Important lessons learned

Applying to College Admission Stories
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This thread has presented a variety of different opinions about how attending an “elite” prep impacts chance of admission to a highly selective college. Students attending “elite” preps also seem to have a variety of different opinions. Some example stats from Andover’s most recent survey are below. The vast majority of Andover freshman seem to think attending Andover helps with selective college admission, but opinion seems to change over time as students continue at the HS. By senior year, only ~half of students think Andover helps with selective college admission. Lower income kids at Andover seem more likely to think Andover helps with selective college admission than wealthy kids with >$500k income.

Do you think attending Andover affects your chances of attending a selective college?
Freshman – 76% Positive Impact / 15% Negative Impact
Sophomores – 62% Positive Impact / 32% Negative Impact
Juniors – 58% Positive Impact / 34% Negative Impact
Seniors – 52% Positive Impact / 41% Negative Impact

More than $500k Income (Sample = 229) – 54% Positive Impact / 39% Negative Impact
…
$35k to $60k Income (Sample = 34) – 66% Positive Impact / 29% Negative Impact
Less than $35k Income (Sample = 38) – 71% Positive Impact / 21% Negative Impact

3 of the 8 Ivies had a <4% admit rate this year, so a large portion of applicants are bound to be disappointed. Many kids from “elite” preps are disappointed, as well as many kids from less selective HSs. While recruited athletes often do get a huge boost in chance of admission at D1 colleges, the overwhelming majority of HS athletes are not recruited, also leading to a lot of disappointment. Many SCEA/ED/EA applicants are disappointed, as well as many RD applicants.

I’ve never seen an “elite” prep HS publish admit rates, but some selective magnets do, and the admit rates can be quite low for highly selective colleges. For example, Thomas Jefferson HS is the #1 ranked HS in USNWR, probably has higher average test scores than any prep schools that are mentioned in this thread, and has a very large number of matriculations to the “elite” colleges. In the class of 2019 (didn’t see 2020 online), they had nearly 60 Ivy Plus matriculations. This sounds high, until you look at the admit rate and percent applied, which are partially summarized below. The vast majority of TJ applicants were rejected at all listed “elite” privates, in spite of attending the highest ranked HS in the US, and having students with higher median test scores than nearly any other HS.

Thomas Jefferson Admission Stats: 2017-19
UVA: 79% applied, 56% admit rate, 32% yield, 14% attended
Cornell: 37% applied, 16% admit rate, 52% yield, 3% attended
CMU: 32% applied, 26% admit rate, 42% yield, 3% attended
Stanford: 28% applied, 6% admit rate, 83% yield, 1% attended
Penn: 28% applied, 13% admit rate, 40% yield, 1% attended
Princeton: 25% applied, 8% admit rate, 67% yield, 2% attended
Duke: 23% applied, 13% admit rate, 54% yield, 2% attended
MIT: 22% applied, 11% admit rate, 80% yield, 2% attended
Harvard: 21% applied, 7% admit rate, 67% yield, 1% attended
Yale: 17% applied, 11% admit rate, 50% yield, 1% attended
Chicago: 16% applied, 18% admit rate, 50% yield, 1% attended

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No, it still sounds high. As do the admit rates. Those are not normal public-school admit rates or gross numbers.

Data, I said it before: you also got to smell the cooking. If you don’t know how, that’s no crime, but to present printout after printout like this and imagine that you’re getting the picture is to mislead yourself pretty mightily.

Maybe my next thread will be a survey of how upper-income parents believe the rest of the world to be living, making school choices, and educating themselves.

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When the data doesn’t agree with your opinion, you just disregard it? Interesting.

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TJ is not a normal public school, so of course it would have different admit rates.

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What I don’t understand is why you are upset in terms of not having had your expectations set. It’s common for top prep schools to have their kids guided early on. Many apply ED or SCEA, or ED2 etc. Many are also top of many tiers so they are essentially competing against one another in the college pool. That makes it really tough. There’s a lot of talk on the prep school threads about this. Going to prep school can actually make it harder to get into top colleges as one’s classmates are so impressive and already have gone through admissions to get in.

The legacy, athletes and all the rest make it a smaller pool for all. I think what many people believe is that the top kids from the top schools will be able to have more options. Talk on the Prep school parents is often centered around having fewer shots at the tippy top schools.

Many prep schools give a list and advice about having enough safeties and fits. It’s becoming more common for Prep school kids to apply to schools beyond NE and many also apply to international schools.

I’m not sure it’s a question of inequity so much as it’s a question of being a student amongst a pool of really top candidates. My oldest kid has friends who would have waltzed into amazing colleges some years ago, but it’s going to be a struggle for any kid to attend those schools with single digit rates. It’s no different for any kid these days, high or low SES.
I don’t see it as an equity issue but as supply and demand type thing. Add in the holistic admissions and it’s a lottery ticket for nearly all.

