<p>
</p>
<p>No, that’s not right. Mean SAT scores in New Jersey are pretty much right at the national averages, actually slightly low in CR:</p>
<p>Mean SAT scores for 2008 college-bound seniors:</p>
<p>CR: NJ 493, U.S. 502
M: NJ 513, U.S. 515
W: NJ 496, U.S. 494</p>
<p>bclintonk - Nice analysis … very nice. My only quibble is not making some allowance for offspring of Princeton staff and NJ political/industrial leaders … and perhaps large contributors, of which NJ has many. Not many of these “tipped” prospies are likely to originate from fly-over states. </p>
<p>VP - I think a better measure would be the PSAT scores needed to make the NMSF cut: NJ has among the highest required scores … fly-over states among the lowest.</p>
<p>“VP - I think a better measure would be the PSAT scores needed to make the NMSF cut: NJ has among the highest required scores … fly-over states among the lowest.”</p>
<p>Newhope - thanks for that post. I knew I read something about higher scores for something from NJ. Obviously I wasn’t remembering totally correctly.</p>
<p>Vicariousparent - In all honesty I have no intention of doing the research and reporting back. Sorry, but my interest level just isn’t that high. I was just sort of giving my opinion; I didn’t mean to make it sound like I was quoting some great research on the subject.</p>
<p>I’m sticking to my personal assertion that it IS harder to get into alot of colleges if you’re from NJ…if for no other reason than the high “export” rate of NJ students. I can tell you lots of stories about kids I know and their college searches that back up my opinion. There are probably people with stories and opinions just the opposite of mine. But again, it’s just my opinion based on what I’ve seen/read/heard. And again, while there are lots of #'s in that “Princeton post” I still don’t think they give the complete picture…</p>
<p>I do not believe NMS cutoffs are set according to the number of students per state. I believe there is some arbitrary number for each state, so the more sparsely populated states do have an unfair advantage. Like the number of Senators per population.</p>
<p>China: Looks like you didn’t have to do the research…bclintonk did it for you, and it is exactly as I remember. NJ students are about average. </p>
<p>Here’s a link:</p>
<p><a href=“http://professionals.collegeboard.com/data-reports-research/sat/cb-seniors-2008[/url]”>Higher Education Professionals | College Board;
<p>I’m glad I started this interesting dialogue. New Jersey is a diverse state which accounts for the middling average SAT scores. The NMS cutoff is more relevant and I think it could be the highest in the country. I think it’s a confluence of factors but the “problem” is that schools want diversity and to create an interesting class so they like to take international students and students from underrepresented regions. I think because there are a lot of jobs which require a lot of education and possibly raw brain power in regions like the northeast and Chicago, you may have a lot of smart kids there but because of the desire for geographical diversity, they may have a harder time getting into the schools they deserve to go to. Also, because of these good jobs and real estate values, etc. there are more parents on the East Coast who can pay for private college tuition.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well, close, but NJ’s NMS cutoff score in 2008 wasn’t the highest. That honor went to Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, at 223. New Jersey and Maryland tied for third at 221.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Depends what you mean by “fly-over states.” North Dakota (202 in 2008), South Dakota (202), and Wyoming (200) are indeed low, but Minnesota (213) and Illinois (213) are moderately high, roughly in the same range as California (217), Connecticut (217), New Hampshire (215), North Carolina (214), Pennsylvania (214), Florida (212), and Washington State (215). There’s “fly-over,” then there’s “fly-over.”</p>
