<p>My “goody” is … wealthy private school places lots of kids into elite schools. So? In other news, Andover does the same. I don’t see the point of pointing out the obvious.</p>
<p>I think what’s more telling is what a bunch of lemmings they all must be, if out of 480 people 100 apply to Stanford.</p>
<p>JHS - I don’t think this proves your assertion at all. This is a very wealthy, status-conscious area. These are people who would rather die than go to, oh, I don’t know, Rice or Vanderbilt or something else second-tier (/sarcasm), even for all the tea in China. Of course they don’t care about merit scholarships elsewhere - but that has nothing to do with plenty of other students who would indeed turn down HYPSM for merit scholarships elsewhere.</p>
<p>At wealthy private prep schools, I would not be surprised that there is a high level of elite-school legacies as well.</p>
<p>Anecdata: My nephew, who did attend a wealthy private prep school, is at Princeton, playing a sport that I would say is generally associated more with private prep schools than with public schools. His teammates are almost all wealthy private prep school kids, and a very significant number of them are Princeton legacies – some who are quite visible / active in the Princeton fundraising community. So you can’t separate out the prep school effect from the legacy effect and the fundraising effect.</p>
<p>Lemmings? 82% got accepted to Standford. I think that’s impressive. Granted they probably come from a previleged backgorund, some of them kids of faculty. Still 82 accepted to Stanford out of 480 is impressive however you slice it. </p>
<p>Now that I read more closely, I agree it’s a third applied to tippy tops and 60% accepted tp H and Y, 20% to P, 46% to M, 82% S. It’s hard to say what fraction of that third was accpeted. Probably safe to say more than half to HYPM? That makes about a fouth accepted to HYPSM roughly speaking. No less impressive.</p>
<p>My D goes to a private HS in an area with 5 other wealthy private schools. We all have similar admissions stats. It is not anywhere close to what the OP posted.</p>
<p>No, it’s not that 82% got accepted to Stanford. According to the OP, there were roughly 100 applicants to Stanford. Stanford apparently admitted 17 of them, of which 14 (82%) went and the remaining 3 went to Harvard (2) and MIT (1). </p>
<p>The lemming factor is that one-fifth of the class applied to Stanford. Really, you guys? You have all that many, all those opportunities, and you all are attracted to just one school? Good grief, think outside the box. </p>
<p>I went to a high school where probably 1/4 kids wound up at our state flagship. At my kids’ high school, probably the same ratio winds up at our state flagship. That’s boring and lemming-like! Why is it any different if it’s Stanford versus Big State U?</p>
<p>Oh, I see, 82% is not the accptance rate. If it’s lemmings, it is not unique to Palo Alto. My kid is in the east coast private school. You can bet more than 25% of kids apply to the local Ivy.</p>
<p>Iglooo - you’re double-counting. The same kid appears several times below. </p>
<p>For example, of the 5 kids admitted to Harvard, 3 went to Harvard and 2 went to Stanford.
So those latter two are part of the 14-going-to-Stanford and 2 of the first 3 are part-of-the-3-admitted-but-not-going-to-Stanford (that is, they were the dual Harvard/Stanford admittees who chose H over S). It isn’t “5 kids admitted to Harvard” and “17 kids admitted to Stanford”. If you just restricted it to these 2 schools, it’s 18 kids in total … of which 4 were admitted to both H/S and 2 chose H and 2 chose S).</p>
<p>Similarly, of the 5 kids who were admitted to Yale, the 2 who didn’t go to Yale – who went to Stanford – are also part of the 14 going to Stanford (they were dual admitted to Yale and Stanford and chose S; apparently no one admitted to both Y and S chose Y). </p>
<p>You can’t add up the 5, 5, 10, 13, 17. </p>
<p>Harvard: 3/5 = 60% yield (2 to Stanford)
Yale: 3/5 = 60% yield (2 to Stanford)
Princeton: 2/10 = 20% yield (3 to Harvard, 5 to Stanford)
MIT: 5/13 = 38% yield (1 to Caltech, 1 to Princeton, 2 to Harvard, 4 to Stanford)
Stanford: 14/17 = 82% yield (2 to Harvard, 1 to MIT)</p>
<p>No one said the lemming factor was unique to Palo Alto! I just find it amusing, because when all the kids in Oklahoma flock to Oklahoma, it’s provincial, but when all the kids in Boston flock to Harvard and all the kids in Palo Alto flock to Stanford, it’s supposed to be meaningful. There’s little difference. Most people still are motivated by wanting to stay close to home, no matter where they are on the elite scale. I would want to THINK that kids from more privilege would have parents who would be more expansive in their thinking and who wouldn’t consider plane rides big deals, but who knows? Though I’m not one to talk. I tried to push both kids far from our backyard and one wound up there, LOL.</p>
<p>“My “goody” is … wealthy private school places lots of kids into elite schools. So? In other news, Andover does the same. I don’t see the point of pointing out the obvious.”</p>
