The reach schools I’ve applied to this year are Yale, Duke, Hopkins, and Cornell. Duke and Yale are esspecially my favorites. Unfortunately, my naviance account shows bad news in terms of the number of students accepted from previous years:
Duke- 1/5 accepted 2017, 0/12 in 2016
Yale- 0/6 in 2017, 0/6 in 2018 (Naviance shows only 2 green check marks in the SAT vs GPA graph, meaning that only 2 students have ever been accepted bin recent years. While my numbers are very close to those two check marks, so are 4 other X icons)
Hopkins- 0/12 in 2017, 2/20 in 2016. (And so far 1 athletic recruit accepted ED this year.)
Cornell- 4/15 in 2017 and 1/15 in 2016
To make matters worse, at a lot of these schools the graph shows that those accepted in previous years have stats that are respectably lower than mine, making me think that mostly athletic recruits are the ones being accepted. Are my chances for these schools out the window because my high school isn’t respected enough? I go to a decent public school and have a 4.61 W GPA, 34 ACT, top ten/600 rank so I think I’m a very competitive applicant, but it seems like the numbers in Naviance shows otherwise. I was already denied from Penn ED, so I’m trying not to remain too hopeful anymore. Any advice or input?
Admission to all of these places is very selective, so the news that so few have been admitted from your high school is meaningless. Many high schools in the country are in that same situation, with candidates as strong or stronger than you.
Make sure your list has some matches and a couple of safeties that you would be happy to attend. That way you will have a place to start next fall if all else goes wrong for you.
@AnthonyZ There are something like 36,000 high schools in the US, the majority of which probably never have students apply to top schools, let alone be accepted. Except for serious feeder schools like these https://www.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-COLLEGE0711-sort.html the vast majority of HSs will have few if any applicants to top schools, let alone any admits. Your school seems to be well above the median and has enough applicants to at least be on the radar of top schools which puts you well ahead of the game compared to most.
These schools are long-shots for everyone no matter the HS. It is not worth worrying about something you can’t change. All you can do is give each application your best effort and see how things turn out. As long as you have a solid list which includes reach, match, and safety schools that appear affordable and that you would be happy to attend then you are in great shape.
I think the high school that a student applies from is a factor. It is not the largest factor in the admissions equation, but it is definitely a factor. Few colleges will come right out and say so, and there is no national data set I know of which can validate that statement objectively. I only know the data I see around me, which is the admissions results at one particularly well known public high school. Those admissions results are, frankly, not believable. So, there must be a flip-side. The only way that this particular high school can generate the admissions results that it does is if admissions are, in fact, biased to some degree by the prestige of the high school that the student applies from. That bias works in both directions–both for the student at some colleges and against the student at others. Those patterns are definitely visible in the Naviance data–colleges behaving outside of their published acceptance ranges year after year.
Yet another reason that it is important to be comfortable with your ‘likely admit’ schools.
If your apps were not already submitted, I’d suggest that it might be worthwhile to either pay a counselor with experience in selective college admissions to review your app. Sometimes very small changes in how you present things can make a huge difference in admissions. Since your school’s GC and teachers may not have much experience in this area, they might not know to offer some of those tweaks or how to give good advice on essay topics, for example.
But if your apps are submitted, then the only thing you can do is to be your own advocate. At many of the top public and private prep schools, they have GCs who not only know how to package an application, but also what schools are a great match for individual students, so based on that input the students’ apps are very targeted and likely to be effective. Also, many of those GCs have developed personal relationships with AOs at various colleges so can make a personal appeal that could tip the scales. Sounds like you don’t have that. But all is not lost - my son’s school didn’t really have that either and he was admitted to his top choice, so don’t give up.
What all this means is that you can’t rely on anyone working behind the scenes to help you. You have to be your own champion. Depending on the school, that might mean seeking out an interview at schools that highly value that or making direct (but brief, respectful and meaningful - they are really busy!) contact with the regional admissions officer. If you haven’t met or corresponded with an AO, you might even drop them a very brief email about how you see that ____ hasn’t had any experience with students from your school in the past but you are the guy to show them what they’ve been missing (obviously in your own noncorny words - I write like what I am, a middle aged mom, you need to phrase it in your terms.)
Above all, don’t spend more time worrying about things you can’t control. Good luck.
I suggest that if you are interested in Rochester and/or Lehigh that you visit unless you have already been there. They like to see demonstrated interest. I don’t know about UVA (and it is farther away from home)
It looks like few students from your high school even applied to selective colleges. I doubt it will matter one way or another. The data set is so small that it’s hard to draw any sort of conclusion.
@swampdraggin I have visited both Rochester and Lehigh. I especially have good demonstrated interest in Lehigh. Under the “contacts” tab of the common app I denoted that I interacted with a professor for about 1.5 hours while there, I wrote the names of 4 students who attend Lehigh that I interacted with, and I mentioned that I attended a sporting event at Lehigh in the past. My essay also showed great demonstrated interest. I’m still planning on interviewing with Rochester. Thank you!
@RustyTrowel I spoke with my guidance counselor about this issue and she told me that most of our students don’t have luck with Yale because my school hasn’t “proven” itself to Yale (what ever that means). She pretty much said that Yale doesn’t value my school enough so very few students are accepted, even though I go to a well respected public highschool.