<p>But frankly, it’s hard to see why National Merit cut-offs are a “better measure.” National Merit cutoffs are determined by reference to the total pool of PSAT-taking HS juniors in each state. But who takes the PSAT varies widely from state to state. In some states it’s a large pool representing more or less all juniors. In other states it’s a smaller, self-selecting pool. I don’t know exactly where New Jersey comes out on this relative to other states, but I do know that in doing state-to-state comparisons of PSAT scores or National Merit cut-offs, you’re comparing apples to oranges. Same on the SAT, frankly. If we want to compare SAT scores across states, Minnesota kids score about 100 points better than New Jersey kids on SAT CR, nearly 100 points better on SAT Math, and about 80 points better on SAT W:</p>
<p>Mean SAT scores, 2008 graduating seniors:</p>
<p>SAT CR: MN 596, NJ 495<br>
SAT M: MN 609, NJ 513
SAT W MN 579, NJ 496 </p>
<p>But the explanation is obvious: it’s not that Minnesota kids are smarter or better prepared. It’s that in Minnesota, an ACT-oriented state, only about 5,000 kids take the SAT annually—and those who do are primarily those looking to apply to elite out-of-state colleges that emphasize the SAT over the ACT—whereas in New Jersey most college-bound kids take the SAT, about 85,000 annually. (New Jersey has a bigger population, but only about 50% bigger). Apples-to-oranges. Same as the PSAT. Neither set of aggregate state comparisons is going to tell us anything about the qualifications of the kids who apply to Princeton and similar schools.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Sure, everyone’s got stories. And there are more of those stories in New Jersey just because of the sheer numbers of well qualified New Jersey kids who apply to and are rejected by Princeton. But on a percentage basis it appears they’re rejected at roughly the same rate as kids from other parts of the country.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Nice point, well taken. But so far the data I’ve seen don’t seem to support the idea that applicants from other nearby states are at a statistical disadvantage, either, even though they’re far less likely to be Princeton faculty brats. As for heavy donors, I’m not so sure. My guess is that a fair number of Chicago, Washington, LA, and Minneapolis/St. Paul-area applicants who get admitted to Princeton are legacies and/or development cases. They’re admitted in smaller numbers, but apparently in similarly small percentages. But of course more data would be welcome.</p>
<p>It is always nice to see a discussion driven by data!</p>
<p>Good work. </p>
<p>One of the curious things I’ve observed during my time on these boards is how many factors regarding admissions seem to become lore without any data backing the factor up. Some of this stems from over-generalizing a factor, such as demonstrated interest, that may apply at only a few schools. Worse is the fact that adcoms engage in gentle disinformation on factors such as legacy preference. And quite a few of this disinformation has been brought to light in academic studies such as that behind the “Early Admissions Game”.</p>
<p>I think it important for us parents to keep in mind that admissions is a game, but we parents (indeed, anyone not at the admissions office) are not told all the rules. </p>
<p>I take this to mean in practice that we use the rules we know, such as grades, SAT scores and a few others, work them as we can, and ignore the rest. </p>
<p>Your thoughts?</p>
<p>Another issue is the caliber of the students beyond the stats. In New Jersey, extracurriculars can be very intense - 20 hours a week, no leeway for missing rehearsals, practices, etc. In our school in the midwest, you could do let’s say band and tennis, even though there were conflicts. Being on the debate team there vs. New Jersey was so much less work. If you have much less work in school and for your extracurriculars you can spend more time studying for the SAT and your AP exams. This is what my daughter was able to do. </p>
<p>There’s also much less competition to be president of the service group because hardly anyone wants to do that.</p>
<p>Being from northern NJ is akin to being from Westchester County in NY or Long Island. There is fierce competition for extracurriculars and grades.</p>
<p>I don’t recall the exact statistics, but in my daughter’s year at Harvard, most students were from MA, NY and CA. I was surprised (and still am) to find out how many students come from MA, specifically the greater Boston area.</p>
