For the majority of its students, attending a tippy-top BS actually limits a student’s chance to be admitted to a tippy-top college. Yes, there’re more Exeter students admitted to Harvard and Lawrenceville students to Princeton, but that doesn’t mean it’s easier for other students to be admitted. Harvard, and colleges like it, admit far fewer students now from their traditional feeder schools. And the ones admitted tend to have other admission advantages (a few academic superstars and those with ALDC and/or other hooks) that have nothing to do with the BS. Students without such hooks at the BS likely have to aim for colleges one notch lower.
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Actually, I’d wager that just like the vast majority of the private research U kids who win the Rhodes/Marshall/Truman/etc. come from elite private U’s, the vast majority of the kids who come from non-sectarian private HS’s at the Ivies come from elite private HS’s. Not necessarily the boarding schools, but the boarding schools + the top handful of private HS’s in each metro area (OK, fistful in the case of NYC).
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Completely agree. I have seen that occur very often.
The SAT and AP tests are a very low threshold for many of these kids.
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Perhaps the difference is that those elite high schools with well connected dedicated college counselors will steer students who are unlikely to get into HYPSM toward other “reach” schools that are more likely to admit those particular students.
For example, a certain high achieving student may not be what HYPSM wants, but may be what Vanderbilt wants. If the student is at a typical public school, they may apply to HYPSM and not notice that Vanderbilt even exists. But if the student is at an elite high school, the well connected dedicated college counselors may steer them to apply to Vanderbilt.
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Yes.
Look at the IG accounts for the class of 2020 at NYC private schools like Horace Mann, Chapin, Spence, Fieldston, and Dalron, probably a fair number of legacies, and a good number of athletes, but still pretty crazy emissions.
I actually ran the odds for a thread in the prep school forum. Essentially, it compared the odds of T20 or HYPSM acceptance for prep and good private school students vs top 5-10% of good high schools across the nation. Assuming relatively similar test scores for the top 10% of good public schools vs good private and prep schools, because of the enormous denominator for public vs private school populations, the odds of admittance from good private and prep schools was much, much higher.
I keep getting this response defending the intangible superiority of the students at the private schools, but the fact is, the test scores simply don’t bear that out, especially when one considers that the students at the private and prep schools are more likely to get test prep.
It’s not that I disagree with you that better private schools and prep schools probably provide better education than public schools overall. But the best of the public schools are most definitely the equal of the top half of the prep schools - and those public school students are not getting admitted at anywhere near the rate that the top half of the prep school kids are.
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UChicago is generally the number one destination for the elite private schools.
Where HYPS was cutting back the slots for elite private school students as they offered more first gen and diversity and international slots, and were able to grow their class size only marginally, UChicago increased their class size substantially and added all new dorms, etc becoming the destination for those for those displaced students.
I view UChicago now on equal footing (or so so close) with HYPS and add Columbia and perhaps Wharton to that list.
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There may be yet another confounding variable here though as the kids tend to apply where they may have “legacy” advantage at their respective college of choice since the parents may have also attended one of the T20 schools (it is difficult to afford prep-schools unless parents have $$$s).
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How specifically did you run the odds? Did you compare matriculating students or students who applied? Did you use forum poster applicants as your sample group or stats provide from the HS?
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Outside of a handful of nationally famous exam schools, that isn’t a safe assumption to make. The ultra richest NYC suburban high schools average 1350 / 30 and it drops off from there fast.
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Because the SAT and ACT just aren’t that challenging. You’re essentially arguing against holistic admissions, which is fair, but if you go solely by the American standardized tests, there’s no way to differentiate between an average top 1 percentile kid and a future Fields Medal winner.
BTW, the top 5-10% across even the top public HS’s aren’t going to all be in the top 1 percent in the country academically.
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I looked up the lists of prominent prep and private schools, of where their graduates were enrolling. I looked up the average SAT scores of those schools. Then I estimated the number of high achieving public school grads from across the country, vs the top halves of the good private/prep schools. I really don’t want to reinvent the egg. You can find the post in the prep school thread, if you like. Boy did it ever get some people very, very angry.
In any event, most good, highly-ranked suburban public schools might send say no more than 3 kids (who are not URMs) to Ivies or T20s, if that. While good private/prep schools seem to send half the class or more to T20 schools, and many to HYPSM.
I find it hard to believe that the top half of the good private schools are that much better than all the valedictorians and salutatorians and National Merit kids from all over the country.
The important lesson to be learned is that if your goal for your bright, high-achieving kid is that they should be admitted to a T20 school, sending them to an elite prep/private school gives them a tremendous boost in the odds of acceptance.
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You can look up totals on the polarislist site I linked earlier. Different people have different opinions about what the most prestigious private HSs are. I expect some common choices are Andover, Exeter, Lawrenceville, Groton, Trinity, Hochkiss, Noble, St. Paul’s, Harvard-Westlake, Choate, and Horace Mann. These 11 HSs include all of the top 5 private HSs with most matriculations to Harvard and the vast majority of top 10. They make up a total of ~3.5% of the matriculating students to Harvard during the sample years from class of 2015-18, and make up ~15% of the total non-parochial private school matriculating students. They are certainly overrepresented, but make up only a small portion of the total private school matriculating students and a near miniscule portion of the overall student body.
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Actually, you haven’t shown that.
But anyway, let’s go by National Merit Finalists. I’ve seen that at publics, the there’s a decent correlation between number of NMF and matriculations at Ivy/equivalent+ (so not just Ivies and equivalents but the privates just below like Emory/USC/Tufts and the very top publics of OOS).
The correlation breaks down at the elite privates because of hooks. In fact, a lot of the boarding school kids who go to T20 are hooked, which your analysis doesn’t take in to account.
So at that HS that sent 3 to Ivies, how many NMF were there and how many went to T25 privates + Cal/UCLA/UMich/UVa?
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Note that I didn’t say just the top boarding schools but also the top privates in each metro like Harvard Westlake, John Burroughs, U of C Lab School, Sidwell Friends, etc.
lol there would be riots in the Acela Corridor suburbs if numbers that modest were even close to being true
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I did a search for the terms you listed, and the search result only pointed to this thread. In any case, it sounds like you compared number of matriculating students, then based on a difference in number of matriculating students claimed “hundreds of times higher admit rate.” A higher number of matriculating students is very different from a higher admit rate. For example suppose you have 50 students who apply to Harvard from a highly selective private and 3 students who apply from a non-selective public. The private has a 10/50 accepted and 8/10 attend. The public has 1/3 accepted who attends. The public had a far higher acceptance rate in this example (33% acceptance rate vs 20% acceptance rate), even though they had 8x fewer matriculating students. Even if you attempt to control for SAT scores, there will still be a huge difference in the rate of applications to Harvard between kids at highly selective private colleges and kids and non-selective publics. Kids who attend highly selective private HSs tend to apply to highly selective private colleges. Kids who attend non-selective public HSs tend to apply to in-state public colleges.
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BTW, what metro are you in? The top non-magnet publics (invariably in the richest towns) I’m familiar with are still sending scores to T20/T25 every year.
And I’m talking about metros outside the Northeast.
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