<p>from what I’ve heard from floormates, there is a perception that Columbia is perhaps the most difficult school to get into while attending a tri-state-area high school. Often Columbia is harder to get into from some schools than Harvard.</p>
<p>@admissionsgeek
I go to Hunter and we are in no way like Dalton (I’d say most of us would actually resent being compared to a private school). We’re proud to be a public school and we may be in the UES but more than half of our class is middle class…we do get more of “that crowd” that you refer to than the specialized schools but they are definitely a minority. The main differences between Hunter and Stuy is that Stuy (and Bronx Sci) is 60% asian while we’re only 30% and we lower teacher-ratio ratio because we’re smaller and so our humanities programs are better. We write better than they do, but they have more math/science-oriented students (as well as funding for athletics and more classes).</p>
<p>The “big three” thing needs to change. Sure, for the last 30+ years or so those have been all been EXCELLENT schools, but right now there are many other good schools like Townsend Harris or MSIT that, in my opinion, are easily better than B-tech, which I believe couldn’t even offer BC Calculus classes this year because of lack of funding. The quality of education is now what it was twenty years ago.</p>
<p>I understand for statistical purposes there’s no point in including Hunter in there (just look at the class sizes: 200 at Hunter, 800 at Stuy, 1500 this year for B-tech) because we send fewer students - but a way higher percentage - to top schools. But anyway I wasn’t saying Hunter belongs in the big three. I was just showing some pride.
And then I felt obliged to respond when you said we were more like Dalton.</p>
<p>yeah, i am sorry you feel insulted, and so i am glad you are here to defend your school. but the avg. hunter student comes from a significantly higher socioeconomic status than the kids at stuy, b-tech and definitely more than kids out at bronx, queens and bk high schools most have never heard of. </p>
<p>so in an interesting sense, the pride you speak for hunter (and denigrating attitude toward b-tech) in a way affirms precisely why hunter is not the same. your school doesn’t have to worry about NYS DOE cutting funding. i don’t doubt that Hunter is a great school, i’d send my kids there. but let’s call a spade a spade. when 1/4 of your school attends an ivy, then you have more in common with Dalton than you do with Stuy (which is closer to 15%) - and that is not just that your kids are smart leaving, but come with significant talent coming in. you may be the exception to the rule, but doesn’t make the rule useless.</p>
<p>Hunter is poor as hell. Have you ever visited our school? Many classrooms still have tiny desk-chairs that are designed more for junior high and elementary school students, and classroom compartments are separated by a thin foldable barrier (which can be pulled back and forth like a screen) and so in class we often have to speak up to be heard above the noise of the classroom next door. Our clubs and sports teams have so little funding that this year students are required to pay $25 each time they join a team (it’s because our teams need money, not because we’re so wealthy that we can all easily pay the fee). STUY has more funding than Hunter (I’m sure stuy offers like 2x as many AP classes as we do :[) and any of the specialized schools…ask anyone from BronxSci or B-tech.</p>
<p>I do think we’re better than B-tech, but my post has no “denigrating attitude”. Tech has been sorely in need of funding - much more than Hunter needs it - for a long time now, and that’s why this year they increased the entering class to 1,500 students (up from 1,000 normally, I think) so the DOE would give them more money. But when you increase the class size by that much, the quality of the teaching will inevitably decrease and even with the increase in funding the number of resources available for each student can’t help but go down as well. Consider also that the additional hundreds entering each year will all be the ones who didn’t make Stuy or BronxSci - how can the school possibly keep the reputation it’s had for the past few decades if this keeps up? I wish this weren’t the case for Tech, but the facts speak for themselves. </p>
<p>The pride I “speak for hunter…affirms precisely why hunter is not the same”? No. I don’t think we’re better because my parents have a lot of money and because I live in the UES (which I don’t) - I know we’re better because Tech just has way too many students and not enough teachers.</p>
<p>Each entering 7th grade class at Hunter has about 220 students. Of those 220, 40-50 come from the Hunter elementary school which is in the same building (the elementary schoolers are pretty much guaranteed admission into the high school as long as the make it in in kindergarten). Since it is only possible to enter the elementary school in kindergarten and the test can only be taken by Manhattan residents, that’s where “that crowd” comes from. But again, that’s only 40-50 out of 200+ students. The other 150 enter by passing the Hunter test in 7th grade, which is quite similar to the SHSAT, and that’s why Hunter, liek the big three, has a large number of asians.</p>
<p>As you say we are like Dalton, but only in that we’re as smart as any private school student and because we have a greater percentage going to top colleges…and that is NOT because we have better resources than every other public school (though I admit our teachers are probably better). College admissions statistics aside, we’re much more similar to Stuy than to Dalton.</p>
<p>edit:
The other 150 enter by passing the Hunter test in 7th grade, which is quite similar to the SHSAT, and that’s why Hunter, like the big three, has a large number of asians. The “significant talent coming in” is due more to the fact that asians are good at standardized tests, and that isn’t really accounted for by socioeconomic status (and this is why we feel so close to Stuy - most of us come from the same backgrounds).</p>
<p>My nyc public hs may be poor, but i f-ing love it!