Unfortunately I don’t have the money to pay for counselors to review my Application, but I had the best English teacher read and help me revise each of my essays, and they are all pretty good.
Hi, AnthonyZ. I’m impressed by your thoughts and desire to navigate the college process. I agree with a few posters above that colleges are familiar with schools. I believe certain colleges have “affinities” for particular high schools, and vice versa. For example, our local HS has strong history with Claremont McKenna, Pomona and the other Claremonts. Given that the acceptance rates are around 9-15% for each school, you’d think our school would have one kid every few years, when in fact a few get into each almost every year. Likewise, nobody from our HS seems to get into Vanderbilt. All little red x’s on scattergrams! If your GC is saying that you’re not a “Yale school,” for whatever reason, perhaps they can tell you if any of your chosen schools have affinity with your high school. Also, from personal experience, having direct contact and building a relationship with each of your top choices Admissions rep (if they have a designated person) definitely helps. I saw it in both my kids processes, and the schools where they had deeper connection with the staff member, they were admitted. Could be coincidence or luck, by my intuition says this admission connection made a difference. Sounds like you’ve done this with Lehigh, which is a great school. Again, others have made suggestions for you on this front. Best of luck!
p.s. We couldn’t afford a private college advisor either, and I worried that my D’s application would not be as polished. She got into one of her top choice schools, so I guess her app was fine! (rejected from another top choice, so she’s batting 500). Colleges might be able to tell when an app is too polished – and i just learned that an acceptance was pulled by a college when they learned the college advisor had completed sections of the common app for the student. yikes.
@AnthonyZ If your GC has specific insights about how an individual college actually behaves with respect to students applying from your school, then I think you have to give that some weight. If GCs were allowed to write a book on how the colleges actually behave, it would be a best seller. For example, at my D’s high school, the GC knew right away that my D would never be admitted to either Williams or UVa because of the past pattern of decision making behavior by both of those schools with respect to students like her.
Also, if you can discern athlete-seeking behavior in the Naviance data at your high school, then you need to take that into account when assessing what the actual odds are for admission. “Naviance-adjusted” admission odds calculations based on what the prior history has actually been for similar students is very revealing. The playing field isn’t what it appears to be based on the published statistics in the guidebooks.
In practice there are most definitely affinities between high schools and universities. It is however a factor I would not consider too much when drawing up the list of colleges to apply to. Maybe one would however want to consider this as a tie breaker when deciding where to apply ED.
About those interactions between high schools and colleges: “The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College” by Steinberg is a good read. Old book but no doubt still very relevant.
There is an abundance of incorrect advice on this thread.
The following statements are all incorrect:
– “Admission to all of these places is very selective, so the news that so few have been admitted from your high school is meaningless.” Incorrect. It means that your odds of admission are astronomical.
– “Except for serious feeder schools like these https://www.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-COLLEGE0711-sort.html the vast majority of HSs will have few if any applicants to top schools, let alone any admits.” Incorrect. The data that a student (or a parent) needs to correctly appraise the relative pull of a given high school in the admissions process has never been published. The WSJ published what they could get their hands on, but it is full of holes. What you really want to know is what is the admissions rate among the Top N schools (with any reasonable but consistently applied definition of ‘Top N’) on an accurate admissions results dataset. This data has never been published, and it never will be. If it were revealed, it would show just how biased this whole process is, and the public outrage would be a national scandal.
– “It [the historical admissions rate performance of the applicant’s high school at a given college–ed.] is however a factor I would not consider too much when drawing up the list of colleges to apply to.” Incorrect. It should be of paramount importance when selecting the list of schools to apply to, especially for target and likely schools. For example, based on the historical admissions performance information, I knew that my D was an automatic admit at many schools that are highly competitive schools–assuming that statistics in the Common Data Sets are not outright fabrications. That performance information is especially useful when thinking about just how many schools you can afford (in both cost and time) to apply to.
I would not worry about aspects you cannot control.
According to Naviance:
My son is the first person from his high school ever to go to Williams.
No one from his high school had ever been accepted to Yale until last year, when someone was.
There are other similar anecdotes from his school.
You can’t control what a college thinks of your high school, but you can control your own application. Write a good application and hope for the best, while applying to matches and safeties in case the reaches do not work out.
The only way to be sure you will not be admitted to a college is not to apply to it!
Can you see a 12-year view of your school’s history with each university? I can see that on our Naviance.
Also, yes, our public school supposedly never gets any admits to Duke. On the contrary, about 5-6 students a year (usually athletes) get into Duke from a nearby prep school. I think Duke does have its favorite high schools/prep schools.
However, things are continually evolving so you never know - just wait and see. Good luck!
It is definitely worthwhile to consult the Naviance and scattegrams for colleges. It would of course be more valuable if there was a large enough sample size. However if a college has a lower acceptance rate than Stanford or Harvard in your high school, you have to look at that in more detail. The reason it matters is that you typically only apply to a handful or reaches and if the colleges are similar wrt how you feel about them, you should select ones that have the higher acceptance rate, especially if they’re substantial. That should help narrow your list as well.