<p>Parents in our town (well, our city of several million people :) are abuzz over news that a local private high school (with 190 seniors), just had 8 of their kids selected for Harvard ED. The kids there are smart...they always have success...but there are lots of smart kids in our city. A friend explained their success to me this way, "Their applicants are held to the same standards of all applicants but the difference is that their guidance counselors have contacts at all the Ivy League schools and they assure that the applications are actually considered." </p>
<p>Now that made me pause. Mostly because it feeds into my disbelief/paranoia that these colleges give more than the most cursory read to the 35,000 plus applications that they receive. It's sort of like the slush piles that publishing houses used to have....yes, all novels submitted by would-be novelists were 'read" but by an overworked editorial assistant...who every once in a while would surface up one to the actual editors.</p>
<p>The kids at the private school probably have hooks. The parents may be Harvard alums who have contributed a lot over the years. These parents may well be connected themselves. That seems to be the more powerful factor in my area across all school types: CEO kids get a certain bump in admissions. Ask how many of these ED kids were athletic recruits. You’d be surprised how many there are in the ED round. </p>
<p>Yes, it’s true that the guidance counselors at private schools actively solicit connections to the elite schools but there’s no magic to it. I know plenty of smart private school kids who aren’t accepted in spite of those connections and plenty of smart public school kids who are. And sometimes the private school kids who are accepted are a surprise to the GCs. I think the admissions committees really do read all the applications. I also believe that many of them don’t pass that first look but many more are read and considered, at least by the regional person who does the first review.</p>
<p>Colleges divide their adcom’s regionally, so that the person who does the first “read” of your kids app knows the HS, the area, etc. The Harvard adcom reading the application of a kid from a HS in Bridgeport, CT knows the difference between Bridgeport and Greenwich (low income and high income) and moreover, understands the subtleties between a kid who attends Brunswick (a prep school in Greenwich) and Greenwich HS.</p>
<p>I’m calling @##$% on anyone who claims that a private school guidance counselor has “pull” with the Harvard adcom’s. Not that the private school guidance counselor can’t get their phone calls returned- they can. But to claim that every single kid has a counselor barraging the adcom’s with a PR spiel on each and every kid? Not buying it. </p>
<p>If you’re talking a school like Roxbury Latin, the kids don’t get accepted to Harvard in those numbers because of the guidance counselors pull… it’s because the counselors steer away the non-Harvard admits early on in the process by directing them to schools which are more realistic admits for them, thereby saving the Harvard adcom’s the trouble of rejecting those applicants.</p>
<p>And out of curiosity- what was last year’s Harvard results? Is this a one time only, or does Harvard typically accept 6-10 kids per year?</p>
<p>My own kids HS seems to have four kids accepted at Harvard every year. For ages Princeton accepted zero until they started accepting 3-4. Yale used to accept 1 or 2, until they had a few years of accepting nobody. And then it went to 3-4.</p>
<p>I feel sorry for anyone trying to find a pattern in all of this.</p>
<p>These are great insights…I appreciate it 3girls & Blossom! Everything you say makes sense (well crazy college admission sense :). On your concrete question, 5 were accepted to Harvard last year through all rounds. This year, it’s 8 in EA alone!</p>
<p>What you may be forgetting is that these prep school kids have already been through a competitive admissions process. Not only are they kids with high grades and scores, but the prep school admissions process has already weeded out most of the bright but socially awkward and athletically gifted but lazy kids. Essentially you’re looking at a class of high achievers. They’re coming to Harvard pre-screened. It’s the same reason one might expect a higher percentage of kids from Harvard to be accepted at Yale Law than from UMass.</p>
<p>If you have any doubt about the calibre of students some of these schools admit take a look at the CC prep school forum. You’ll see “chance me” threads that look eerily like the ones for the Ivies.</p>
<p>I agree that it’s unlikely the counselors at the private school have pull at Harvard–but they may do a good job of helping kids in that school put together really good application packages. That’s part of what the parents are paying for.</p>