<p>I don’t think this is a private school. I think it is one of the Palo Alto or Los Altos public schools. The nearby private schools don’t have a senior class size of 400+.</p>
<p>It’s even similar here in San Diego. Our mediocre suburban HS sends 1 or maybe 2 kids to HYPSM each year. Some years none at all. But for richer schools down in La Jolla, near UCSD, the numbers getting in can be astonishing by comparison. In D1’s year she was the lucky one from our school, and we went to an Admitted Students Reception put on locally by MIT - designed to recruit the kids to choose MIT. My daughter was the only kid from her school, but it took several cars to bring all the kids from Torrey Pines High who showed up together in a group. I don’t remember the exact number from that one school but it was probably about a dozen.</p>
<p>I have to say, in all my discussion with other parents about college application, distance is never a consideration - urban vs suburban, size, NE vs South vs Chicago area vs CA, prestige come into play. Most of D1´s friends didn´t want anywhere close to home. They all wanted few hours from home. Very few wanted to go to midwest, but many ended up going to CA.</p>
<p>My nephew is a graduating senior from Palo Alto, other than UCs, a lot of those kids are going to east coast.</p>
<p>PG - Not double counting, misreading on my part. I read yield as acceptance rate. Me bad.</p>
<p>Yes, sure it is provincial if there are better things in the outside world and you don’t try. If you got something good in your own backyard and choose to stay, it is not provincial. Not what I would do or my kid is doing but if anyone is lucky to have something good nearby and sticking around you could call that wise.</p>
<p>Igloo, you aren’t reading closely at all. Somewhere between 100-160, probably towards the low end of that, applied to at least one of HYPSM, out of a class of 480. I say probably towards the low end because the answer is 100 + however many of the HYPM applicants didn’t apply to Stanford, and we know that lots of the accepted HYPM candidates were cross-accepted at Stanford (80% of the Harvard acceptees, at least 50% of the Princeton acceptees), so it seems logical to assume that at least that percentage of applicants cross-applied. So lets say ~120 applicants to HYPSM. That’s 25% of the class.</p>
<p>Of those ~120 applicants, 28 were accepted at at least one of HYPSM: The 27 who are enrolling at one of them, and the one kid who decided to go to Caltech. That’s a 20-25% success rate, spread across five colleges. Well, in my kids’ public magnet high school classes, of similar size, there were probably 20-30 kids who applied to one or more of those five colleges, and 3-5 who got into at least one of them. That’s a lower success rate for the applicant pool, but pretty comparable given that no one here had home-team advantage at any of HYPSM. If you included our local Ivy in the analysis, I bet the PA school’s success rate would not be meaningfully higher. And our school is NOT full of rich, status-conscious kids.</p>
<p>oldfort - I was just talking to my dentist. Distance was the first consideration for them. How ready their kids are to move away home at 18. I think it’s a legitimate consideration.</p>
<p>Yes, there are kids, like my oldest, that would not consider going to school somewhere they could “run into their mom at the mall.” </p>
<p>But one consideration for many kids is where do they want to start their careers. Many of those around here wouldn’t mind going away, but eventually want to start their careers here. Attending Stanford would give you quite an array of opportunities around here when you graduate. </p>
<p>Same for the east coast kids and east coast schools. For instance, my daughter is graduating from school in LA, she, and most of her friends, have job offers in LA.</p>
<p>I doubt it is a private school.
It is too big. The Palo Alto (public) HS is known to be excellent. Attended by lots of techies’ kids, and prob some have parents who work at Stanford.
p.s. $100,000 income does not go far in Northern California. So the Ivy League merit cut-offs can be problematic.</p>
<p>My kids’ good-but-not-great public hs in the midwest, with a graduating class in the 500 range, is sending 2 to Stanford and 1 to Yale this year.</p>
<p>Right, Pizzagirl, but how many applied? I bet not 100.</p>
<p>Look, the school in question is either Paly or Gunn. They are both fabulous high schools with lots of students who are gifted, privileged, or both. Many students have a connection to Stanford – faculty or admin brats, and loads of legacies. What impresses me most is that 60 kids out of 480 thought they had a good enough shot at HYPM to apply. I suspect that reflects a school culture of high achievement (and probably high stress). What doesn’t amaze me is that probably around 25% of the ones who applied – maybe as few as 20% – got into one of those schools. That’s no different from the acceptance rate I see with other pools of sophisticated kids.</p>