I know much is made of the legacy and Z-list “hooks” that help kids get into selective schools. However, to flip the script, I was curious what people thought about the following theory:
Here in NYC, all the private high schools cost $60k+. Every one of the schools are teeming with Ivy legacies, and centimillionaire/billionaire families. But if you made an anonymized profile of the parent population of, say, Brearley/Trinity/Horace Mann versus Columbia Grammar & Prep/Trevor Day/Avenues, I doubt you would find much, if any, difference.
And yet… these schools have tremendous differences in college placement. The former group of schools has year after year of stunning placement, while the latter schools look very much like nice suburban schools – lots of private colleges, and a few selective placements.
How is this explained? Doesn’t this result normalize for HHI and legacy?
I can look at my daughter’s school and sometimes I see hooks in effect and sometimes I don’t.
There’s definitely a senior last year whose father is a prominent and wealthy entrepreneur. Her matriculation at a certain top-5 school makes total sense as a Z list effect.
On the other hand, I can think of another senior who certainly comes from a nice affluent family (but not crazy rich), unhooked as far as I can tell, not URM, who got multiple admits (and only a few rejections) at top-5 schools, and completely swept the admissions in the 6-30 range. No legacy, URM, or crazy HHI in effect.
The latter kid looks like a normal, hardworking, smart kid, not a crazy prodigy. Difficult to attribute this success to anything other than the school.
Don’t those two groups of schools have very different groups of students in terms of admissions to the school and academic rigor? I always thought HM especially was much more academic an admisssion and also more “middle class” (for a 60k a year private school) than the others. The other two are much older and have intense prestige and legacy themselves. Maybe they are just better known at top 10 schools?
I can’t comment in detail on those specific schools, but I definitely think different selective high schools create different distributions of transcripts for college admissions purposes.
In the end, the most selective colleges are typically challenging schools full of smart and ambitious kids. They like to admit kids who they think will do well in such schools. The kids in whom they have the greatest confidence are logically the ones who have already succeeded in an environment as close to that as possible. And certain high schools basically try to do exactly that–imitate as closely as possible what it will be like to be at one of these highly selective colleges, at least for their first couple years.
So the kids who do well in such high schools tend to do well in highly selective college admissions. There are lots of details we can tease out as to how exactly that works, but at a high level it is really pretty obvious why this would be the case.
HM absolutely more academic and screens students more carefully.
HM is definitely NOT more “middle class”. All of these schools have large numbers of parents in finance, entertainment, Big Law or consulting, dynastic money, etc.
There are differences in flavor. Maybe one school feels more Jewish and another feels WASPy … but on paper looking at professions,
income/wealth, legacy status, etc. I think you’d have a hard time telling the parent cohorts apart in a “blind taste test”.
Ha. I mean nyc middle class. More doctors and lawyers, less inherited wealth. But I work with nyc kids and there does seem to be a big academic difference between HM, Collegiate, Brearly, Dalton crowd and the others.
When you say you see a “big academic difference” what do you mean?
I have encounteted a pretty large number of NYC private school kids in my decades of living here and sending my own kids through the system.
I have encountered a handful who make you pause and think, whoa, that kid is amazing in some way – extraordinary accomplishments in music, or advanced math, or just precociously articulate and mature and knowledgable.
There are a large number of reasonably bright, hard working, linear thinkers, with parents who have high expectations and make various resources available to them. You meet them and are pretty confident they’ll do fine in college and life.
And around 25% of the private school kids I meet seem totally unremarkable, or even below average.
Colleges don’t admit the HS, they admit the kid. And because of the sibling advantage, there are always a core group of kids at these schools in the bottom 25%-- whose academic superstar sibling graduated a few years ago. Collegiate cares about admitting the less accomplished (or less hard-working, or just disinterested) younger sib- Harvard and Yale could care less.