<p>I think one other factor is that this year Harvard decided to accept more students in EA than they have in the past. So 8 may be the total they accept this year.</p>
<p>Southern Hope - have you ever read The Gatekeepers? Elite high schools are tied into elite colleges and the colleges often have their eyes on potential students from the time they are freshmen.</p>
<p>So, not including this year, Greenwich Academy has gotten 12 female squash players into HYPS–an average of 3 a year.</p>
<p>(And, there are 2 more GA grads on the female squash roster at Brown; none on Columbia’s or Cornell’s; 1 on Dartmouth’s; none on Penn’s.)</p>
<p>I’m sure that helps Greenwich Academy’s HYPS admission stats look great–but if your D doesn’t play squash (or another sport) I don’t think going to Greenwich Academy is going to boost her odds of getting into HYPS much. But if she plays squash? The fact that 20% of the female squash players at HYPS are grads of Greenwich Academy may mean you’d want to investigate Greenwich Academy further.</p>
<p>I second The Gatekeepers, get it used for cheap on Amazon. It is a good eye opening look at the admissions process at selective schools. It follows the admissions officer and committee for a year. It also tracks some HS applicants, including some from a top private school. Quite a good read.</p>
<p>Brown not only reads the applications but says they actually take each one to committee! Hard to imagine how that could work logistically. </p>
<p>In that quote you gave missed the mark. It is misguided in both overstating and understating the situation. </p>
<p>My daughter went to a private boarding school, not one of the East Coast elites but a good school. They have a good GC active in NACAC. The kids do their applications themselves. They are not ‘packaged’ by the GC. They do get carefully written recommendations. They do have many ways to get involved and be leaders and they have opportunities, but it is a matter of what they take advantage of. I have no doubt they are on the phone with the colleges, ready to answer any questions, maybe push hard for a certain student, perhaps even indicate who has a clear first choice.</p>
<p>The guidance counselors might not have more pull, but those students have guidance counselors who know them, who write recommendations, who actually GUIDE. My kids are at a school with 2000 kids and 3 guidance counselors. Not 3 for the 420+ seniors, three total who are also fixing schedule problems, talking to kids who want to drop out, preparing transcripts, talking to kids who are in trouble, kids who are homeless or hungry. This is at a suburban high school in what is deemed the best school district in the state.</p>
<p>And it can just be a quirky year. I was a nanny to a boy who was pretty smart. He went to a Country Day school and then to a private high school. He was one of 12 NMF his year, and his class only had about 200 in a grade. Five of those 12 went to Yale that year, and all 5 had gone to school together since kindergarten. Very unusual, and probably the only time it will happen. </p>
<p>There is a poor urban school close by, and while it rarely has a NMF, it often has big scholarship winners and several kids that head to Dartmouth, Harvard, Yale each year. The guidance counselors at that school really know how to prepare their kids, where and when to apply, how to shine the light on kids whose stats don’t stand out. This school doesn’t offer IB and is not considered the ‘smart’ school in this large urban district.</p>
<p>Another really, really important factor not mentioned is the high school’s track record of matriculating. This may not be as obvious, but it really rings true, especially when students are sending out 25 applications: which one will they choose? My guess is that girls from GA’s squash team have shown a history of not only performing well in school, but also in accepting the acceptance offer. </p>
<p>So next spring, when your child gets into all these really terrific colleges but can only accept one, it’ll mean something to those underclassmen when he/she declines all the others. It’s all about their YIELD, which why schools are accepting more during the ED timeframe. EA is less a guarentee, but it’s becoming more important, even to colleges like Harvard.</p>
<p>When you have a high school with an average SAT score way up there, and where many students are academically well qualified for the top colleges, it makes sense that more of them will get accepted to the top schools. Also, as others have mentioned, the parents of kids in such schools often have connections such as legacy, development, celebrity that up the chances as well. Not only that, both family and school infrastructures are such to put those students in the best positions for selective school admissions starting very early. Knowledge of how to package kids, how to have the best resumes, starting test prep early, taking the right courses, and the school offering those courses all make a huge difference. </p>