id argue its better than any specialized/private/“elite” hs :)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>You’re correct in asserting that HCHS kids both arrive “smart” and leave “smart”–this is due to the significantly more rigorous admissions standards that applicants to HCHS have to meet to be admitted.</p>
<p>However, associating Hunter with a school like Dalton, chock full of Upper East Side prep school brats, is very offensive when one considers how these wealthy types are portrayed in the media and conceived in our imaginations.</p>
<p>I myself attended high school, spent four years, on the Upper East Side, but would loathe for any connection to be drawn between my high school and Dalton besides our shared location.</p>
<p>According to its “School Profile,” 75 percent of HCHS students are sons or daughters of immigrants and 15 percent are “economically disadvantaged.” Not bad, but not comparable to Stuyvesant in socioeconomic diversity.</p>
<p>Given the nature of the SHSAT, that admission to New York City’s “Specialized High Schools” depends solely on this exam, the packing order is quite clear: Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech, etc. HCHS, however,–although it is a public school–is in a league of its own, due to different admissions policies and standards.</p>
<p>I intended for the data to show that admission to Columbia is exceedingly difficult even for those students who are fortunate enough to attend a specialized high school.</p>
<p>Here’s the stuy statistics.
For Columbia College ED:
3/25
Columbia College Regular:
19/104
Columbia SEAS ED:
7/14
Columbia SEAS Regular:
5/30</p>
<p>About ten of the SEAS regular applicants had averages in the 80’s. A good half of the Columbia College applicants for both regular and ED had averages in the 80’s as well. Almost everyone for SEAS ED was relatively competitive. They were all obviously long shots and none of them got in.</p>
<p>I didn’t include waitlists, deferalls, etc. just the acceptances.</p>
<p>This year’s ED acceptances were similar. 3/20-something for College and 8/12-13 for SEAS.</p>
<p>I’d certainly say that Stuy, BxSci, and BTech are in a league of their own due to the fact that they attract so many underprivileged minority (especially Asian) students from the outer boroughs. I’ve never considered to be in the same league, because the student body is quite different. That said, “private school in New York” does not mean “Dalton”. Sure, there are the infamous UES/UWS prep schools like Dalton, Collegiate, CSH, Marymount, Nightengale, etc. but there are also more middle class private schools like Dominican Academy, Regis, and Xavier. Hunter probably belongs to this final group.</p>
<p>pwoods:
Dominican Academy is an all-girls Catholic school (and each grade has only 60 students).
Regis and Xavier are both all-boys Jesuit high schools.
Hunter is a hundred times more diverse than any of these schools. Any 5th grader who scores above the cutoff in the city-wide tests is eligible to take the Hunter test in 6th grade. ANY 5th grader.
Guy-girl ratio is 48-52 or so and, like most other NYC public schools, a huge percentage of the student body is atheist.</p>
<p>You’re from Connecticut? With all due respect, what the hell do you know about public schools here? Unless you moved out of the city last year or something, please just keep your opinion to yourself. Regis and Dominican academy? You couldn’t have picked worse examples to compare Hunter to…those are all excellent schools, but the atmosphere is completely different. </p>
<p>Visit Hunter. If you just take one look inside one of our classrooms or hallways and then visit Stuy and Dalton you’ll see the difference IMMEDIATELY and you’ll hit yourself over the head for it too. It’s so f***ing obvious…seriously. </p>
<p>Hunter is as public as it gets…the fact that admissions is based only on a multiple choice test means that it does favor students with educated parents and higher family incomes, but it’s NOWHERE near the level at any of those private schools.</p>
<p>While I agree with the fact about the public school thing [To be honest, I don’t see why anyone would care about something like this], I don’t know why you think stuy’s facilities are <em>that</em> much better.