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Nor is TJ anywhere close to a normal high school.

Our local high school has a median SAT score of about 1350 which makes it an exceptionally good high school. In comparison, TJ has an average SAT score of 1520, meaning that a large fraction of students are hitting the SAT ceiling on one or both sections; the SAT is too easy for them.

While fewer students apply to the elites from our high school, it has similar admission percentages as TJ for some of these elite colleges over the recent years. Our admission percentages are actually higher for MIT, Harvard, and Stanford, and lower for some others. Note also that due to the demographics of our town, most students don’t qualify for legacy or other preferences, and I suspect the same is true of TJ as well.

What this suggests to me is that after preferences are considered, there is a ceiling as to the number of strong students that are accepted from a particular school. Students that would likely have shined very brightly in a normal public high school and be accepted into an elite college may fall outside the allotment for a place like TJ. Those students might actually be hurt by going there.

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Any college will only accept up to a certain number of kids from each high school. So the top kids (10%) at a top school will do very very well. Next tier down, not so much. Schools that have national standing will have a larger % of acceptances but that doesn’t mean every qualified kid (stats wise) is getting in. Not even close.

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You need to consider that selective magnets like TJ and the “elite” private HSs all have selective admissions. They are not open admissions like a “normal public-school”. TJ has a ~15% admit rate, using a holistic admission system. Prior to COVID, TJ considered GPA+score stats, course rigor, essays, and teacher LORs, among various other factors – much of the same criteria that is considered by “elite” colleges. This results in an extraordinarily high concentration of students at TJ who are well qualified for “elite” private colleges and excel the criteria that “elite” colleges consider in their holistic admission decisions. TJ’s school profile lists average test scores of 34.4 ACT, which is a 99th percentile score. The average kid at TJ is a 99th percentile kid among the full US population. Suffice to say, TJ is not a “normal public school.”

In addition to being extremely selective, all TJ students are required to pursue original research and complete an extremely rigorous curriculum. This curriculum often includes post-AP level courses. The TJ kids who do not do well in this challenging curriculum return back to their base non-selective HS, resulting in another level of screening.

With this group of amazing students who are prescreened to excel on criteria that is similar to the criteria used in “elite” college admissions and have 99th percentile test scores, one would expect a much higher admit rate than the general population. And we do see a higher admit rate, but typically only ~double the admit rate for the overall population… and often not higher than the overall average for applicants with similar stats.

For example, Princeton publishes admit rate by score. During the reference year, Princeton had a 8% admit rate for applicants with a 96th+ percentile ACT. With TJs 99th percentile 34.4 average ACT, and the majority of Princeton applicants presumably being well above the TJ average; one would expect the TJ admit rate to be quite a bit higher than overall 8% average for 96th+ percentile scores. However, the actual admit rate among TJ students was not higher. The basic upstate NY HS I attended gets a very large number of kids who apply to Cornell, and among kids from my non-selective HS with stats anywhere approaching TJ’s, the admit rate for kids from my HS was much higher than TJ. The majority of kids with stats this high from my HS (small sample) were accepted to Cornell compared to 16% at TJ. A similar statement could be made for other colleges, although sample size is not significant from my HS, since my non-selective HS did not have many 99th percentile stat kids.

From what I’ve gathered from this thread, knowing how involves ignoring any type of analysis or published information and instead just trusting that it must be true.

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At a massive open house at one of the schools on the TJ list, the VP of admissions said that they did not have a cap on the number of kids from any particular school, but he wanted to let the kids from high-performing schools know that there is a lot of talent distributed throughout “regular” high schools and that the name only goes so far. I think what this means practically speaking is that the non-top-level kids at selective schools will lose any tiebreakers to kids with identical stats/ECs/etc who finish at the top of “normal” schools.

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I believe Cornell does show preference to (at least some) NYS high schools.

It is NYS’s land-grant uni, after all.

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I want to say to @irishmam3 as well that HS isn’t simply about getting in to a “good college”. There are benefits to attending a terrific HS intrinsic to itself (assuming that you’d thrive in that type of environment). Now if you do attend a challenging HS, by comparison, an average state school or equivalent (or classes if you major in a subject at a school that that school isn’t strong in) may seem like a joke. But (and this is a small sample size, I know), looking at some folks I know who attended a magnet and then majored in a subject at their state flagship that their state flagship isn’t known for, they seem to have done well (founded a company; second-in-command of a company that sold out to a larger institution; became a money manager). And this is not counting the CS majors, some of whom, after attending the state flagship, have now either cashed out of startups or still are in SV investing.

