Does HS "competitiveness" matter?

Parents Forum
61

That’s the opposite of my observations of HS/college classmates. Most college classmates who struggled the most academically in undergrad were ones who had high HS GPAs/class ranks, but lowish SAT scores for our LAC.

And doing well in AP classes or even scoring a 5 is no guarantee the individual student covered the material to the same level of an actual corresponding college class…especially at a respectable/elite college.

Had to provide a crash tutoring course to an older college classmate because despite scoring a 5 on APUSH and an A from his mid-Atlantic boarding school, he had so many astounding knowledge gaps in US history that he was crashing and burning in higher level courses in his major/core courses in a related field. Gaps which wouldn’t have occurred if he had taken my public magnet’s non-AP USH or our LAC’s US history courses.

62

The SATs have been re-centered several times. When I was applying to colleges, before the '80s, only two schools in the country had median scores above the 1300s. Scores in the 1300s were highly competitive basically everywhere.

When we lived in Manhattan, a kid getting into Hunter elementary was like winning the lottery. Because people were concerned about the education quality in the public schools prior to HS. Getting into Hunter meant they didn’t have to pay huge private school tuition bills, or move to the suburbs.

I am acquainted with several alums of its high school, and I have never witnessed a more talented and accomplished group of people. It is, or at least was, truly a remarkable school.

As a freshman in college I did a project with two grads of Bronx Science. They were clearly much better prepared than I was.

As for getting into college, I too have heard that it may actually be a disadvantage. Aside from the top boarding school anecdotes, I know several residents of Scarsdale who feel that their kids are actually disadvantaged. It could particularly be an issue if the school is large, because few colleges want to fill their class entirely with qualified students from just one school.

On the other hand, it may not be altogether a disadvantage. This is going into the wayback machine, but back when I was applying , I knew the valedictorian of a small non-elite private school , who applied to Yale and was denied. The guidance counselor followed up, and he was told , to the effect of, “if we take him that would mean denying a kid from (elite feeder school that was down the street)”. Of course this only speaks to how that one university handled things a very long time ago. But it implies that “elite feeder” was helpful to get the students “in the game” for that university. But maybe the university did not go deep into the ranks of that elite feeder school to admit all of its deserving applicants.

But regardless of advantages or disadvantages for college admissions, I believe it is clearly beneficial in the long run, in providing the skills that promote life achievement. Beyond college admissions. College is just one step in the rung, not the end game.

63

At the top NYC privates, more than 30% of the students go to Ivies/Stanford/MIT. Every one of those students goes to excellent schools, whether they have straight As (which is very rare) or a C average. A good number of these students are legacies; an even greater number are full pay. But the fact of the matter is, colleges know and respect the education schools like Trinity and Brearley give their students, and reward them in the admissions process, knowing that they are graded extraordinarily harshly.

64

Many NYC privates have very generous financial aid too.

65

People often assume their kids are “disadvantaged” in the college application process by having so many high-achieving classmates and no doubt, there are times when they are probably right. But a significant number of kids become high achievers because of the company they keep. This can be unhealthy if it’s solely about competition, but it can truly help many students understand what real intellectual engagement looks like and it can also allow the to apply themselves without risking social ostracism.



Based on my own experience, I am not entirely sure that a kid in the middle of the pack at a highly selective school would necessarily have been at the top of his class in a middling district without the culture that embraces academic excellence. Obviously, it depends on the kid, but this may not be as black and white as people often think.

66

My experience is that it all evens out and people generally end up at the level of college where they belong.

I went to a pretty mediocre HS. The best 10-15 students (top 5% or so) got into to the top (Ivy and equivalent) colleges, others went to other 4 year colleges or the local CC, and some didn’t go past HS. My kids went to a very competitive, high achieving HS and probably 30% or so of the students from their HS go on the the very top schools and virtually all but maybe one or two students a year go on to a 4 year college. That said, I think if my kids and I traded places that we would likely have ended up a similar colleges.

