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<p>Are they from public schools?</p>
<p>These cozy GC-adcom relationships seem like a double-edged sword to me.</p>
<p>What if the GC prefers another student in your kid’s class to your kid for a particular school?</p>
<p>If no relationship exists, the college has to decide whether to admit or not based on the materials provided by the applicant – no middleman involved.</p>
<p>To add to glido’s point, I know families at a few of these private schools. Some of these families are full-pay for high school, but cannot afford to meet their EFC. Their kids either get merit aid, or attend their (very good) in-state option. Getting an admissions “tip” to a tippy-top school because of a great GC/adcom relationship means diddly to these families. They’re not eligible for need-based aid (yes, even at HYPS), and these schools don’t offer merit aid. To be contenders for merit aid, they shouldn’t need any extra GC pull–their record, and the high school’s reputation, should be sufficient. </p>
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<p>In JHS’s example, it’s a question of having only a handful of kids apply ED to each school, rather than a few dozen. Your kids’ school doesn’t have that kind of mindset. There’s no need for the GC to “manage” the competition to give your kids the best shot at ED.</p>
<p>Glido - yes I fully recognize that there are scholarship kids at Exeter et al. That’s not the point. 99% of families are neither willing to nor interested in sending kids to boarding schools. I at least thought there was a sporting chance for a smart kid from a decent high school to at least swing the bat. But no, there are apparently 100 high schools in the country that matter and the rest don’t. I played it all wrong by having the nerve to send my kids to a good but not New Trier type of hs.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl,
My son did OK from a public HS that doesn’t register on any top HS list. He was first to go to his UG school and first to go to his grad school. Most kids stay in-state. He was very fortunate to have a great GC who helped him maneuver thru the system and leave hs early. I doubt any GCs from our school talk to college reps, and there were no visits from colleges to his school.</p>
<p>We only went to one college meeting, and drove 1.5 hours to get there. He based his essay on “Why College X” on that visit.</p>
<p>Obviously, it would have been better to visit other colleges and demonstrate more interest, also arranging interviews.The following year, several of S’s friends went to prestigious places, like Naval Academy, HYP, MIT.</p>
<p>How many students did your school send to the Ivies each year for the past few years? This is generally a good predictor (though of course not perfect) of how many it will send this year.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, there is hope. The only “colleges” who come to recruit at our high school are the US Military and the local beauty schools. My daughter attends Williams. Her guidance counselor had never heard of it so I highly doubt he picked up the phone and called to advocate on her behalf.</p>
<p>Just a thought.</p>
<p>If we say that there is not a strong correlation between going to a top college and how one does in life after college, might that have something to do with the fact that that top college missed better kids, mostly likely from public high schools?</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, our high school fell off the Best High School list a couple of years ago (and were near the bottom when we were on it.) Every year at least the top 25 students (and probably more, but those are the ones whose college choices are announced in public) get into HYPSMC and the top LACs. Plenty of kids like my son’s best fried who got into Harvard as a legacy and Yale where he was not a legacy. He was a great kid - #3 in the class, active in theater but not a star, played bass in the orchestra, headed a rock band that wrote its own music. But he didn’t have national awards or anything like that. There are still feeder schools for sure, but there are plenty of slots for kids from schools no one has heard of. That said top colleges have missed better kids for years - admissions is an imperfect art - sometimes from public high schools, but sometimes from the private schools too.</p>
<p>My nephew went to one of the top schools in the country and his mother felt that in many ways it was a disadvantage. He would likely have been a star at a public school, but he was a runner up there. The story has a happy ending though. He went to Rice (which turned out to be a far better school than he realized) for undergraduate, did spectacularly (including being an author on what dh described as “the paper of the century”) there and was accepted at every PhD. program he applied to.</p>
<p>There are many public school that offer good college counselling. They send a lot of kids to top tier schools. All that information is readily available at each school´s website, and the information is given to any prospective real estate buyer. </p>
<p>When we first moved to NJ 15 years ago, college placement of each town´s public high school was the first thing I checked out. It was a priority to us and it was a main factor on where we ultimately bought our hosue. It shouldn´t be a surprise to parents on how competent those schools are. People who work around most metroplitan areas have a choice of which town they want to live in, and which public school they want to send their kids. We ultimately decided on a private school for our kids, but it was with a lot of soul searching (is that where we want to spend our money, and what we would be giving up, and could we afford 13 years of private tuition?).</p>
<p>No, I don´t think only private schools send kids to top colleges, but not every public school is the same. Some high schools do a better of job placing their students, and if it´s important than it should be a factor when deciding where to live.</p>
<p>It is true that the competition for Ivies is much much tougher in the competitive private and elite public schools. In many cases a kid who would have really stood out at a generic public is only one of the crowd at a school like this.</p>
<p>Sorry, I don’t buy the hyperbole that only kids from 100 high schools get to swing the bat. Local magnet schools and public high schools hereabouts (at least those with a good percentage of families aiming at strong colleges) each send at least a handful of students to tippy-top colleges. </p>
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<p>But you played it right by thoroughly researching the admissions process, and by educating yourself and your family. A professional college counselor couldn’t have done better by your kids than you’ve done yourself. Not to mention that your family will be able to send your children to any school they get into, regardless of COA. Those are two huge, huge advantages. There are parents at those super-well-known high schools that don’t have those advantages, themselves.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, as you know my kids moved from a hoity-toity private that operates the way I described above to a large urban public where the GCs are essentially traffic cops. They think they ended up in college pretty much where they would have gone had they stayed at the private school. Kids from their public school did fine at selective colleges. They could have done a little better with a lot more (and a lot more intrusive) GC work, but if you adjusted for demographics, test scores, and fashion differences, the equivalent kids at the two schools were accepted at equivalent institutions. And the kids for whom the private school had no equivalent – the first-generation, working-class, politically conservative strivers – got plenty of chances to “swing the bat” at the public school.</p>
<p>Now, this was a pretty well-known public school, but it didn’t even come close to making any national “Best High Schools” list. (Unlike mathmom’s school, which could well be the highest-quality non-magnet public school in the country. And if not that, in the top 10.)</p>
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<p>This is so true.</p>
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<p>This is one that I don´t really agree with. I have done it both ways, and I don´t think I did it better by myself with D1. I guess it´s for a different discussion.</p>
<p><a href=“Unlike%20mathmom’s%20school,%20which%20could%20well%20be%20the%20highest-quality%20non-magnet%20public%20school%20in%20the%20country.%20And%20if%20not%20that,%20in%20the%20top%2010.”>quote</a>
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JHS - I don’t live in Scarsdale. 
