<p>hey that is what is among the students at least…</p>
<p>and riverdale is just as good as dalton, chapin, and spence</p>
<p>NYNY parent. It is what it is, even if the forest is hard to see for the trees.</p>
<p>Anti-Catholic bias? Where is Regis in New York on this list?</p>
<p>Regis is a great the equals to many schools on the list but i think they classified it as a parochial school not a prep school</p>
<p>Benley, NYNYParent: If you believe wealth and connections don’t have anything to do with NYC School admissions, you may be out-of-touch with reality. Do you know the average wealth of the kids/parents in NYC schools compared to BS and other private schools? There is shockingly small number of middle-class and poor people at these schools (just enough to window dress). Are you suggesting that only rich kids are smarter and that’s why they get in? You said the admission to NYC schools is very competitive. Yes, not because there are smarter kids in NYC than elsewhere, but because there are a lot of parents with deep pockets. Another way to prove that your premise is wrong is to track these so called smart NYC kids in colleges and compare their performance against BS and public school kids. Then it will be very clear if the kids are really smart or whether their parents are really aggressive to get their kids in. Competition in NYC schools looks tough not because more smart kids are competing, but because the number of seats in each school is like 50 and most of them start at pre-kindergarten. The only spots that open up are the ones due to attrition. Now don’t tell me that these kids have proven themselves to be baby Einsteins at the time of their admission to Pre-K. Probably by now you may be seeing your premises evaporating… </p>
<p>Benley, Your Hook theory is a good start. But it is overly simplified, kinda like doing physics with algebra. The correct version is doing physics with calculus, ie. giving weightage to Hooks. **All hooks are not created equal<a href=“just%20like%20your%20simple%20counting”>/b</a>. RebelAngel and my theories account for the weightage of hooks. Once you take this into account, then it will be obvious to one why small size and demographics account for the NYC school performance. I can demostrate this strength of a hook thing in laymans terms. Assuming you are set up with meetings with two people: one with Jack the Carpenter and the other with Mayor Bloomberg. We tape your reaction and behavior in these meetings. What do you expect? How do you dress for each of these separate meetings and how is your body language during these meetings. I think now you get the strength of the hook effect. I need to go back to my physics now… :)</p>
<p>pulsar:</p>
<p>You are correct. All hooks are not created equal. As pointed out above there are very few people who can actually buy their way into an Ivy in any given year. These days, the URM hook is generally viewed as being more powerful than the legacy hook. If it is true that boarding schools have better stats than NYC day schools (which we don’t even know from looking at something like the Forbes list - more on that in a moment), do we know what causes that? Do we know for sure that boarding schools have more or less URM’s. Several people here have stated that to be the case, but I haven’t seen any evidence. Sure, there are programs like ABC for boarding schools but there are programs like Prep for Prep in the NYC schools. I think we’d need to look at the numbers before drawing any conclusions about which group of schools have more of the URM hook. </p>
<p>You’ve stated that “most of them start at pre-kindergarten. The only spots that open up are the ones due to attrition”. That is in fact categorically FALSE. You should do a little bit of fact checking. For example take Horace Mann. It expands from approximately 110-120 (depends on the year) in 8th grade to 175 in 9th grade. And that’s after having a standard entry year of 6th grade though I’m not sure of the exact number that enter at the year, I’d guess it’s approximately 30 to 40. So, goes from approximately 80 at 5th grade to 175 (a number I’m confident of) in 9th grade. I know that Trinity and Dalton have somewhat proportionate expansions (though they have fewer total students). Collegiate accepted 8 students this year for their 9th grade of approximately 50 students. Sorry, but I didn’t focus as much on the girls schools since I only have sons.</p>
<p>Basically, there seems to be a lot of NYC fear and envy floating around this board (you’re far from the only one). And I’m not even sure over what! Bear with me for a moment…</p>
<p>The Forbes list and any Top N list by it’s nature focuses on the group at the top. It doesn’t focus on the whole distribution. As I pointed out before, those 7 NYC schools only account for about 800 graduating seniors each year. What about the rest of the NYC schools? How do they compare to the rest of the boarding schools? I have no clue. I haven’t tallied up the whole group and that data is simply not available. </p>
<p>In any event, whatever the true reasons for the perceived disparity at the very top of these lists, it’s amazing some of the nonsense that’s being spouted on this board. It’s very atypical as compared to the generally reasonably comments around here.</p>
<p>I know I’m probably wasting my breath, but let me give you a few stats on Trinity that weren’t in the Forbes article: diversity in the lower school 35%, middle school 38%, upper school 27%. Over 20% of the school is on financial aid (26% of this year’s graduating class). The average SAT score for the class of 2010 was above 2100. The average. 63% scored 4’s or 5’s on their AP’s. The top of the class has some truly amazing students - including perfect SAT scores, national level awards, etc. - but the high quality goes quite deep. This is what accounts for their college placement record. If you want to believe otherwise, I’m not going to argue with you any more, but you’re just wrong.</p>
<p>P.S., saw Lvillegrad’s post after posting mine. I agree that this thread is generating some nonsense - glad to hear that it’s atypical. I spend most of my time when I visit this site over in the Parents Forum’s class of 2011 thread, which has been very helpful as I’ve started to try to help my son think about colleges.</p>
