<p>I am very interested to hear everyone's personal experiences concerning their high school's history with Yale. My high school, for example, has 2,800 students. Each class contains 600-700 kids; however, in the 11 years my school has been open not a single kid has gotten into Yale. </p>
<p>I guess this means one of two things...</p>
<p>1) Nobody has gotten into Yale before from my school, and nobody ever will :P
2) There's bound to be someone to get in eventually (hopefully me)</p>
<p>I've been hearing that there are some high schools that get 2-3 kids per year into Yale, and that is astonishing to me. </p>
<p>Don’t worry about others from other schools. You may be the trailblazer for your school, being the first to get in if you are applying. There will be others that follow in subsequent years. I have seen that happen. </p>
<p>You don’t (probably) know how many applied. </p>
<p>I see threads sometimes on CC about how a poster “just knows” that fellow student A will get into some particular school, and since the HS is small, there’s no way that they stand a chance because they obviously won’t accept two from that HS.</p>
<p>That’s no more valid than thinking nobody from your school will ever get in. It’s just not how it works. </p>
<p>My kids’ high school admits from 1 to a high of 7 every year. These are actual numbers - not rumor. Senior classes average about 225 with 100% applying to college. The school is inner city, selective enrollment with a one third low income and two thirds URM student population. Of the 1 to 7, one or two at most, are low income and/or URM students each year. Not all students matriculate with the losses usually occurring to Harvard, Stanford, and M.I.T.</p>
<p>@paleselan: I agree with T26E4, your high school is not being blackballed. However, all high schools are not created equal. Some high schools – think Thomas Jefferson, Boston Latin, Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech etc – are jammed packed with highly intelligent, motivated students who had to test into those high schools, all of which have lower Admissions rates than HYP. Usually half the class is a National Merit Scholarship student, some are Intel finalists, cancer researchers, math prodigy’s, world class musicians, recruited athletes; many are minorities or first generation students. Yale – and all selective colleges – look at those high schools differently and take large numbers of students every year (high single digits to double digits). If you don’t attend an acclaimed high school like that, don’t beat yourself up, or compare your high school to theirs, as it will just drive you crazy. </p>
<p>When you attend an average high school that hasn’t had many admissions to a top college like Yale, your best course of action is to talk to your guidance counselor and ask them how both of you can work in tandem to get you and your school on Yale’s radar. Your GC could pick up the phone, call Yale and speak with the regional Admissions Director to talk up specific students at your school. Your GC could also arrange for a representative from Yale to visit your school, sit in on a class and speak with interested students. There are many proactive things your GC can do – and sometimes students need to be the “squeaky wheel” and start nicely motivating their GC to help you and your school get noticed. Best of luck to you!</p>
<p>When I got into Yale in 1978 from my public high school in Washington, DC, I was the first. There has not been another since then. My D’s high school, which has a graduating class of about 125 each year, routinely sends 4-5 kids to Yale, 4-6 kids to Harvard and the same amount to UPenn each year. Is this fair? No. But, I would suggest you be the kid I was back in 1978 and buck the system and apply, apply, apply!!! All they can do it say No.</p>
<p>There are lots of high schools where hardly anybody ever applies to Yale; and these are not necessarily bad high schools, either–they are just in places where applying to selective out of state private colleges is just not on the radar for very many people.</p>
<p>As mentioned, the number who apply is a huge factor. I was the only one from my class, though there were classmates who were about as good but wanted to go elsewhere. There were about 8 from my class who went to Stanford and an enormous number who went to the local state university. In my Yale freshman class, there were 12 kids from my metropolitan area: 8 were from the top-of-the-line private school, one was from another private school, and three were from suburban public schools.</p>
<p>@IxnayBob, we do know how many applied. Naviance shows how many students applied, how many were accepted and how many enrolled from a given HS for every college for the past 8 years. In addition you can see what the GPA, ACT, and SAT scores were for those admitted to every college. In a small HS like ours, this makes it very easy to discover the GPA and scores of individual students when only 1-2 students go to each college every year.</p>
<p>OP, from our HS with classes of 50-60, from 0-2 students are admitted to Yale every year, usually 1 or 2, with an average of 4 students applying every year. </p>
<p>@nynightowl, you’re right, I had forgotten about Naviance. The class size at my kids’ school is around 100, so it was possible to learn quite a bit. </p>
<p>@OP, 3 kids matriculated at Yale this year. I believe that everyone who was accepted decided to attend. It’s a relatively selective high school (Around 1 in 4). </p>
<p>Move to New Haven. There’s a slight advantage to attending a New Haven public high school. Nationally, 1 out of 1,000 are admitted. In New Haven, it’s 8.4 out of 1,000. </p>
<p>Last year, the Yale Daily News estimated, 10 students were accepted. And the Yale FaceBook page lists 60 students who live in New Haven. These are much better numbers than the suburbs or demographically similar towns in Connecticut such as Bridgeport or Hartford. </p>
<p>I think the locals–who are otherwise qualified–get a slight edge because Yale sees value in educating a cadre of future leaders from the community in which it’s located. </p>
<p>From my school, one student has gotten into Yale.
My school has much more luck with Princeton
Then again, I doubt many students apply to Yale from my school, while a lotttt apply to Princeton.</p>
<p>I also have no idea what that ratio is supposed to mean. At first, I figured it was the ratio between number of freshman entering Yale and all the high school graduates in the country. But there are about 3.3 million high school graduates a year, so that ratio would be more like 1 out of 2,400. Maybe it’s the ratio of the number accepted to total number of college freshmen?</p>
<p>In any event, it doesn’t seem to mean much.</p>
<p>To clarify, it’s out of high school students going to college. Here’s the quote from the Yale Daily News: </p>
<p>“He [Yale Dean of Admissions Jeffrey Brenzel] said based on the national figures, 1 out of 1,000 United States high school graduates going to college is offered a spot at Yale. For graduates of New Haven Public Schools going on to college, that statistic rises to 8.4 out of approximately 1,000 students.”</p>
<p>So it sounds like it is the ratio of the number accepted by Yale to the total number of college freshmen.</p>
<p>If you figure it’s rounded, I suppose it’s about right. Yale accepts about 2,000, and there are something in the neighborhood of two million high school graduates who go to college each year.</p>
<p>I don’t think it says that living in New Haven improves your chances, at least not much. If interest in going to Yale is more than 8.4 times higher in New Haven than nationally (possible), it could actually be read as indicating the opposite.</p>
