How many available spots in a boarding school are you really chasing?

Prep School Admissions
1

<p>OK, since SharingGift is crunching numbers and coming up with all these great analytical observations, thought I’d share some of my own calculations.</p>

<p>How many available spots in a boarding school are you really chasing? Let’s take Choate as an example. </p>

<p>Choate total enrollment is approx 860 students, so as an applicant for the Third Form (9th grade) you think, “Great! I’m applying for one in 215 spots” (i.e. 860 ÷ 4).</p>

<p>Wrong!<br>
In each admissions cycle, Choate adds new students to each grade, so the Third Form class is the smallest—only about 160 students.<br>
So you think, “Great! I’m applying for one in 160 spots”</p>

<p>Wrong!<br>
Half the spots are allocated to Boys and half are allocated to Girls.<br>
So you think, “Great! I’m applying for one in 80 spots”</p>

<p>Wrong!<br>
Day students spots are reserved for day students. Boarding spots are reserved for boarders. Int’l spots are reserved for int’ls. Assuming all int’l students will board, the breakdown at Choate for these groups is:
25% Day
15% Int’l
60% Boarding Domestic
100% sum</p>

<p>If you apply these percentages to the 80 boys and 80 girls in the 9th grade, you get:
80<em>25% = 20 Day spots (9th grade boy)
80</em> 15% = 12 Int’l spots (9th grade boy)
80* 60% = 48 Boarding Domestic spots (9th grade boy)</p>

<p>All schools anticipate that some of the applicants they accept will choose to go elsewhere. So the percentage that actually matriculates is called the YIELD. You can get a fairly good empirical guestimate of the school’s yield by this formula:
*Yield = 0.06(SSAT avg ÷ admit rate) + 0.35 **</p>

<p>So for Choate:
0.06 * (85% ÷ 19%) + 0.35 = 0.62 Yield</p>

<p>Now you divide the available slots by the Yield Rate to calculate the number of acceptance letters:</p>

<p>20 spots ÷ 0.62 = 32 Day acceptance letters (9th grade boy)
12 spots ÷ 0.62 = 19 Int’l acceptance letters (9th grade boy)
48 spots ÷ 0.62 = 77 Boarding Domestic acceptance letters (9th grade boy)</p>

<p>If you are an applicant for the Fourth Form (10th grade), there will be approx 60 new 10th graders added (30 boys + 30 girls)-- I am including 5% attrition from the original 9th grade class. </p>

<p>So if you run through the whole analysis, you get:</p>

<p>8 spots ÷ 0.62 = 12 Day acceptance letters (10th grade boy)
5 spots ÷ 0.62 = 7 Int’l acceptance letters (10th grade boy)
18 spots ÷ 0.62 = 29 Boarding Domestic acceptance letters (10th grade boy)</p>

<p>I'm assuming the yield rate is the same for these different categories. Most probably, it's not. Bottom line is that you are chasing much, much fewer than 215 spots.</p>

2

<p>Then, if you are applying for FA, multiply by the percent on FA. At Choate it’s 33%. So 77 *.33 = 25 or 26
It’s probably a bit less since FA kids tend to yield at a higher rate.</p>

<p>Then, if you want to really make yourself miserable, consider that they are drawing those 25 from a much larger pool of applicants than the 50 FP apps.</p>

3

<p>The ultra-meager silver lining is that it might be marginally higher than 25 or 26, because the int’ls are probably not FA recipients</p>

4

<p>You mean, the “pewter” lining. :P</p>

5

<p>Which is why the most accurate answer to pretty much any “Chance Me” post is “Your chances are not good.”</p>

6

<p>I remember when DS applied to SPS and PEA - both NH based institutions, I did a similar analysis. I also estimated and subtracted slots for children of faculty and legacy students. DS was neither. Even though on average SPS admitted approximately 20 students from NH, I estimated they would admit maybe 2-4 3rd form non-faculty, non legacy boys who were from NH. </p>

<p>Hence “cast a wide net” and kiss the ground of the fine institution that accepts you.</p>

7

<p>You also need to account for some of those seats going to recruited athletes, musicians, URMs, etc. and satisfying domestic geographic diversity. When all was said and done, ChoatieKid was vying for one of the 15 seats in his “bucket” for the entering class in 2011. Still kissing the ground…</p>

8

<p>Thanks, GMT, for not posting this during last year’s admissions cycle – I don’t know if I could have withstood the stress!! ;)</p>

9

<p>And don’t forget their desire for geographical diversity and plentiful representation by URMs.</p>

10

<p>Now is the optimists turn. Guys, an average applicant applies to 5 schools, so you are in fact vying for 1 of 5 x 77 = 385 spots. So the odds are not bad. Also you are not just vying for one athlete or nothing, an athlete can also be a musician and so on. So yeah, relax, your odds aren’t bad.</p>

11

<p>An applicant’s admit likelihood is not random. A walk-on-water candidate will have a higher probabilty of landing one of those 77 spaces and may get acceptances from multiple schools. A “weaker” candidate (e.g. FA need) may get WL or none. So it’s not a straight forward calculation that 5 x schools = 5 x probable admits for a candidate.</p>

<p>I doubt that schools allocate an explicit number of beds for field hockey players or oarsman. Fac brats (even if they live on campus in a dorm apartment) fall in the Day student bucket. Legacy & sibling can span day/ int’l/ domestic categories.</p>

<p>You need to know the yield rate to get a fairer picture of how many places u are chasing.</p>

12

<p>More of the positive side. You are boy. There are 160 spots available and 1600 applicants. When you half the amount of spots, you need to keep in mind that you are also halving the 1600 applicants.</p>

13

<p>

</p>

<p>How do you know the applicant pool is evenly male/female? If schools try to maintain a 50% male-female ratio and the odds are better for boys, that implies that the applicant pool is more heavily female.</p>

14

<p>Most coed schools have more boys than girls, and I assumed - perhaps wrongly - that that reflected the applicant pool. If not, what do you think is the reason for the disparity between boys and girls?</p>

15

<p>The AO I spoke w, from one school w a lopsided boy:girl ratio, said the school was originally a boys school and was transitioning to 50:50 and just hadn’t gotten there yet.</p>

16

<p>Daunting metrics! Assuming your kid tests about right and would, in your view, be a good admit for School X, you need to avoid psyching yourself out during the admission’s interview. Every family coaches their kid (and themselves) differently. We focused on taking it easy, being ourselves, and enjoying the day. We used to say to each other “let the other guys worry, we’re here to have a good time.” That helped us distract from the terror of the stats noted above!</p>

17

<p>ThacherParent: OTOH, one good thing about posting stats like this is that it SHOULD sober people up quickly about their/their child’s actual chances of getting into one of the super-selectives. Heck, even the moderately selectives are not a lock for the average smart well rounded child.</p>

18

<p>To the OP’s stats … please realize that the applicant pool also is split into similar groups … so what really matters is if the group in which your child sits has a better or worse admission rate than the overall average … the small number of admission slots by itself is neither good or bad.</p>

19

<p>@seven…I couldn’t agree more. You beat the drum for realism on this site all the time, which is so important. There are too many bright middle schoolers at the top of their class (academically, socially and otherwise), and their parents, who bring an inflated view of their admission chances to the BS application process.</p>

20

<p>To me, 3togo makes a lot of sense. As you divide and divide the applicant pool, your chance of admission may improve, deteriorate, or remain about the same. I guess it all depends on your profile. In a generic sense, an Asian girl from NE would be significantly worse off than a URM boy from midwest.</p>