<p>Good post, Pulsar. I enjoyed reading it. So I didn’t assign weight to hooks but I didn’t say wealth and connections are irrelevant either. Unless we see the demographic composition of NYC ps in question we can’t make a conclusion</p>
<p>Lvillegrad, You give 70-80 spots at 2 schools out of 7 or 10. Even these are puny compared to the spots at BS. I am surprised that you and some others think people envy NYC people. That is not true. Stating money buys influence is not being envious. It is a true statement since the dawn of mankind. As you know, people may not be envious about NYC folk but they sure have contempt for Wall Street folk right now. You know all the Shenanigans going on there. I don’t know about envious people on these boards, but do I know a few spin doctors trying to sell bridges and snake oil.</p>
<p>nynyparent: I rest my case with you too… We are both entitled to our opinions as be don’t live in Russia or Timbaktu.</p>
<p>You give 70-80 spots at 2 schools out of 7 or 10. Even these are puny compared to the spots at BS.</p>
<p>They are puny, true, but not on a percentage basis which is the appropriate way to justify or refute your statement “MOST of them start at pre-kindergarten”.</p>
<p>And to add a little more fun to the “Forbes fire”, I’ve added a new page “Top 25” based on matriculation statistics that I consider more sensible than what Forbes uses as well as a blog posting with some insights. Have fun!</p>
<p>[Top</a> 25 : Matriculation Stats](<a href=“http://matriculationstats.org/top-25]Top”>http://matriculationstats.org/top-25)</p>
<p>[Random</a> Musings : Matriculation Stats](<a href=“http://matriculationstats.org/musings]Random”>http://matriculationstats.org/musings)</p>
<p>Then I will add you also to my nynyparent list.</p>
<p>lville grad: i like your list better than the forbes one. just seems more realistic to me i guess.</p>
<p>*Then I will add you also to my nynyparent list. *</p>
<p>Fair enough.</p>
<p>Yes…</p>
<p>Lvillegrad, thought you’d take graduating class size into consideration when compiling your top 25…</p>
<p>@Viennaman: *Anti-Catholic bias? Where is Regis in New York on this list? *</p>
<p>I don’t know whether Forbes considered Regis or not, but even if they did, I doubt it would have been included based on their presumed methodology. Although Regis is certainly an excellent school, their Ivy+M+S percentage is about 19%. Most of the schools on their list are solidly over 20%. So, even though that’s only 50% of the rating, it would be hard for Regis to overcome that deficit to make the list.</p>
<p>Lvillegrad, I found your site a while ago and really appreciate all the work that you (and your son) have done on it. Your top 25 list is fascinating in that it confirms your earlier intuition that the Forbes ranking would not be significantly different if the colleges they used for their college placement weighting were expanded beyond the “Ivy League plus Stanford and MIT” set to the wider range of top colleges you use. Of the top 13 private schools in your list, 12 are also in the top 13 in the Forbes list (albeit in somewhat different order) - the only one they have in the top 13 that you don’t is Harvard-Westlake at 12, which is 19th on your list, while you have College Preparatory at 8 and Forbes has them at 17. The only school on the Forbes top 20 list that is not in your top 25 is Milton (which I’m guessing just barely misses your top 25 given that it has an index score on your scale of 161, just below the 165 of the last three schools on your list).</p>
<p>It’s also interesting that 7 of the top 10 in your list have graduating class sizes below 100 (all of those day schools) with only one day school - Trinity (103) - and two boarding schools - Andover (301) and St. Paul’s (133) - above that. I view that as confirming my earlier observation that the smaller class size makes it easier to place a higher percentage of the graduating class into the top colleges.</p>
<p>Most of all, I appreciate having some data, rather than rank speculation, on which to base one’s views.</p>
<p>i attend one of the nyc day schools mentioned in the article, and felt like i needed to chime in.</p>
<p>“Do you know the average wealth of the kids/parents in NYC schools compared to BS and other private schools?”
sometimes i wonder how much gossip girl has skewed people’s perception of NYC day schools. how is our “privilege” any different from the day schools of boston? tell me that windsor and roxbury and commonwealth aren’t every bit as blue-blooded as people seem to assume we are. & oh come on, boarding school? even the most generous of schools, let’s say andover, only gives financial aid to 50% of its students. do you honestly think that half of the american population makes enough per year to pay around 50 thousand a year in high school tuition fees? that’s easily 200k+ a year. since the average american household income is around 50-60k a year, to say that boarding schools aren’t “skewed” either with their connections and/or ‘gifting’ is kind of silly.</p>
<p>“There is shockingly small number of middle-class and poor people at these schools (just enough to window dress).”
over 20% of our school is on financial aid, and we’re need-blind. 20% is admittedly pretty low, but manhattan and our surrounding areas have pretty high average incomes which explains a little bit. 20% is definitely lower than andover’s 50%, but there’s also a 15k difference to take into consideration. so maybe we’re not quite as financially diverse as we’d aspire to be, but i don’t think it should be a point of ridicule, we’re not like some european boarding school with maids, almost everyone who attends genuinely deserves to be here. it’s not like we’re rich snobs, either. we know better than to discriminate against fin aid kids because at the end of the day, it’s our parents’ money, not ours…</p>
<p>not everyone here is a van rensselaer or something, a lot of us have hard-working upper-middle class parents that are indeed scrambling to pay the tuition. obviously if you went to a preschool like the 92nd street y, you’d have a head-start as opposed to a kid from brooklyn but if you’re genuinely motivated and bright you have a definite chance of admission, regardless of financial status.</p>
<p>it’s midnight now so peace out, everyone!</p>