<p>In this area, there are some high schools that have strong Siemens/Westinghouse project programs. Every year and large number of kids from those schools show up on the semi and finalist lists. It’s no accidents. The schools are geared to provide such opportunities to their students and makes it a lot easier for kids to work on such project with mentors who know how to get the projects into finalist status. So it’s not just the counselor, but the way such schools are set up–having AP courses that count like BC calc and having high scores for those kids taking those courses, that make them attractive candidates for selective schools.</p>
<p>Harvard REA had a 21% acceptance rate (notably higher than Stanford, Yale, and Princeton), so a HS with 38 apps and a typical distribution of REA app quality is expected to have ~8 acceptances. The actual acceptances rates are likely skewed towards particular HSs for a variety of reasons, most notably a different typical quality of applying of students. For example, a highly selective magnet is most likely going to have a higher average app quality than a typical public HS. In any case, we can’t conclude much without knowing more about who applied, how many applied, results for other years, etc.</p>
<p>At my local HS, a kid wants to apply to Harvard- guidance counselor tells him or her, “Hey, it’s a free country and you never know”. As it’s been explained to me by insiders, at an elite private school, the Harvard wannabees are gently told, “Kids like you have loved: Lehigh, Denison, Lafayette, Wesleyan, Lawrence, Northwestern” (pick one, depending on the kids stats.) The stars in the class don’t compete with 40 other kids- the GC’s have already thinned the pack for the Harvard Adcom’s. So you don’t get the phenomenon of “crowding” (my local HS could have the entire top 10% of the class apply to Harvard one year, only a handful to Princeton, only one to Dartmouth, three to Brown, a few to Cornell, two dozen to Columbia). The GC’s get paid to eliminate the Hail Mary Pass candidates early on and redirect them to more appropriate schools, and then distribute the viable candidates evenly across a wide range of colleges.</p>
<p>The school gets to brag, “Virtually all of our seniors ended up at their top choice college” (which is technically correct since the kids who didn’t have a prayer of admissions to their top choice had to pick another top choice) and everyone’s a winner.</p>
<p>I don’t think this is a function of the prep school GC’s having any magic with the adcom’s, but certainly reflects more time and attention paid to matching kids up with where they are realistic candidates. I feel bad for the top kids at my local HS who basically do a “Harvard or Queens College” admissions strategy- nothing wrong with Queens college, but nobody takes the time to figure out if there are affordable options that the kid can get into that might be a better fit.</p>
<p>Sue22 raises an important point. Many of the prep schools are quite competitive for admission. So a weeding out process has already occurred before the students are applying to college. There are prep schools where the average SAT score is 1,300-1,400 for CR+M. That’s the average, with many students with scores in the 1,500 range. My boys all went to one of these schools. We are not celebrities, not wealthy donors, we did not go to Ivy League schools, my kids are not athletes, etc. They just happened to be smart enough to be admitted to this school. I absolutely do know that the head of college counseling called one son’s ED school (he was deferred ED) to ask what my son could do to help his candidacy. He got a direct answer from the Dean of Admission at the university and it had to do with grades only. Not a donation. The high school regularly get 25%-30% of each class into Ivy League schools, and also has acceptances from many other outstanding colleges and universities.</p>
<p>I triple the suggestion that you read The Gatekeepers. It was enlightening as well as disheartening for me. Kids from top public and private high schools already have immense advantages over the typical high school students, and indeed the advantages extend to GCs with the insider relationships with adcoms.</p>
<p>Harvard and other top schools actively try to recruit kids from schools that don’t send anyone, and actively recruit lower-income students who don’t have the opportunities offered by this kind of private school. That is not to say, of course, that they don’t still accept a majority who already have a great track record in a tough private school (and have parents who can full pay). But it also can be an advantage to come from an unknown school with no history of sending anyone to Harvard etc.</p>
<p>I think admissions at these places are very thorough, and very holistic. They assemble a good mix of talents and interests so the campus is well-rounded and don’t just go by stats.</p>