Our top students are served pretty well, but we have a huge number of kids who are dropping out or taking 5 or 6 years to graduate. There is no way we could be considered among the tippy-top magnet schools in the country, though I do think we are better than we are given credit for.</p>
<p>I agree with mathmom. Stand out kids have a shot, no matter what their high school, but there are only so many spots at these top-tier schools and there are more qualified kids than there are spots. It should be said that those top schools are more open to non feeder school kids now than they were thirty years ago, but there are more kids applying now. There are 2400 SAT kids not getting in. The schools are looking for more than just that and they want to build a well-rounded, interesting class. If that is wat your child wants, apply. Do not be intimidated, but be realistic. Getting rejected does not mean a particular student is not qualified - just know that going in. </p>
<p>At the end of the day, we have to raise our kids to know that it is they that define who they are, not college admissions officers.</p>
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<p>My concern isn’t “how many kids will the school send to Ivies / similar elites,” because other people’s kids aren’t my business, other people’s finances aren’t my business, and if the smartest kids in the class decide that they’d rather go to U of I because hey, they want to be local and it’s half the cost of an elite and they’ll do just fine from there anyway especially in fields like biomedical engineering … hey, good luck to them. My concern is the <em>mindset</em> that enables the school to appropriately support kids who do have desires to attend the LAC’s and the more elite schools – in terms of teachers and GC’s knowing how to write recs that sparkle and push the right buttons versus “Joey is a pleasant, hardworking student that I recommend to your college,” in terms of steering kids towards EC’s that might mean something, in terms of having at least some nodding awareness / familiarity with adcoms.</p>
<p>Well that is what I was saying as well. If for whatever reason your school has never had a kid accepted to Harvard, it is very difficult (though of course not impossible) for your kid to be the first. If every year the top three kids are accepted to Ivies (wherever they actually end up going for whatever reason) and your kid is one of the top three for this year, he will probably be accepted and whatever the school has done in the past is probably enough and those colleges know your school and level of those top kids and what the recs look like from the teachers. If noone ever is accepted, even if the reason is that noone ever applies, it is a tough road.</p>
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<p>But WHY is the question.<br>
I mean, the thought process, “Well, I’ve never heard of / we’ve never seen any applications from this high school, so even though Joey is a reasonable candidate, we’re just going to say no, because after all, I’ve heard of New Trier and the New Trier GC tells me that her Billy is the best thing around” just doesn’t make any sense.</p>
<p>How can colleges do a whole big we-want-to-send-mail-to-any-student-who-makes-above-X-on-the-SAT-so-we-cast-our-net-wide-because-we-love-ourselves-some-diversity but simultaneously “penalize” a kid for going to a high school they haven’t dealt with? The lack of imagination of a kid’s fellow students (and / or their lack of financial resources, if such is this case) doesn’t reflect on the KID, does it?</p>
<p>I’ve got a D who has three of the elite women’s colleges on her radar screen. Yeah, maybe now and then, once in a blue moon, a kid from our school applied to one of those schools. It’s just not on the radar screen around here and if I asked a GC for advice about those schools, she’d have to point me towards the website. (OTOH, if I asked her about Northern Illinois University, she’d talk my ear off). So? What should that have to do with my D’s interest / application, from the point of view of the college reviewing her application? If we have the money and she has the stats / qualifications to be a reasonable candidate, why she should be explicitly disadvantaged - because no one else around here cares about those schools? So freakin’ what? I don’t get the logic. I’m so tired of the thought process that we’re somehow to be held responsible for the lack of imagination of others with whom we have nothing in common except we all live in the same general area.</p>