Our first floor is nice and all laid out in marble. This is just the lobby, with administration being here and that’s about it. The classrooms aren’t nearly as nice [although I wouldn’t go so far as to say that they are bad].</p>
<p>I actually interned at hunter in the it dept. and I went to each floor, got to know the entire building and saw the majority of the classrooms [I spent two summers and 1 break there - It was not a 2 day thing]. While the hallways are admittedly more dreary, the majority of classrooms are at the very least on par with Stuy’s, if not better.</p>
<p>The entrance exam thing could actually be used for Stuy, Bx. Sci, B. Tech as well. I didn’t bother taking a course for the hunter exam because I didn’t think it was necessary (even though my parents offered) - big mistake. On the other hand, I went to a prep course for the shsat and ended up with above a 700 on the test. </p>
<p>Although I’ve met some real geniuses here at Stuy (you find they aren’t the pretentious ones, but rather people you know will be in the papers one day), as well as friends I wouldn’t give up for anything, I would probably have gone to a different school had I known how far Stuy has dropped.
ED and EA this year were in the craphole (Notably in Cornell, Stanford and Yale, but pretty much everywhere acceptances dropped to 1/4 of last three years, with the exceptions of Columbia and NYU Stern). I heard Hunter got shafted at Cornell pretty badly, too.</p>
<p>Although Columbia SEAS would be my first choice now, I’m not really sure what to expect, due to how volatile decisions proved this year. Columbia College in particular this year, 2/3 of the people accepted were minorities (one with an 1820 SAT and an 87 average…), while rejected were legacies with 2400’s and 97+ averages.</p>
<p>hm…true the physical condition of a school itself isn’t really an indication I was only using that as a small example.</p>
<p>It’s not so much the facilities as the resources as a whole. You guys have teams for every sport in the PSAL (and can afford to pay for all the necessary equipment). You can choose from more than twenty AP courses and dozens of non-APs (like robotics). We offer only 3 foreign languages, and for a such a good school that seems pretty sad. Admittedly, Hunter probably doesn’t have these classes for two reasons: a)no money b)with only 200 students per grade, even if we had the selection not enough students might be interested in enrolling for the teacher to actually teach so it’d be kind of pointless to offer the classes anyway. But that doesn’t change the fact that you have it, and we don’t.</p>
<p>Private schools have their own running tracks, their own soccer fields, their own swimming pools…everything. Private school = resources, and to compare Hunter to a private school is to hint that Hunter has those resources, which it doesn’t. Not by a long shot. </p>
<p>Haha and yes, I don’t see why anyone would care about this either, but I just finished college apps and I have no school tomorrow because it’s the Hunter test and I feel SO RELAXED.</p>
<p>edit (guess not):
The entrance exam thing could actually be used for Stuy, Bx. Sci, B. Tech as well.</p>
<p>Possibly, except for one thing. As you know Hunter focuses more on liberal arts, which is why the test has an essay section while the SHSAT doesn’t - entering 7th graders are (slightly) better at writing. Without the essay section our demographics would be almost exactly like Stuy’s and those of the other specialized schools, but the many students whose parents can’t speak english mess up more on the essay and so we have slightly fewer asians.</p>
<p>I don’t know what class sizes are like at Hunter, but every class at Stuy has 34 students, the max cap for NY.</p>
<p>It’s true that we used to offer these electives, but in the past few years almost all of our electives have been cut. APs aren’t that great lately, either. Only about a third of the people who applied for BC Calc got in (this isn’t a grade thing, there just wasn’t enough space and it was done by lottery), while the rest of us have to make do with AB.</p>
<p>If it’s any indication, I’ve applied for about 20 electives at my time at Stuy (not always different ones, I’ve applied for one class 5 times already) and I got zip. Any electives don’t fill up to the brim get cut.</p>
<p>While I agree that our ten-period technology courses (ie. robotics, principles of engineering) classes in senior year are decent, most students don’t get those classes (only one of them is offered per semester). You get as many who are stuck with things like pottery. This year was so packed that some kids got put into Social Science Intel (without applying for it…) instead of a ten-tech because of lack of space.</p>
<p>A lot of the things you mention are really not Stuy’s resources. Unless you can’t swim, you won’t be able to swim in our pool. The only time I was in it was for the swim test. For PSAL teams, they’re paid for nearly in full by the students (as are most clubs). Things like Model UN can run you over 1 grand a year.</p>
<p>It’s really not all its cracked up to be here. As you stated, the reasons for Hunter not having these classes is because of its small size. This can be both a blessing and a curse. Yes, Stuy offers some of these unique and cool sounding electives. The chances of you getting one of the 34 spots? Slim to none.</p>
<p>Edit: I don’t know about the writing level of Hunter students, so I won’t comment. I will say, however, that a lot of Stuy kids that have averages under 90 are really bad writers. I don’t think I’m phenomenal by any means, but editing some college essays of people made me wince. I often wrote more in corrections then they did.
