In the Catholic high school world Notre Dame is pretty infamous for taking the best applicant they receive from each school. Occasionally they’ll have a year where two are admitted, but it’s often an athlete or extra talented musician or something like that.
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Texas public universities basically do this by using class rank as the main frosh admission factor.
But then aren’t the programs within the school selective around other criteria? So kids within a rank might all get into UT-Austin but to get into the school of Engineering there isn’t a given at any specific rank. (my understanding, could be wrong).
Yes, some admissions programs are going to compare applicants within a specific school, or district, or state. Some may even have a quota. Some look at SAT/ACT’s, some don’t. All goes towards what the school believes to be the ingredients to make up the “special sauce” of their student body. The student should be themselves and apply to a cross section of schools. Some they’ll get into - some they won’t. Some they’ll get great offers of merit at, some they’ll be expected to be full pay. Trying to predict it with any expectation of accuracy is futile.
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Schools that have a preference for geographic diversity, which would include ivies and top LACs at a minimum, will not accept every highly qualified applicant from the same HS - because if they did so their admissions would be heavily skewed to the most competitive public and private high schools in the country. So, they will implicitly limit how many they take from a particular school/region by prioritizing the geographic diversity of other applicants. That said, none have strict quotas. And unless you apply, you never know!
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Yes, some UT Austin majors are additionally selective / competitive beyond admission to the school. However, to the extent that class rank is used in selection for the major, that still means that the applicant is compared against others in the same high school.
Almost dead thread but just stumbled upon it. In any case, that’s definitely not been our experience at a Jesuit school that’s (a) large and (b) a continuous feeder to Notre Dame. Naviance shows an average of acceptances per year from this high school in the teens over the last decade, though the overall acceptance rate has, like at every university, dropped somewhat.
I’m also aware of a different Jesuit high school that contributed a staggering 1% of this year’s freshman class at Notre Dame. These are both in the Midwest and have large student bodies, so perhaps their historical ties and yield/student success rates at ND are more well-known to the Admissions Office there than other high schools.
I would imagine that’s definitely the case. It’s a joke out here in the PNW among Catholic school kids about the one kid every year who goes to Notre Dame. Of course, our high schools need to be much smaller than the big midwest Catholic schools. My kids’ Catholic school is only 300 students.
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I think the Southern poster child for this over the last 20 years has been Tulane (and might have been Wake Forest prior to that). I think Tulane got tired of being the safety for everyone who really wanted to go to Vanderbilt, Duke, UNC, Wake, W&M or UVA, and suffering poor yield from it. So they elevated tracking demonstrated interest and started taking larger and larger portions of their incoming classes from early decision candidates. That led to a feedback loop where, in an environment of uncertainty with increasing admissions competitiveness, more applicants would visit their campus or otherwise engage with the school enough that they decided they really liked it, and then apply ED.
Anyway, agreed that the current backup options for those who want to go to Ivies has changed a lot from JackH2021’s days. Those top of the rankings LAC’s are known by today’s high schoolers to have as low, if not lower, admit rates than a lot of the T20 national universities. It’s much more common to just aim a rung or two lower on the rankings list at another large school or a public university nowadays, because if you were attracted to Cal or Penn in the first place then there’s a good chance you’d prefer to be at a school like Boston College over a school like Bates.
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