67

D20’s school is not competitive when you look at the entire student body, but the top 20% or so are very competitive. The school offers every AP course which is a draw for many kids. Across town, there is a magnet school with an IB program. Then, there is a third school in town - a relatively new charter school - that has almost all of its students enrolled in AP classes. The other two schools rank higher than D’s school in the Washington Post rigor ratings and have great benefits and opportunities, and yet D’s school consistently has a much larger percentage of students achieving NMF and being accepted to top-tier schools. It’s a public school that has been around since the city’s early beginnings and is known for matriculating students who have proven themselves in various colleges’ classrooms. Reputation goes a long way for public or private, small town or large city.

68

With a “competitive” school comes competition. When you are 1 of 45 valedictorians, you aren’t very special. Better to be at the tippy top of a mid-grade public HS than be mid-grade at a private. Your class rank looks good, and you have demonstrated that you were able to wring all you could out of the educational experience at that school. That’s how a valedictorian from our local middle-of-the-road public HS wound up at Cal when some of her peers at privates did not. That was my D - no regrets.

69

Rigor is underrated IMHO. Underrated as a factor in choosing a college; underrated as a factor in understanding where your kid sits vis-a-vis other kids who may look statistically similar, and underrated as a factor in figuring out why adcom’s seem to make decisions which fly in the face of logic (my kid didn’t get into Yale but a kid from the town two exits over did, and he had a 780 math SAT and my kid had an 800).

But rigor is not underrated by the people who run universities, and it’s not underrated by adcom’s. If your kid has a long string of AP exams with 3’s and 4’s, but all A’s in those classes, it’s a very strong signal to an adcom that your HS is not rigorous (or has lousy teachers, or rampant grade inflation, pick your poison). If your kid has a recommendation from his English teacher that he is the strongest writer that the school has ever produced, but his essay is written at a middle school level, that’s a good sign that your HS is not rigorous (at least in how it teaches writing-- a skill which can be taught). If your HS produces a dozen all-state athletes every year but only 3 commended scholars from National Merit (like a HS near me… I think it’s tragic- and it’s in an expensive suburb with high property taxes) and one National Merit finalist every other year-- that could be (not definitely, but could be) a sign that your HS isn’t very rigorous.

What does this mean for the typical kid? Some kids can excel and get a great education at a HS which isn’t terribly rigorous, and then figure out how to up their game if they end up in a very rigorous college. And some could crash and burn. YMMV.

70

^I disagree. If you’re one of the very few to be Commended or NM Finalist from this “less rigorous” school, then you got there on your own merit. Lots of kids crash and burn in college. But over the years, all the outliers from my kids’ school who actually got chosen despite their “non-rigorous” high school did just fine. Never heard of an Ivy or other top school admit from our school crashing and burning for academic reasons. (Even my S who famously left an Ivy for six years because of personal problems and bombed two semesters because of them eventually finished with well over a 3.0 average–Deans List for all the other semesters.)

I simply think that it’s unfair to hold a student’s school against him or her, and my observation at our plainly-not-good-enough school (we don’t put out enought NMF to make the grade, apparently), is that the colleges do not, in fact, hold it against the students who excel at such a school.

71

At Andover, the average SAT score is 1400 and the average ACT is 30. When you look at their matriculation lists, they have admissions success far beyond what you would expect just by looking at the stats. A very large part, probably most, of that is Andover students have numerous hooks. However, I would bet Andover itself adds to that(whether by having GCs/teachers who know how to write great LORs, teaching students to write in a way appropriate for essays, variety of ECs available, or being respected for the rigor of their curriculum.). I’m theorizing the admissions advantage depends on the student and the college applied to. If your goal is Harvard, there’s probably a long line of hooked students ahead of you at Andover. If you’re trying to get into somewhere other than HYPMS, it probably helps. How the college admissions process works is a separate question from how any of us think it should work.

72

The same could be said for the NYC public magnets such as HCHS or NYC STEM-centered public magnets like BxSci or Stuy.

73

Only on CC could a high school send 5% of its class to Ivies and be described as pretty mediocre.

74

Garland, you’ve misinterpreted my post. Clearly, the NMF commended kids at an average HS are standouts. It’s the REST of the student body- many of whom might be Vals, perfect GPA’s, honor roll, standouts at HS awards night for every academic prize under the sun- who may be getting all A’s in a highly grade inflated environment.

Kids who excel, excel. And adcom’s don’t hold the school against the kid. But there needs to be more than a 4.0 GPA going on when the school isn’t a terribly rigorous learning environment.

