According to Apply | Pomona College in Claremont, California - Pomona College, “Pomona does not consider legacy or donor-affiliated status in the admissions process.” Their CDS also indicates Pomona does not consider legacies. However, ~25% of students at Pomona are varsity athletes, and they do provide a strong boost for recruited athletes.
Up until you pointed your user name out and googling it, I had no idea what it meant. I thought your name was “Cate” like “Kate,” just spelled differently. 
That’s just one article. If you google, there are many, many more. I just quickly picked that one. I realize that any article or articles that I post will picked apart for some reason. It is what it is.
For frame of reference, my two kids went to public schools all their lives. Our local public HS is one of the more diverse in the SF Bay Area. We live in the general area/vicinity of Stanford (Harker and Nueva aren’t far away) and I know people who know people who were caught in the Varsity Blues scandal.
Just a couple examples that I’m aware of. I work with someone who went to Yale and Stanford. His kids went to…you guessed it, Yale and Stanford. Go figure. Legacy wasn’t the only reason for admission. A friend of my older kid has generational wealth and now attends a college with buildings and programs named after the family. Go figure. Just anecdotes. I know. But I have MANY more of them.
My D21 just graduated her local public HS and will be attending Cal Poly SLO, as anyone following the “Parents 2025” thread will know. Yes, some universities are trying to work on the issue. Inequities obviously still exist TODAY.
Getting back to my original point, if you don’t have a hook, say like being a member of the “donation class,” then your chances of being accepted at the top colleges are greatly reduced. And yes, there other hooks, like recruited athlete, legacies (often go hand in hand with wealth), URM’s, etc.
I get that a lot! It isn’t the most school-ish name out there. Someone needs to talk to marketing…
I think we are saying the same thing. It was a very sobering thing to figure out that the Naviance/Scoir scatterplots were basically useless. The good(?) news is I did the numbers for our lps a couple of days ago, and I figure his odds wouldn’t be any better had he stayed home.
I feel weird talking in these terms, though, because I don’t really care where he goes to college- I am more just fascinated by the cultural reckoning happening, or not happening depending upon where you sit.
From my front row seat, prep schools are “privilege ground zero” and there is a lot to talk about and a lot to work on. They are easy targets and a lot of old tropes don’t really apply any more - which I only have a clue about because of the past 3 years my kid has attended one. I think there is a lot of good in them, they are earnestly trying to improve, and they are not to blame for all of the inequities of the world.
Eta: congratulations to your daughter! Cal Poly is a fantastic school! I hope she is excited for it. I t isn’t far from Cate, and I have wanted kiddo to tour there for a while.
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I live a sheltered life, so don’t fire the folks in marketing due to my ignorance. 
SLO is a perfect fit for D21. Great location, not too far from home, perfect major for her, UG focused, smaller school AND relatively “light” on the pocketbook for the parents. The only nit to pick is that D is coming from a very diverse HS, and while SLO is improving, it’s still not considered as diverse as other CA publics.
Is my resentment of private schools showing? 
Kidding, sorta.
The one thing I forgot to mention above and this is my own first hand account. I coached youth sports at a high level. Teams comprised of all SES levels. Let’s just say, I’ve seen and heard a lot. And obviously to everyone here, some of those high SES kids benefited a lot from private training and also some pretty fantastic video/Internet presentation(s), just to name a couple of examples.
If schools like Chicago and NYU are targeting wealthy prep schools in order to scoop up full payers, then these acceptances show up as unhooked acceptances from the middle of the class (Chicago) or lower (NYU). In other words, applicants who can potentially pay full freight show up in the HW data in the “without distinction” pile. That data strongly suggests that these “without distinction” students face very long odds at schools like Pomona, CMC, Yale, MIT, Swarthmore, Brown, Stanford, and Princeton., regardless of their willingness to pay full freight.
As others have suggested, there may be some applicants from rich prep schools who, because of their family’s wealth, end up on a college’s “Director’s List” or its equivalent, but I think those are rarer than people here seem to believe, even from a school like HW. Being willing to fund a new athletic center may put a family on such a list, but being able to pay full freight most certainly will not.
I don’t doubt it happens, but “Director’s List” type kids are not nearly common enough to explain the large number of “with distinction” kids who get into top schools.
