My high school has about 2000 students, about 500 each class. The top ten this year got into harvard, mit (three students got in), Georgetown, cornell william and mary, etc. however, my school usually ranks pretty average on standardized testing. taking more than 3 ap classes a year is considered very rigorous (my school only allows 4 ap classes a year—we have block scheduling and ap classes run the whole year).
will my hs negatively or positively affect my chances? or will it be neutral.
Neutral. It’ll be YOU that will affect your chances - your courses, your grades, your test scores, your recs, your essays, your ECs, your awards, and you, your personality.
As you’ve already seen, the top ten at your school did great, so there’s no reason why you can’t as well. But they did great because of themselves. A way it can negatively hurt you is competition among the top ten of your class for certain universities who may want to limit students from one particular high school.
Which high school you go to will almost never affect your chances in terms that one kid, with the same credentials as another but attends a better school, will get in over the other. In fact, if a kid that attends a rough school ends up with the same accomplishments and scores etc. as a kid who went to a prestigious school, the admissions might view the kid that went to the rougher school as a person who has had to overcome more adversity, thus benefiting him or her. However, there are schools such as Harvard Westlake that have insanely high admit rates to the Ivy League and other top colleges. This is because the colleges find that students that went to HW are very prepared for college (correct me if I’m wrong). So, in short, going to a prestigious or not-so-prestigious school won’t heavily affect your admissions chances. However, there are some schools that will, in fact, help. Also, attending a school with a good rep will help, but it will only be a very small consideration in your application. My school had about a 20% to 30% admit rate to Ivy League schools, but I’m not counting on my school’s rep to get me in (it doesn’t really have one, as we only had our first graduating class this year). Message me if you have any other questions!
The main benefits of prestigious schools are that they often prepare you very well for college and that they have superior college/career counseling (sometimes/often including connections to selective college adcoms), leading to higher rates of selective college admissions.
Also, since your school is familiar to top schools, they’ll be able to correctly credit you for your accomplishments rather than worry whether or not the As on your transcript hold up to other top applicants.
I agree with @ap012199
Admissions team members very often say they consider an applicants accomplishments " in context "
This most likely means that they expect an individual with more opportunities to have more accomplishments. So coming from a very top high school can be good if you take advantage of the opportunities given to you, while coming from a subpar school may boost your chances if you exceeded expectations.
Just speculation though…