<p>Is there a reliable way to find out if a college will view your high school as good or not?</p>
<p>Well, there’s the Newsweek’s top high school list.</p>
<p>… not that that’s a reliable way to rate school at all.</p>
<p>Well, i think that it really depends on the reputation your high school has built, like where its sent its kids, how they have been doing in college. It also helps if an adcom is an alum and colleges eventually get a feel for high schools. Apparently most colleges know that my high school is very prestigious being private and we have some very famous alumni, and most kids can get into good schools with a 93-95 average.</p>
<p>The real way prestige works is self-defining. If you and your friends don’t just ooze “we’re better than you” when you see townies, then it’s not “prestigious”.</p>
<p>Talk to the admissions reps. That’s the easiest way to find out…</p>
<p>My high school isn’t highly-ranked on Newsweek (due to its anti-AP stance). It is, however, a top-school powerhouse and well-known amongst adcoms. I think the best way to determine prestige is simply by the percentage of seniors going to top-tiered schools, and perhaps by average SAT scores.</p>
<p>Just to give you an idea of how accurate Newsweek’s rankings are, our rank is in the 700s; another public school about 30 minutes from us is in the upper 100s. Our average SAT score is ~1950; theirs is ~1200. But what else could you expect with such a rudimentary and flawed rankings system?</p>
<p>the US News and Newsweek rankings are one way of determining your high school’s prestige since “better” students “tend” to take more AP/IB classes</p>
<p>Here’s the thing, though. Your high school’s prestige doesn’t reflect on YOU, because you weren’t the one making the money to live in that school district. It merely reflects what your parents were able to do / earn. And colleges get that. They don’t penalize the kid in the “average” school district for the fact that his parents couldn’t afford the “fancy” school district.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, that is true but I don’t think that as somebody in the bottom 50% of my class, I would be able to get into schools like the University of Pittsburgh if I didn’t go to a “good” high school which may reflect a college’s understanding that my school curriculum is much harder than a normal public school’s</p>
<p>Who cares? High school prestige is a myth.</p>
<p>^agreed. </p>
<p>I do go to a no prestige high school (public, reeks of marijuana from the 70’s when my parents went there, infested with mold, half of school is housed in 30 year old “temporary” trailers, best looking equipment are the pop machines, virtually no AP, poster child school for “crappy, depressed public schools”), and I was suprised by the fact that there really was no difference between the quality of schools that people went to from my high school and the high school in the large, award-winning public district that I formerly went to nearby. So, to be honest, high school prestiege is probably a myth.</p>
<p>However, if you wanted the most accurate imformation about how a college would rate your high school, you should probably refer to the state benchmark tests that they use for every high school with a state, and then compare that with the state’s academic quality. For instance, my school rated excellent for theear, meeting about 20 of 26 requirements. The state of Ohio also has a academic reputation of about 15th best in the nation or so, meaning that my school would look better than, say, the public school that scored 16 of 23 benchmark points in South Carolina which has an academic quality of 37th in the nation.</p>
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<p>False. I heard from a Cornell ad-com that “<name of=”" my=“” hs=“”> kids don’t compete with kids only compete wit other <my hs=“”> kids". </my></name></p>
<p>As in, Cornell accepts, more or less, a set number of kids from my HS based on their standing only from within the school, without comparing ot other schools From looking at years of data, that seems to be the case, and the number seems to vary up or down slightly based on the performance of our current alum in Cornell. </p>
<p>Similar trends are apparent to all the top schools that are popular with our students, and so it can be guessed that similar rules apply there.</p>
<p>The name of our school definitely carries some weight. You better believe that if your HS is regularly graduating honors students from X Top School, the adcom knows that propensity.</p>
<p>However, I went to legitimately one of the best HS’s in the country (I’d say it’s safely top 100 by any metric). Most people who perceive their school’s as prestigious are just simply wrong, or more accurately, thinking too narrowly in their scope. Their school may be better than average, but average isn’t particularly good at all, now is it?</p>
<p>Prestige is a myth? Tell the kids at Phillips Exeter that.</p>
<p>^I’d be more than happy too. Anyone have any statisticson the average salaries of elite school grads after 20 years? I doubt they are much different from your high school.</p>
<p>No they aren’t, but only because I attend a prestigious high school as well (though nowhere near the level of Phillips Exeter). I don’t think you could rationally argue that there isn’t a significant difference between the salaries of Phillips Exeter grads and, say, the salaries of your standard public high school. It’s similar to arguing that there isn’t a significant difference in income between Harvard and University of Arizona. Granted, there are more factors that can slightly skew the high school numbers, but to deny the lack of a significant difference is ludicrous.</p>
<p>I vote with prestige being in the “irrelevant” category. Either the place works for you or it doesn’t.</p>
<p>^The place where prestige counts is according to adcoms. If they know your school’s rep, you might have an upper-hand because they will recognize the school as being rigorous or very competitive, factors that can explain and forgive a relatively weak GPA/class rank.</p>
<p>Student A: 3.7 GPA, 2350 SAT, class rank of 15/400
Student B: 4.0 GPA, 2050 SAT, valedictorian</p>
<p>Admissions are of course contingent on other factors, but if student A goes to a rigorous, prestigious high school, student A will likely have the edge over student B. That’s not to say student-B types will never make it in, but if a school is not prestigious, generally only 1-2 kids from that school will be admitted, whereas in elite high schools, colleges will probably admit several students from that school (and they sometimes do not need to do narrow it down to a few students- even if the school is Harvard, very rarely will all the students matriculate at one place.</p>
<p>Yes, there are other factors too. At prestigious high schools, there probably is a degree of higher difficulty at being accepted. Think of those students as being ORMs (although to a much lesser extent than the actual ORM competition). They need to compete with each other to gain that admissions spot, and some will falter, not because they aren’t qualified enough, but because there are too many applicants from that one school. But also like ORMs, there is some sort of imbalance in the favor of elite high school students; even if the competition is an imbalance, these students will still disproportionately represent a college’s population.</p>
<p>I’d argue that now college focus more on the context of the applicant’s application and the promise and drive of the individual. not so much the highschool. college always take in kids who they know haven’t had a good highschool education and it never seems to be an issue.</p>
<p>^True, the process is definitely more individualized than it probably used to be, but if one attends a rigorous high school and does well, the advantages are obvious and significant in terms of college admissions.</p>
<p>Anyone who denies the importance of prestige does not live in the New England or the Tri-State area.</p>