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Different colleges have different admission systems. Rather than a simple quota or max ceiling on number of admits, at many colleges, it may be more of the “elite” college wants to see students who excel at TJ while taking a challenging academic environment and surrounded by great students, like would occur at the “elite” college, which may include a similar type of challenging environment with many amazing classmates. This includes both excelling in the classroom and taking advantage of the many amazing opportunities at TJ – both academic and non-academic. Most TJ students are not going to be at the top of their class and get near all A grades. Instead more TJ students will fall towards the middle of the class, with a far from ideal transcript. This also indirectly impacts non-transcript criteria like LORs (both GC and teachers). For example, the Harvard reader guidelines state the following. All the quoted statements for the high 1-2 rating are based on a comparison to other students in the class, which does not bode well for middle of the class students.

Harvard Reader Guidelines: School Support
1 . Strikingly unusual support. "The best of a career,” “one of the best in many years,”
truly over the top.
2. Very strong support. “One of the best” or “the best this year.”
3+ Well above average, consistently positive
3. Generally positive, perhaps somewhat neutral or generic
3- Somewhat neutral or slightly negative.
4. Negative or worrisome report

Consistent with this, HYPSM… type schools generally do not show the same number of admits each year. For example, TJ might have a 5/90 Harvard admit rate one year, then 10/90 the next.

Only a small minority of Cornell undergrad students attend a land grant / contract college, and most seem to believe the in-state advantage for that minority is small. However, yes, there is some degree of in-state advantage for a minority of Cornell applicants. As noted in my earlier post, a similar pattern seems to occur for other colleges besides Cornell, although the sample size is quite small.

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Yes. Elite privates (at least some) certainly seem to give an advantage to public school kids from cities where they own property and would be affected by what local politicians decide. Thus how Boston Latin sends a disproportionate number of kids (compared to both other HS’s and other colleges Boston Latin sends to) to Harvard. There are other examples of this.

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Context-free data are frequently misleading.

Collecting a pile of stats from a website is a starting point for developing and understanding a picture, but in the end it’s a meagre starting point. The stats are the beginning of question-asking and paying attention, not the endpoint.

Though I’m laughing now because I’d always assumed that most management consultants – you know, the ones who blow into town, assemble a bunch of stats, generate a massive report, then depart and send the bill – knew perfectly well that they were charlatans, but for the first time it occurs to me that they actually believe they understand what they’re looking at and believe they’ve provided a very useful service.

If that don’t beat all.

Of course, I’m also laughing ruefully at the turn this thread has taken to “pity the poor elite private high school students who’re at a sad disadvantage to the public-school diamonds in the rough, despite ED applications.” Must find hanky.

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While I am not discounting your experience, OP, it is just one perspective. There are students and faculty at public universities who are quite happy. Indeed, there are more than 4000 universities, and it is silly to think that attending one of just eight is essential for a happy, lucrative, or even " society-defining" career, whatever that is. You haven’t worked in many of the fields, like the elite branches of the federal government, you claim are so out of
reach for your students, but those of us who have can attest they are filled with public college grads who are successful.

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Plug in any of the multiple groups you like. That seems to be common on CC. Many parents and students plug in their own sub-groupings and expect different ( and better) results than other groups. Why? I have no idea but think it might be they just don’t understand that college acceptance can be very competitive and there are great kids at every economic, social and any group you define.

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Most fantastic students won’t be admitted to Top 20 schools. It’s a numbers game and demand outstrips supply (by a LOT). Are wealthy, well-connected students at an advantage - of course they are, but only to a certain extent. Lots of outstanding students from prep schools and the like are routinely shut out of schools that they are eminently qualified for - the same goes for public school students. Perhaps if we stopped acting like there are only 50 colleges worth attending in the country, and kids (and their parents) started looking for true “fit” instead of prestige we could all get off the hamster wheel. As it stands, some students spend a big chunk of their adolescence grinding at school, loading up on the ECs and acting like mini adults all in the service of the elusive Top 20 admission. For what? At the end of the day, most Ivy grads end up like their non-Ivy counterparts - sure, they may make more $ (but not all) and a few will go on to significant careers, but most are living “normal” lives like the rest of us. How do I know? I’ve got lots and lots of Ivy grad friends and neighbors, and while they all have decent careers none are famous, none are “defining society” and many aren’t doing as well as my husband who attended a very mediocre state school.

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Ok, now I am confused. So you consider all management consultants to be charlatans, and therefore must not be capable of doing “elite, society defining work”. What about all those who leave management consulting to take executive jobs? Is that not- elite, society defining work either?

Note that nobody in my family has even been or plans to be a management consultant, so I have no dog in this fight. But I am confused.

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Rather than criticize all management consulting or the general process of using stats to support conclusions, why not state specific reasons why you disagree with the conclusions?

