<p>I'd say that many of these measures described above also depend on where you live and the size of the school. I would describe our public high school as competitive (Newsweek ranked and we get top API ratings in the statewide testing) yet:</p>
<p>1) we see only one or two kids going to the Ivy league each year because we are in California and the east coast is a long way away. </p>
<p>2) The majority of the kids go to in state public - but then again, in-state public is UC or CSU - with literally dozens of campuses. </p>
<p>3) We don't have 20+ AP courses - since there are less than 800 kids in the school - not enough in any graduating class to populate that many offerings </p>
<p>4) We do send a sizable percentage to 2 year jucos - but then again, CA public university system is set up to encourage students to go to jucos and transfer.</p>
<p>Bottom line - I don't think there is any one criteria - perhaps competitive is like Justice Stewart said "I know it when I see it"</p>
<p>I don't think that APs factor in at all. Many HS in this area have been bitten by the AP bug and offer tons of them. I see no correlation between the number of APs and the quality of the school. I think the rash of APs is just the USNWR (or is it Newsweek?) effect.</p>
<p>DD's HS offers few APs outside of math, but offers a true college prep curriculum in the "regular" classes. There are no "honors" classes (see my thread on that) and one "advanced" class. </p>
<p>How to quantify it as competitive? Standardized test scores, acceptance at top schools in large numbers, special treatment by adcoms/admissions, ??? Don't know, everyone just thinks it's good.</p>
<p>I think that the only valid time the term "competitive high school" comes into play, as far as college applications and merit scholarship chances go, is when class rankings are considered to be a factor. Colleges will take into account a lower class ranking if the applicant is from a competitive high school, and accept them into their honor college or grant them merit aid, even though they might not technically be eligible for that consideration. Other than that, it really doesn't matter that the applicant--if their test scores and grades are high--is from a competitive high school or not.</p>
<p>We can see all the various factors here. I consider our public school to be competive because the State of Ohio ranked us first in performance on every state test at every grade level last year. We only have around 400 students in the high school so don't offer a lot of AP classes and because we're small, we aren't nearly as well-known outside the state as we should be.
I believe we get preference at our state universities, where they'll take one of our graduates with a 23 on the ACT and turn down a 25 from a neighboring school.</p>