Importance/significance of high school's acceptance history in admission chances to top schools?

Applying to College
1

Someone’s question about how important a high school’s acceptance history is in the admission process prompted me to look at our HS’s stats for acceptance at USNWR top #10. This list is for a large suburban Texas school district with about 35 -40 NMSF per year…according to Naviance there plenty of kids with perfect or near perfect ACT/SAT scores, high GPAs and I am assuming great ECs. I say the school you attend plays a very big part in your acceptance chances…how about you?

(This is the past three years. 1st # is total applied, second # is total accepted)

Yale 12/0
Harvard 9/0
Princeton 13/0
Stanford 18/0
U of Chicago 8/0
Columbia 14/0
University of Penn 6/0
Duke 6/0
California Institute of Technology 10/0
MIT 15/2 - two brothers 2 years apart (We know them personally)

So, it looks like if you want to attend one of those universities, from our school district it is unlikely you will be accepted, so you better dig deeper.

2

Whoa.

I will say that our Chicago suburban school does have batting average of zero for Columbia. I think the university thinks boring suburban kids aren’t the right fit for their ultra-urban campus. We have a lot of success outside HPY schools, though, with schools like Vanderbilt, Duke, Emory, NU, Chicago taking many kids over a certain GPA/test score. Most of the kids at our school who get into Ivies are getting in to play a sport AND they have great academic stats.

3

@homerdog I was reluctant to keep looking at the numbers for the next set of schools because I’d bet the numbers will be just as dismal!

Most of our HS’s kids stay in-state and don’t really apply OOS. My own kids applied to lots of OOS schools in the #50 -#110ish range often being the first, according to Naviance, to apply from our school. They have had good success, but now I wonder if that will harm future applicants?

4

Who knows. I hear you though. S19 will apply to some OOS schools that only get a handful of kids from our high school to apply and, even when they are admitted, they do not go. That’s a pattern that might worry a college and then perhaps they would start wait-listing our kids until someone actually attends. The bummer is that S19 really is interested in these schools so he will have to show tons of interest!

5

Wow, that’s not good. I would look deeper at all the stats. How is the school ranked in the state? Nation? Are there AP classes if not what is the most rigorous course level. What about SAT scores? For the kids who are at the top in ALL scores why aren’t they getting in ever? My guess would be that the school isn’t rigorous compared to others and even if you NMSF they might not be competitive in a nationwide group. Have to remember that what you think of as top in your area may not be for these schools. Are there kids with perfect SAT scores and national or at least state involvement in sports or academics ( science fairs?) These kids are competing against the nation not the local region. Where we live many school systems never have kids go to the top schools and others have the top kids go each kid. It is mainly dependent on the school district. If you have kids who are 1600 SAT, National Merit(really not that big a deal IMHO), nationally ranked in sports or academic disciplines or both and also great kids who are not getting in. That might indicate a problem with the guidance dept or something else. Otherwise, it’s just that they aren’t making the cut.

6

Ask the counselors if any students in the past applied ED and backed out. If so, the colleges may be holding grudges against the school and auto rejecting applicants (including RD).

7

@Happytimes2001 All good points. Kids who get into these schools from our high school take all honors/AP classes (for all subjects including foreign language). Our school is known as super rigorous. I think two or three kids out of 750 per year have a 4.0 unweighted with all honors and AP classes. Most kids getting into top 20 schools have a few Bs. I think the reputation of the school makes a difference for sure.

8

@Happytimes2001 Almost all of the possible AP classes are available (we are light in the foreign language area). Lots of kids are receiving 4s & 5s on the exams. Definitely there are kids with State and National ranked awards. It is a moderately competitive/rigorous, major urban/suburban HS.

9

I agree with you @labegg . Same thing at our school. Fortunately it tells me that S18 is likely to get into a state flagship despite weaker GPA, as they view our high school as very competitive. The ivies don’t really seem to know our school at all.

10

This is interesting. Naviance is good but doesn’t give the whole picture…and ECs are huge for those schools. In my area all of the public schools send multiples to Ivies each year, even the smaller and lower income towns…my thinking is that there must be a lot of factors we don’t know about, including financial need, state rank in education, even demonstrated political leanings (remember that post a while back about the tippy-top student who wrote his essay about his love for guns?).

There’s a small chance this is random coincidence. Out of about 100 applications, you might expect ~maybe~ 5-10 acceptances, all other things being equal. But it’s more likely that the school is noticeably less rigorous (how many APs are offered?) or the guidance counselors are truly horrible.