<p>Amazon, were you in comparable economic areas between Ohio and NJ? At similarly sized schools? At the same geographic (urban/suburban/rural) type schools? Based on our experience here in the midwest, I’m having trouble figuring out why there would be such a difference. Our Illinois school sounds more like the NJ school than the Ohio school. Are you accounting for all the other factors (other than the state) that might make the difference in ECs, etc.?</p>
<p>Are you in a suburb of Chicago? I think some of those high schools are every bit as competitive as the New York area. </p>
<p>I don’t think there are similar economic areas in Ohio and where we are in New Jersey. The Ohio school was one of the best in Ohio. It was a “full service” school with all the APs. There were quite a few smart kids there - like every year they had a bunch of kids with almost perfect SATs. It was a smaller school. I would say the counselors and teachers were not as savvy at getting kids into top schools - for example, no one was told to take SAT IIs - you had to figure that out yourself. There were some very wealthy people in Ohio but not as many. But I think a kid from a blue-collar area in New York or New Jersey would still have a harder time getting into college just because they don’t add geographic diversity.</p>
<p>So don’t these well-prepared kids from wonderful, fierce, competitive HSs get into great colleges? Only a few thousand students, from all over the country, get into HYP, etc. All/most of those “rejected” have excellent grades/SAT/ECs. They are not rejected because they live in New Jersey. They are rejected because tens of thousands applied for a few thousand spots.</p>
<p>I do not see how one can say that a child is at a “disadvantage” because they happen grow up in an area with great public schools, parents who can support/pay for extracurricular activities, SAT prep, etc. It seems, from the data, that those students are doing just fine in the college admissions “game.”</p>
<p>Personally, I like the idea that a student can do “tennis and band even though there were conflicts.” And not just because it frees up a child to study for the SATs but because, in life, well-rounded people have a lot more options and outlets.</p>
<p>I think looking at my individual kids, in the Northeast, they would kill themselves, get a very good education though, but not get into as good a college as they would slacking off in Ohio. I know that for a fact. I started the thread because my husband is thinking about moving to Florida or North Carolina and I wanted to know how they stack up.</p>
<p>Amazon, I don’t understand your position. Are you saying an Ohio slacker (not taking the most difficult courses, few ECs, low SATs) will get into a “better” college than a Mass student with stellar grades in AP classes, high SATs and strong ECs? I’d want to see the data for that. I’m sure your children will “stack up” well anywhere and that you would not tolerate “slacking off,” even in Ohio!</p>
<p>The best reason, academically, for a move to NC is that the state limits OOS to about 17% at Chapel Hill so they “reject” a lot of highly qualified OOS students, so that they may serve the residents of their state. That does not mean that the NC students they accepted are less qualified. It just means that the school does not have room for everyone qualified, who wants to attend.</p>
<p>amazon: I was in exactly your situation last year, trying to figure out whether it would help my daughter (who was a high school junior doing extremely well in her excellent school in New Jersey) to move out of the area to one of the ‘flyover’ states (sorry but it would compromise her privacy to say which one). She is now doing extremely well in her excellent school here.</p>
<p>Long story short, I have had a chance to look at one year’s worth of data and my experience is:</p>
<p>a) Yes, students are less cut-throat here than in New Jersey.
b) Academic and extra-curricular standards are equally high in both schools and the counseling is equally good.
c) Family involvement and affluence is similar in both schools.
d) Slackers in the new school probably have an advantage if they apply to second tier (maybe low first tier) colleges in the Northeast relative to New Jersey.
