprise to see HOW it’s sidetracked. 
The yield talk came out of blue, espcially considering Andover’s yield has always been high and never seems a concern. And I think I know why neato is offended by “diamonds in the rough”. But in this context, I think they mean kids who are far from the boarding school world and the school has no way to reach them more effetively than public information sessions. I consider ourselves “in the rough” a few years ago. Although we lived in a middle class suburb in the east coast and intensely cared about education, we had about zero knowledge of boarding schools. Had we not received a marketing letter from a top boarding school, BS would not have been an option for us. Period. When my kid, who had good grades and test scores, first stepped on to the BS campus, he was indeed very much “in the rough”, compared with those coming from private schools, junior prep schools, and the kids who have had private tutors for academics and sports… From my experience, I really don’t see how that expression offensive. </p>
<p>Personally, while I believe discouraging obviously unqualified applicants to be invested in the application process is a good idea, I’m not sure to try to control admit rate should be the perspective or appoach. A very low admit rate could be intimidating but is it the major factor that stops people outside the BS circle from taking interest in BS? As we all know, elite colleges such as HYP are having much lower admit rates. Of course, it doesn’t mean they are not concerned about the implications of the continued decline of admit rates, but they probably haven’t yet figured out a good way to address it. As mentioned earlier, acceptance rate’s impact to ranking is not significant to these colleges (btw, yield was removed from the US News ranking a decade ago), so I think they would be willing to “sacrifice” it just a little bit if it can serve their other institutional needs better. However, I don’t think the low admit rate is the main reason for the fact that people outside the “mainstream” such as those from the Mid West and South or those in lower SES are much less interested in them and many of the strong students wouldn’t even apply. It’s more because of the perception that these colleges are elitist, expensive and “not useful”, so an increase of admit rate is unlikely to change that… Anyway, good discussion. Thanks.</p>