11

@labegg , curious how the top students in your district do in terms of acceptance to the top honors programs at UT, e.g. Plan II, Business Honors, Engineering Honors, Dean’s and Turing Scholars. If the record there is not stellar, it might bring into question the rigor/perceived rigor of the district and/or the competency of the GC’s. If the district does well with the highly competitive UT programs, and assuming it’s the same top students who got in these honors programs but got rejected by the schools you listed (which themselves are pretty diverse), it would be a real mystery other than random chance given a relatively small sample size over a relatively short period.

12

This is really interesting data, @labegg. It would be fascinating to see the numbers for the next 10-15 schools on USNWR.

I wonder if there are many legacy kids. In some schools, high stat legacy kids (and recruited athletes) can come into play and influence numbers.

13

What kind of AP and SAT subject scores do A students in the associated courses get?

If those test scores are low, that may be seen as a negative indicator on the school quality.

14

@labegg I may have missed something “…This list is for a large suburban Texas school district with about 35 -40 NMSF per year…” This is the number for the whole school district, do you have the app/accept numbers for the whole school district so that we can compare apple to apple?

15

@Pheebers in our case, I believe it’s because we are a new-ish large public school in the south. The school is about 7 years old. We have many NMSF, and large numbers of high achieving kids. We lack history with Ivies, and we’re in the south. We sent our first kid to Harvard last year, and it’s only because he was a recruited swimmer. We’re sending one to Princeton next year, for football.

16

Your high school isn’t the only one in that area, so you can’t blame, eg, being suburban, without seeing how other kids in the large area fare.

17

Another data point:

My daughter attends a large suburban school (2600+ students) in the Bay Area (California) with around 45 NMSFs this year. The acceptance history for the past 3 years is as follows (with many cross-admits):

Brown University - 67/4 (Applied/Accepted)
Caltech - 39/5
Columbia University - 76/3
Cornell University - 107/24
Dartmouth College - 35/0
Duke University - 59/6
Harvard University - 67/4
MIT - 58/11
Princeton University - 62/2
Stanford University - 140/5
Yale University - 51/2

Quite dismal! MIT has been quite partial to girls from our school in recent years.

My daughter applied early to her favorite LAC (8 applicants and 0 acceptances in the past 3 years) this year and got in. Naviance can be very useful in putting together a realistic list of colleges to apply to, especially when there is sufficient data.

18

Agreed! However, the pertinent question for a student is “what college(s) favor students from my high school”?

At my Catholic HS, it was Notre Dame. I’ll bet that there’s at least one top-level institution that loves to admit the best students from your HS.

19

The issue with Naviance is you assume nothing changes. Your school gets x results, until those kids in other area schools suddenly shine better, look mighty worthy.

20

@jzducol As of the the last summer (2017) the Naviance stats where for our whole district because our particular HS is young, with only 5 classes graduated. In order to protect identities, last spring, we were told the numbers reflected the whole district. There has since been an update to Naviance, so it is possible that they updated to just our high school at this point, but I can’t tell you if that for sure, I am assuming it is the whole district at this point. That is 5 very similar performing suburban high schools with average senior class size around 500 (+/-), so estimate about 3000ish kids for the whole district.

@BKSquared Of the kids I know, there are several at honors college at state flagships like UT and A&M, Baylor, SMU, Alabama, Honestly relatively few are OOS, but they are definitely placing in Honors programs at what I would assume is a normal rate.

@Faulkner1897 Here you go… (I am guessing there are not a lot of Ivy legacies. 75% of people in this area are engineers, a few medical or legal, financal professionals scattered in the mix, everyone that I know is a graduate of a state flagship or directional, my husband is an exception he graduated from Case)

Dartmouth 6/0
JHU 7/0
Northwestern 8/0
Brown 7/2
Cornell 12/0
Rice 47/3
Vanderbilt 10/3
Notre Dame 8/3
Wash U 6/1
Georgetown 5/2
Emory 6/3
Berkley 14/1
UCLA 18/2
USC 14/0
Carnegie Mellon 5/2
U Michigan 4/0
Case 3/1

LACs-

Williams 0/0
Amherst 1/0
Wellesley 1/0
Middlebury o/0
Swarthmore 1/0
Bowdoin 0/0
Carleton 0/0
Pomona 1/1
Claremont 0/0
Davidson 2/1

Texas Schools-

UT-A : 241/101
A&M 323/142
Texas State 220/121
SFA 141/82
U of H 342/207
Sam Houston 138/84
Baylor 133/45
SMU 23/8
TCU 47/4 (looking at the stats here the majority of these kids were unlikely candidates, most were very low, like in the 15% ACT/SAT range)

I will say the data collection for our school district is not exactly highly accurate. Kids are not required to use Naviance nor are they required to report their results. I am sure some enter where they applied and never bother to update and I am 100% sure the GC office does not accurately record data beyond what school a kids ultimately enrolls and even that is iffy.