I find this rather odd, because the worst departments by far in our school are math and science (science being hit and miss for good teachers). History teachers tend to be phenomenal and english teachers usually pretty good. Although you might get the old boring guy for english, there’s so many vibrant teachers in the english department that its hard for less than half your teachers to be great.</p>
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</p>
<p>Don’t let your fanboyism distort your ability to reason and to express yourself objectively.</p>
<p>90 percent of Regis students are sons of immigrants. Its mission statement stipulates that “*n the admissions process, special consideration is given to those who cannot otherwise afford a Catholic education.” The Dean of Admission ensures that affirmative action is practiced in the way it should be practiced–specific, clear preference is given to boys of academic talent and promise from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. It is the only Jesuit high school in the nation to offer full-tuition scholarships to every single student admitted.</p>
<p>If you’re asserting that Regis lacks diversity because all applicants must be baptized, Roman Catholic males, you’re correct. But, Regis is one of the most socioeconomically and geographically diverse independent high schools in New York–its students come from all five boroughs and the tri-state area.</p>
<p>And, despite being an independent high school founded chiefly to provide an elite education for students from middle and working class families, it manages to send nearly a third of its annual graduating class to the Ivy League+SM+AWS.</p>
<p>I can speak proudly and factually about my alma mater without viciously denigrating other schools. Please curb your vitriol.</p>
<p>Yes, you are correct. I went way too far with the “hundred times” and I apologize for that.
I did very little research beyond noting that they were all all-boys or all-girls schools.</p>
<p>Those institutions all provide terrific educations, and I don’t dispute that, but the differences in their admissions requirements still lead to an atmosphere very different from that of the specialized schools. Yes, Regis students come from much more socially and economically diverse families than private school students do, but the school atmosphere is still quite different. The things that can be said in the hallways, the clubs available, interactions with classmates from other backgrounds - that’s the beauty of NYC’s public schools. A 6th grader (who let’s assume would also be accepted to Regis) who decides to go to Hunter in 7th grade instead of Regis in 9th grade would end up a very different person at the end of high school. Hunter shares many more similarities with the specialized schools than it does with Regis (or Dominican Academy, or Xavier), and if in responding to pwood’s statement I appeared denigrating (edit: or if I appeared to be labeling Regis as a private school like Dalton) then I apologize. That was definitely not my intention.</p>
<p>Why the vicious response, DuaneReade? I was trying to support your assertion that HCHS is unlike typical UES prep schools even though it is in a different league than Stuy and BxSci. The Specialized Science High Schools are large public schools that admit the students who score highest on math and science tests. This attracts a lot of children of poor Asian-American immigrants, since they are generally well-educated in those quantitative subjects and can only afford private schooling. It is worth, nothing, though, that not all students at these schools are poor Asians! Stuyvesant, BxSci, and BTech are phenomenal public high schools, much better than typical New York public schools, and attracts smart, determined students of all ethnicities. I don’t know much about BTech and BxSci, but I can certainly tell you that not everything at Stuy revolved around math and science. They have the second-best debate team in the city, and most of my friends there are quite good at the humanities. That said, they’re still specialized SCIENCE high schools, and there’s a reason they win all those Intel awards.</p>
<p>I know very little about HCHS, but it seems to me that it’s a smaller public school full of intelligent, motivated students, most from the middle-class but some from the working-class and some from the upper-middle-class, who are interested in a college-style liberal arts curriculum. I suspect the school prides itself on its liberal arts curriculum and its humanities classes, trading on its affiliation with Hunter College. It’s a very different environment from a specialized high school (just look at the class sizes and the general interests of the student body), let alone a typical public high school, but it’s obviously not a stereotypical Manhattan prep school like Dalton or Collegiate.</p>
<p>kwu, it’s probably impossible to put Regis in any category, since although it’s a private Jesuit school, it actively recruits (exceptionally bright and motivated) working-class and middle-class students, which sets it apart from Loyola and even DA.</p>
<p>At any rate, I propose we stop arguing over this. This thread has gotten far too off-topic, and I apologize for contributing to that.</p>