75

No it can’t. Don’t get me wrong, these schools send WAY MORE kids than nearly every public school in the country, but it’s not 30+%. At Stuy for example that would mean literally several hundred kids across those 10 schools. Simply doesn’t happen.

76

Indeed straight As wasn’t even a guarantee to happen every year but 50% had SATs >1500/1600. We had many kids getting 5 on the AP but B for the course (our AP Chem class actually had exclusively 5s with 1 or 2 kids getting Cs). Our junior and senior english classes were taught almost exclusively by former college lit professors and our syllabi and grading reflected it. In all of high school I only got an A- on two papers - in all my literature classes at Brown I never got less than an A. We’re not really any smarter, we’re just much better taught and much better prepared. It’s hard for the schools to resist such known commodities - especially when the connections between the guidance counselors and the unis are such that SCEA was treated as ED by our GC so the school knew that student was enrolling if accepted.

Depending on what your definition of “a good number” is, a lot of people overestimate the number of legacy admits coming out of these schools. Rich, well connected kids who get unpaid summer internships that sound impressive instead of working at the local super market and get private tutoring for a year for the SAT- absolutely, but of the ~45% of kids (~20 kids) who went to ivies alone (not even doing the ivy+ thing here) when I graduated in 2005, only 2 were legacies (1 Harvard, 1 Penn). Even if more of us were legacies somewhere, we usually went elsewhere so unless you think the legacy status has cross over, it’s not a factor. If 10% legacy is “a good number” than my apologies, you are spot on - I would assume you meant more than that though.

Where it’s really huge is these are the URMs (who made up ~25% of the class) that schools fall over themselves trying to recruit - particularly the ones who come through Prep For Prep (https://www.prepforprep.org/page). Those kids are pretty much guaranteed to be successful with all the support they receive between Prep and the high school.

77

Stuyvesant is made up of 1 per cent African americans and 2 per cent Hispanics. Bronx science is a little better it is 3 per cent African American. Hunter high School is 3 per cent African American and 1 per cent Hispanic. It has been said

“If you truly believe that the demographics of Hunter represent the distribution of intelligence in this city then you must believe that the Upper West Side, Bayside and Flushing are intrinsically more intelligent than the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Washington Heights, and I refuse to accept that” (From Chris Hayes one of the stars of MSNBC)

At Dalton and Trinity and Horace Mann Hispanics are 3 per cent of the student population . By way of comparison 40 per cent of the New York public school students are Hispanic. African Americans make up another 29 per cent of the New York public school students.

Many of these schools are cut throat and pressure cookers. I don’t consider them elite at all. They appear to be bastions of special privilege. They are the last place I would ever want my kid to go to school. I live in California so that may at least partially explain my slant on this.

78

Neither Horace Mann nor the Dalton School have scores near that. I’m willing to bet you went to the only school in the entire country with a mean or median SAT score greater than 1500/1600. Wherever you went was unique, even within the bubble of top NYC privates.

79

@iwannabe_Brown

That was the case with my graduating class considering out of a little under 690 seniors, the top 25% were accepted to at least one Ivy…and considering they were often the best financial deals and our GC strictly limited the vast majority of us from applying to more than 2 reaches…those who were accepted usually attended. ~1/6 of my graduating class were accepted to Cornell A & S* and Engineering and another 1/7 were accepted to Columbia College alone…more were accepted to Barnard and SEAS*.

  • Back when I was a HS senior in the mid-90s, Cornell A & S and Columbia SEAS accepted plenty of classmates whose GPAs/SAT scores would have precluded them from Cornell Engineering, Barnard, or Columbia College....much less the other Ivies.
80

Just a side note on the “number of SATs or ACTs that’s a concern for schools” convo. Hate to break it to you all, but the schools don’t really care because, after a range, all they really care about visavis your kid’s SAT/ACT is what it does to their average. (I mean, do any of believe they go to the trouble of averaging each student’s SAT scores to get the school average?)

Sure, if some kid took the SAT 5 times to inch up a few points the Adcom might roll their eyes, but really, once they get an idea from your GPA/School Rigor/SAT/ACT/Subject test if you can handle the school, then they’re just looking to see if you goose their stats for next year’s USNews.

As you were.