e) Top students applying to top colleges have no advantages here, they may even have a disadvantage because the top colleges have more experience with the well-known NJ schools.</p>
<p>My daughter knows the accomplishments of the valedictorians of both schools- her old school in NJ and the school here, and thinks they are very similar in competitiveness and stats. The Val in NJ got into Yale (not sure if attending but got into Yale). The Val here was rejected from Yale. The success rates of the other top students at both schools are similar. If there is a trend, the new school has better success at Stanford than the old school does, while the old school does better at Yale. Probably because Stanford doesn’t know the NJ school as well as it knows the school here. That is not great news for my daughter who likes Yale a lot more than Stanford. She may have been better off applying to Yale from her NJ school.</p>
<p>Bottom line, move where you have to move, but don’t have high hopes that your kids will be at an advantage because of the move. Unless your kids are slackers in which case they may in fact have an advantage at the second tier schools.</p>
<p>Vicariousparent - I would really like to know where you live. Would you like to send me a private message?</p>
<p>Stillnadine - Don’t know anything about Mass. My personal experience with let’s say 10 kids from each school - kids in Ohio weren’t slackers per se, and my kids aren’t either, but the school work and extracurriculars are just much, much less demanding. I think I gave the example, one kid not taking hardest classes available - maybe half honors, good grades but a few Bs, decent SATs, not great extracurriculars, got into the same school as high school valedictorian at New York suburban school. Not Ivy but top tier school.</p>
<p>Kids got into Ivys with very good stats but not great extracurriculars and it was a lot easier getting those good grades.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>My personal observation (having lived in both as well) is that in the Northeast, it’s more assumed that the top students (val, sal, etc.) will go to private, elite colleges. Here in Illinois, I find plenty of top students where they just assume they’ll go to U of I, and their parents assume it too, and the parents (even though they may be well-to-do) just aren’t necessarily interested in spending the big bucks for an elite school when they’ve got a good deal in the U of I. </p>
<p>This might potentially make it easier for a student just-below-the-top to get into an Ivy or similar school, insofar as they’re not competing with the vals / sals for those spots. The same might be true in California with their strong UC system; I don’t know.</p>
<p>^ Pizzagirl’s observation sounds right to me. We’ve lived in New York, California, and the Midwest (Chicago at one time, the Twin Cities now). In New York, and really throughout the NY-NJ-CT Tri-state area, the standard expectation was that top students would go to top private colleges, and that even the next tier of good-to-very-good students would mainly go to private colleges. In California most people saw the UCs as an outstanding combination of academic excellence and value, though a distinct subculture of high-achieving professional parents were clearly steering their kids toward Stanford, the Ivies, the Claremont Colleges, or other top private schools, especially in the Northeast. In Chicago it was also mixed; most people thought UIUC a good combination of quality and value, but there were definitely pockets of private college enthusiasts, especially in the affluent North Shore suburbs (and most particularly at New Trier High School, through there are probably others). Here in Minnesota, despite the general affluence and high level of educational attainment in the Twin Cities metro area, that private-school subculture is far smaller than even in Chicago, certainly smaller than in the Bay Area, and only a tiny fraction of what you’d find in New York-New Jersey-Connecticut. Parents here think nothing of sending their HS vals and sals to the University of Minnesota, or to neighboring University of Wisconsin-Madison where under our tuition reciprocity arrangement they get in-state tuition at an excellent public university.</p>
<p>A telling statistic is how many students take SAT IIs, which are required by only a small number of elite private schools (and the UCs, which means most people take them in California). Not surprisingly, SAT IIs are taken mainly by the better students. But here in Minnesota, only about 1,800 students take SAT IIs, a small fraction of the nearly 15,000 who take SAT IIs in New Jersey. </p>
<p>State / # taking SAT II / mean SAT I CR / mean SAT I M / mean SAT I W (among SAT II-takers) </p>
<p>MN / 1,840 / 651 / 675 / 641
IL / 4,465 / 661 / 687 / 657<br>
NJ / 14,686 / 624 / 653 / 632
CT / 7,225 / 624 / 639 / 633
