@Golfgr8 That is so great! W&M is a wonderful place. Very special. This coming from a lifelong Cali girl. I wish I could go back to college and do it again. I don’t think I could get in these days, though.
I have gently suggested to kiddo to consider W&M, and he just smiles back - the way kids do that “know more than their parents “. . If we ever get to tour colleges, I am going to force him to at least humor me and look. The campus is so dang beautiful.
I am no golfer, but my recollection is that there’s some fab courses near the ‘Burg.
This ranking inverts a matriculation list (for Groton School) to consider the concentration of GS alumni at the colleges they most commonly select (5 or more matriculants, 2015–2019):
A) ED applications were way up this year due to test optional?
B) You had to sign a statement for some schools saying that if you apply test optional you never took a ACT/SAT?
C) Average SAT/ACT scores of accepted students will be higher - or that average will be higher because of test optional. People won’t submit low scores?
Scripps fascinates me. Seems super popular for prep school girls. I have a friend whose daughter goes there, and the report is that it is chock full of top notch young women. That it gets the benefit of the Claremont consortium means it is all girls, but isn’t. Apparently they have a really good pre-med program.
UVa seems to do very well across the board. Has it always?
I will dig up the Cate and Thacher matriculation numbers - they are different from the East Coast schools but the same.
The other thing that makes it hard to compare is school size. One kid goes one place over another in a class with 70 kids, it changes things.
I know the Florida schools were drug kicking and screaming over the TO line.
I think D did 8 apps, and had 20 total cued up in the common app. I never saw this. If it happened my guess is it was pretty limited. I think part of the leeway schools were giving was because some kids took the test under less than ideal circumstances, plus they didn’t want to encourage unsafe behavior, or major travel. If a kid had one bad score, requiring this statement encourages those things.
I think any B was probably outlier behavior that probably won’t be widespread or mimicked by others if TO stays prevalent next year (which I think it will).
Here’s the comparable list for Cate (5+ matriculations in past 5 years, lowest to highest). There’s a big cluster familiar names with 4, but gotta cut off somewhere. These schools below account for well over half of the students in the past 5 years.
Scripps
Dartmouth
UCLA
Barnard
Claremont McKenna
Colorado College
Santa Clara University
Tulane
Yale
Brown
Cornell
Georgetown
Pomona
SMU
UCB
University of Chicago
USC
St Andrews
Michigan
Columbia
Penn
Bowdoin
NYU
Stanford
And here’s Thacher (it also has a cluster of familiars with 4) - also about half of the students in the time period represented)
Wake Forest
Pomona
Occidental
NYU
Johns Hopkins
Georgetown
Columbia
Wesleyan
Santa Clara
Cornell
Scripps
Northwestern
University of Chicago
Harvard
Duke
Claremont McKenna
Yale
Stanford
USC
Dartmouth
Colorado College
There is only so much you can glean from these lists. What is interesting to me is what’s missing from both lists - Princeton, MIT and Cal Tech. There are lots of STEM kids at both schools- but they don’t seem to go to colleges with “Technology” in their names.
Around 2/3 of colleges are TO for class of 2021, per fairtest.org.
For B, the only school I know that requires students to report their entire testing history is Georgetown. Meaning, if you were able to take an SAT/ACT you can’t apply TO. Hopefully, others will share the names of schools that required applicants to sign something that they didn’t take a test.
Florida publics are not test optional…it will be interesting to see whether their apps are down (they were trending that way into December), and by how much.
(1). Re Colorado College - I understand it is very outdoorsy. Makes perfect sense Thacher kids are drawn there.
(2) These are tiiiiiiiny schools. A run of 1 kid extra per year, or a bumper crop of 5 kids in a year - and those rankings look very different.
Eg. I think all of the kids who went to SMU on that Cate list were last year.
Another interesting thing, and maybe this is just a function of how Thacher reported - I got theirs off their web page, not the school profile - the UCs don’t show up on theirs.
@CateCAParent
Hello, is this list the number of matriculations to a certain college divided by the college’s size? Or is it simply frequency of matriculations?
@merc81
Could you please elaborate on your methodology?
@UltimaCroix - straight matriculation, no dividing. For Thacher, it is straight from their website. I just copied their chart without the numbers. Where more than one school had the same number, they are in alpha. For Cate - I got it from their most current school Profile. They list the schools in alpha order with the number attending. So I plucked out the ones with 5 or more, and ordered them accordingly.
I was just trying to match how the post above listed the schools, and there is something that feels a little unseemly to post the actual numbers.
It is interesting, at least to me, how much variety there is in how bs’s report matriculation in their School Profile. Can’t compare apples to apples very easily. I stayed up way too late reading them last night. But Andover - pretty impressive.
Oh, and also, I remember a while back somebody posting that it is more important to look at where bs sends the kids in the bottom part of the class than the top. I agree with that. For Thacher, the schools with the biggest matriculation numbers and highest admit rate overall are Occidental and Santa Clara. For Cate it is SMU and Santa Clara.
Each boarding school I looked at seems to have a couple of schools like that - higher admit rates and a proportionally high number from the bs attending. There is almost no overlap between boarding schools - Santa Clara being an exception.
I’m always surprised how much variety there is in matriculation. That’s a great thing, IMO. Means that kids are finding their fit, rather than finding a name.
Totally agree. What the lists above don’t do justice to is how much variety there is overall - there are loads of colleges for each high school that has 1-2 kids matriculating. Kids are definitely not just following a pipeline.
I know that many of the schools with tech in their names don’t have hooks that favor “connected” families.
Some BS, especially ones that don’t have as many students from privileged backgrounds, really like those schools because the playing field is actually more level…
. If we ever get to tour colleges, I am going to force him to at least humor me and look. The campus is so dang beautiful.