For example, the referenced stats showed TJ applicants had ~double the admit rate to “elite” colleges compared to the overall pool. TJ is a selective magnet that is the #1 ranked HS on USNWR. It has a ~15% admit rate and has 99th percentile average ACT. You previously said the admit rates “sound high.” Do you believe that TJ has a higher admit rate than expected due to an admissions advantage? If so, why don’t you think the selectivity of the HS and high concentration of 99th percentile students substantially increases expected admit rate above the overall application pool average?

The referenced post also included an Andover survey showing that the vast majority of Andover students started out as freshmen thinking Andover provided an advantage in selective college admissions, but by senior year only ~half of Andover students still thought Andover provided an advantage in selective college admissions, and a good portion thought attending Andover was a disadvantage. Other persons in the thread mentioned similar experiences that attending a highly selective HS may be an advantage or disadvantage, depending on a variety of factors, including the particular student and how well they succeed as what may be a small fish in a pond of high achievers. Do you believe that conclusion is wrong and everyone at an “elite” private HS has an advantage, just wealthy kids, just ED applicants, etc.? If so, why?

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I disagree with this.

I disagree with a lot of other things that have been posted as well- but I want to reassure the OP that this is absolutely not true (at least now) and I say that from the perspective of someone who has worked in corporate recruiting for 35+ years for some elite/prestigious companies, some of whom pride themselves on serving up the kind of game-changing impact you are talking about.

First- you are ignoring the fact that rich people often produce dumb kids. And third/fourth generation wealth often produces dumb AND lazy kids. Those 18 year olds end up at expensive private colleges (for the most part) but do not delude yourself that during the Senate confirmation hearings in 30 years time, some Senator is going to gush “You graduated from High Point? That’s fantastic”.

Second- you are ignoring the fact that what constitutes the kind of game-changing careers you want for your D change/shifts with time. If I were to tell you the “most sought after” jobs coming out of my top 4 MBA program from decades ago you would howl with laughter. Nobody had heard of the internet, we all had to pass a programming test (a requirement) and the scorn that we heaped on the TA’s who staffed the computer labs is shameful. A couple of them probably invented Blockchain. So today’s boring/dull job learning to program in the five or so influential languages “back in the day” might be tomorrow’s breakthrough/change the world career. If we could predict that, we’d be sitting on an tropical island getting a pedicure right now.

Third- it’s not the school, it’s the kid. And I say that as someone who has screened out hundreds of thousands of resumes over the years for “bad” gpa, terrible transcript, bad SAT scores (yes, I’ve worked for “those companies” which ask college grads for their SAT scores), or for just using 8 point type. Hundreds of thousands of resumes get a polite “sorry, not sorry” email, and yes, the name of the school matters. But every company I’ve worked for (including the so-called elites) LOVES to find the stellar kid from fill in the blank- a college we’ve never heard of, a Bible college which doesn’t teach evolution and yet a kid got an internship creating stem cells out of a diseased liver at a pharmaceutical company, a kid who was on the slow track at community college but ended up the commencement speaker at a flagship public U.

So if your kid wants one of those jobs, there are ways to get there. It’s about the kid, not the college. I’ve hired hundreds of kids from Harvard and can recite the reading list from Yale’s Directed Studies program in my sleep, and can find my way to Princeton in the dark with no headlights. But I’ve hired astonishing intellectuals from places you’ve never heard of, and have hired first gen college graduates whose accomplishments- without the parental coddling, without parents to monitor their HS EC’s, without the social capital you’re assuming the elite colleges confer-- would make you cry.

Go read the bio’s of the Truman scholars released today. If you can get through them without a tear, you are made of stronger stuff than I am.

And my final pushback to you- do you have any evidence that your D is at all interested in one of these game-changing careers? I could describe some career moves to you that would be a head-scratcher- the elite college grad, to elite graduate program, summa cum everything, now working as a yoga instructor. Dozens of people with elite college credentials and one or two jobs in the “it matters” sectors who have chucked it to live in Key West, ski town, rural mountain area and work as a sailing , ski or fly-fishing instructor.

Again- it’s the person, not the college. You don’t wake up one day and say “Hey, I’m Ruth Bader Ginsberg” (of blessed memory). That was years and years and decades of choices and hard work to become the RBG we know. Sure, Sheryl Sandburg had the benefit of elite schools and companies and the mentors that go with that… but she could have decided to stay home after her kids were born, and other than her book club and the other mom’s at pilates, nobody would have ever heard of her.

Your D sounds great, and she’ll get to experience a great adventure regardless of the name on the parchment. And hitting the cover off the ball academically is never a bad strategy for a college kid, whether she wants to teach fourth grade language arts, or run the CDC some day…

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