[Note: by population Illinois is by far the largest of these states with 12.9 million, New Jersey second with 8.7 million, Minnesota third with 5.2 million, Connecticut fourth with 3.5 million].</p>
<p>But the smaller numbers taking the SAT II in Minnesota and Illinois are actually a slightly stronger group on average, as measured both the the average SAT I scores of those who take both SAT I and SAT II, and as measured by their performance on the SAT IIs.</p>
<p>State/ mean SAT II Lit / Math2 / US History</p>
<p>MN / 646 / 694 / 654
IL / 649 / 709 / 666
NJ / 616 / 690 / 641
CT / 616 / 677 / 633</p>
<p>State / % scoring 750 + Lit / Math2 / US History</p>
<p>MN / 15 / 35 / 15
IL / 14 / 43 / 21
NJ / 8 / 32 / 14
CT / 8 / 26 / 12</p>
<p>State / # sending SAT I and/or SAT II scores to Princeton</p>
<p>MN 283
IL 759
NJ 3,774
CT not available but < 755</p>
<p>So what do we make of this? Well, Midwesterners’ preference for public universities drastically reduces the number of students from those states who apply to Ivies and other top privates. But there’s still no evidence that those who do apply are weaker students than the Ivy applicants from New Jersey and Connecticut. Indeed, if we take the SAT II-takers as a proxy for the applicant pool for top privates, it appears statistically the smaller numbers of Midwesterners in that pool have slightly better SAT I and SAT II scores, on average. Yet they’re not accepted to Princeton at higher rates; indeed, quite the contrary, their acceptance rates to Princeton are slightly lower than their New Jersey and Connecticut counterparts.</p>
<p>Unless someone can produce hard data showing that the New Jersey and Connecticut applicants to Princeton are better qualified than the smaller numbers who apply from Minnesota and Illinois, I’m standing by my story—and all the anecdotes in the world won’t budge me.</p>
<p>Here’s my perspective as a Northeast native from an Ivy League college town now transplanted to Montana. </p>
<p>If two students (one from NJ and one from MT) presented with equally impressive resumes, and looking at that Princeton map with big fat zero enrollees from MT, WY and ID, I would think that Princeton (or equivalent) would be inclined to accept the student from MT over the NJ applicant.</p>
<p>However, this is balanced by the difficulty of obtaining a stellar resume in the first place for the student from MT. My son, a junior, attends the best high school in the largest city in MT (pop. 120,000) and could easily be the top student in his grade in math/science. Despite this, we had absolute no knowledge or information about Siemens, AIME or other math/science tests or programs sent our way. I am a UChicago grad, a professional, and consider myself involved in his schoolwork, but apparently I completely missed the boat on this. His various teachers have never said a word, or suggested we participate in any of this stuff. Therefore, he has done none of it. My bad. Given this, although he has top standardized test scores, I doubt he’ll be as strong a candidate as someone from back east with all the prizes etc., at least on paper. How it’ll balance out, we’ll see. Fortunately, he has a national ranking in a minor sport that should help.</p>
<p>Just for interest, his HS class has experienced 28% drop out rate from freshman to end of jr year (640 to 460). Scary. One unfortunate consequence of this is that his class ranking continues to drop, percentage wise, as the denominator drops even though he isn’t moving.</p>
<p>ihs76:</p>
<p>The fact is that we just don’t know how adcoms put together their classes. We DO know that they are not only not forthcoming with how they decide, but also prone to make misleading statements about what they in fact do. </p>
<p>We also know that the existing approach to admissions (a so called “holistic” approach where issues beyond academic achievement are part of the admissions criteria, such as athletics, legacy, ECs etc.) was developed some years ago for purposes that we would now view as highly objectionable (yet the approach still exists!)</p>
<p>IMHO, it is truly odd that our great internationally known universities seem to go out of their way to obfuscate any acccurate understanding of how they actually decide admissions. The cynic in me says that the only rational reason for such obfuscation is that if we knew the reality, we would be rather unhappy (or worse?). The non-cynic in me says they’re running a business, admissions is the marketing arm, buyer beware. </p>
<p>ihs76, best of luck to your son. I can imagine how frustrating it must be to see such missed opportunities. I can only hope adcoms recognize these disparities. And if it is any consolation, from my daughter’s new england based HS, who sent about 10% of its class to ivies, I don’t know of one Siemens, AIME or other winner among them. And I would have known if something like that happened.</p>