This is just wrong. For once, I agree with @lookingforward, it’s so much more than being the best at your small town high school.
My D just graduated from a well-regarded private high school, known to be tough on grading. Admissions to the school is selective, generally students score in the top decile of the SSAT. The average GPA of this year’s senior class was around 3.5. There are colleges that calibrate their expectations knowing these facts, and others where it looks as if they don’t. This gives rise to the idea that the high school is a feeder to some colleges. This information all comes into play when students make their college lists.
In some respects, this makes sense. If SmallTown High only offers 3 AP courses, colleges aren’t going to count it against you that you didn’t take 8 APs, even though applicants from BigTown High routinely take that many.
But even if you have the highest SAT scores that SmallTown High has ever seen, Harvard isn’t going to be impressed with them if they’re in the 500s.
Feel free to disagree, but three years running at College Info weekend at our son’s boarding school, AOs from very selective colleges explained this concept to parents. Students are compared apples-to-apples as they cannot be fairly compared across high schools regardless of type. I heard this over and over from college reps as well as the CC office at our son’s school: Choate students are not compared to Andover students, just as Smalltown High students are not compared to BigTown High students or other SmallTown or Private High students, etc. We evaluate each applicant solely within the context of their own high school, and we will take only so many students from any given school.
As @Marian correctly states, even the best student from a particular high school may be a poor contender for a given college, but that student will be passed over as a bad fit not because s/he failed to match up to the rigors of some high school s/he did not attend.
^ True. But Harvard might be more impressed with scores in the high 700’s coming from a small town HS kid than from a kid who attends a NE boarding school, a public magnet or a top suburban school. A pretty good percentage of S’s classmates at his magnet school had 800 SAT Math score. You needed a LOT more to stand out.
No argument there, @FallGirl. Every college builds a class and they need those smalltown students as well as those underwater tuba players. I don’t think they are as “impressed” as much as they are looking for diversity.
I agree too, @FallGirl.
Many of the kids in my daughter’s selective-entry IB program (where roughly 1/3 of the class ends up as National Merit Finalists) felt that they would have done a little better in college admissions if they had gone to their ordinary neighborhood high schools instead. At the neighborhood school, they would have been academic superstars – with the class rank and gushing recommendations that superstars get. At the IB program, they were just ordinary IB kids.
The flip side is that once the IB kids got to college, they found they were extremely well prepared academically.
That was our experience too, Marian. I knew that the magnet school might hurt rather than help in some college admissions, but I also knew that S would be very well prepared for any school.
I also found that there was no “big fish, small pond” syndrome in HS. The first thing you leared in that school was that while you might have been the “smart kid” before, but now all of your classmates were “smart kids”.
Or in some cases, one ends up hitting the academic wall in 9th grade after being considered an academically above-average “nerd” because too many students are not only genuine genius-types, but also exceedingly hard working as well.
On this, I speak from firsthand experience.
And this was the case in spades for yours truly* nearly every HS classmate from our public magnet…including those attending HYPS.
And for those attending Swat, Reed, Cornell(engineering/A & S), JHU, UChicago, Gtech, MIT, Caltech etc…they felt it was about the same.
I doubt you’re correctly recalling what was said. It might be approximately true that Andover students are compared only to other Andover students if A) Harvard has soft quotas(ex. no more than 12 students from any one high school) and B) Harvard knows many Andover students consistently have the qualities they look for. What would be true for Andover would be true for almost no where else. Very few high schools would be affected by that 12 per school upper limit, as very few schools get anywhere near that number of admits. If Harvard chooses not to admit a single student from SmallTownHS, it’s clearly a result of applicants from SmallTownHS being compared to applicants from other schools. Marian’s example is a bit of a strawman. There are a lot of SmallTownHS with many 1500+ SAT students and not a single one gets admitted to HYP.
Why are you making the assumption that those students aren’t admitted because they don’t compare well against students from other high schools? A student is admitted because they have an academic record and test scores that prove they can do the work and they have a profile that fills a need the college is trying to fill. At selective colleges, there are many, many more qualified applicants than there are seats. It is more than possible that no students are ever chosen from a given high school because those students don’t fill a particular need or stand out in any compelling way no matter how qualified they are, or there just aren’t enough slots. You’ll just never know why any individual applicant was chosen or not. It’s easy to speculate.
My memory may be faulty about many things, but what I posted was clearly communicated many times from many sources during our son’s high school years. It’s not important whether or not that information sits well with anyone. I have no horse in this race, just thought I’d add the information given to parents at our son’s high school to the conversation. Carry on.
While I get that Choate, Andover, Exeter etc. are in the same general East Coast boarding school pool, I think it probably is true that even within that group they look at each school somewhat separately, so I have no reason to believe anyone was lying to @ChoatieMom. I never felt that our high school was lumped with the other north of NYC suburbs, but rather that the admission officer (who came and spoke at our school every year my kids were there), knew our school very well and judged the students in the context of our school. (We had arts programs, a large selection of AP courses, a science research program, sports and probably some other things that may have been part of the equation. In fact one of the things that made me most nervous was that my older son chose not to continue with clarinet and dropped out of the science research program before it ever got on his transcript.) He got in because he had a lot of non-school stuff to offer and of course the grades and test scores that opened the door.
“The flip side is that once the IB kids got to college, they found they were extremely well prepared academically” - Very true (especially in schools where students must take ALL classes for the program, not pick/choose).
You can’t blame a college for looking at two perhaps equally intelligent students and picking the one that has had an opportunity to take classes closer to college rigor than the usual hs honors classes.
I’m not claiming anyone was lying to ChoatieMom. I do think we’re not getting verbatim quotes from the AOs. I do think the AOs were probably making a very narrow point(we’re never going to take more than 15 kids from Andover or any other school), which ChoatieMom either didn’t understand at the time or has not correctly recalled years after the fact.
@roethlisburger The AOs don’t say stuff like that because one year they might like16 kids. There are no hard and fast numbers. I listened to the AOs from a dozen selective colleges six years in a row. I know exactly the sort of things they said. I also saw who they accepted and for the most part could guess why. They say they look at kids in the context of their schools, I think they mean that. Which doesn’t mean they don’t also have a general idea of how many students total they might want to take from East Coast boarding schools in general, or suburban public high schools in the NYC area, or any number of other categories.
The number is “soft,” and varies with the student population from year to year, but a limit is very real. Thus, the kids are just competing among themselves for whatever that year’s limit is at any given college. Nothing wrong with my hearing or memory. Still hearing this same message from others on the Prep School forum; no need to take my word for it. Which boarding schools did your kids attend @roethlisburger? Perhaps it works differently at your kids’ schools. I can only speak to my own experience.
And your takeaway from that article was…?
I’m pretty sure none of my comments indicated any feeder relationship with any school or that any number of slots is definitely reserved for any students from our son’s school in any given year, only that all of these kids were competing against each other for those highly competitive seats however many exist.
Interesting that you chose an article about Yale though. Naviance data from our son’s school does show a strange affinity between Choate and Yale but that could be due to the number of Yale faculty children who attend Choate. 
There’s a vast difference between saying they look at kids in the context of their schools and ChoatieMom’s original statement kids from high school X only compete against other kids from high school X.