Money spent in exorbitant amounts on things like new science centers can be a hook, but in order for “Director’s List” type kids to be driving the numbers, there would have to be many dozens of such families in every HW class, and that’s not the case. There is a huge difference in the wealth needed to pay for private school tuition and the wealth needed to buy your way into Harvard.
As for all these articles, you might notice that quite a few of them are written by the same author, or they are articles about other articles written by that author. Keep in mind when reading that the author’s point of reference was teaching at HW around 30 years ago, and she has been writing various versions of the same article for at least two decades.
IMO, there is some truth in what she is writing, but to the extent that her points are still relevant, they seem to apply to a small (and seemingly shrinking) contingent of private school families, and they don’t strike me as a fair or accurate depiction of the current culture at HW in particular.
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Thanks for digging this up and posting it, as it cuts directly to the heart of the matter.
I’d add that I think that for schools like Pomona, the HW “with distinctions” data includes students with other desirable, recruitable talents other than just athletics.
We live in the East Bay in a high SES area, and I saw and heard a lot, too, while on the sports sidelines. 
. Sounds crazy, but Cate was a way to escape that particular dysfunction. There’s very few recruited athletes (very different than East Coast boarding schools and probably private day schools) and kiddo gets to play sports for the fun of it with his friends. Can you even imagine? He got to try a new sport in high school, and even got playing time!
Plus there is honest to gosh real diversity- which is virtually non-existent in our town. And it isn’t like people aren’t spending ridiculous amounts of money on their kids here - all of the tutoring, private coaching, test prep, club sports, school donations, the car, the food (someone else is feeding my teen boy all he can eat for most of the year!) etc. Keeping up with the Joneses really adds up. And isn’t so hot on the mental health of the kids.
I get where you are coming from re: private schools, I really do. For us, the problems around privilege at boarding school ended up being more manageable than the problems around privilege at our public school. We are fortunate because family was able to help pay for school, and therefore we had a choice. Most people don’t have a choice, and that’s the real problem, in my mind.
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As we all know, there are 5 schools in the Claremont consortium. In terms of CDS’s, I checked all 5 and this is what I found:
School/Alumni Relation/Recommendations
CMC/Considered/Very Important
Pomona/Not Considered/Very Important
Scripps/Considered/Important
HMC/Considered/Very Important
Pitzer/Considered/Important
So, alumni relations are considered at the other 4 colleges of the Claremont consortium.
And the other admission factor to address is how does a student obtain recommendations, which are “very important” at 3 of the 5 colleges at Claremont. And “important” at the other 2. Teachers? Coaches? Paid or Volunteer Work? Internships? Absolutely. How does one get those jobs, volunteer positions and internships? How about from, say, “important or influential people”? When you have wealth, prominent or “strong” recommendations, can and are obtained.
So, it’s not always about a direct donation or donations to the college.
I agree, I didn’t mean to imply that it is common. I should have added that our prep school has its share of billionaire heirs, and I only saw obvious admission purchases happen twice with T20 schools (out of maybe 400 college admittances over the years). Of course, perhaps those were the only two that were egregious enough to be noticed… but on the other hand I did not see the “failed bids” either…
One of the benefits of being at a prep school is that you can understand the odds of admission better simply because you know the kids well who have gone before. HW is large, but many high ranking prep schools have no more than 100-150 kids in a class. It is not that hard to keep track of how, say, the top third of each class navigated their paths to college acceptances. Honestly, where kids wind up is not perfectly predictable ex ante, but it is far from random.
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Your point applies not only to odds of admission, but to “fit” as well. The kids know each other even across grades, and so they gain strong insight into the “type” of kids who end up at certain schools, and whether they would be comfortable at such a school.
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The earlier comment mentioned Pomona specifically rather than the other 4 Claremont colleges. Some of the legacy considerations are interesting. For example, following Varsity Blues, there was a new law requiring CA private colleges to report information on legacy admissions. An example report is at https://cdn.ymaws.com/aiccu.edu/resource/resmgr/publications/2020/aiccu_state_admissions_repor.pdf . In the report, CMC and Pitzer mention information on number of legacy/donor admits, but Mudd and Scripps say they “do not provide any manner of preferential treatment in admissions on the basis of applicant relationships to donors or alumni of the institution,” per definitions in Education Code Section 66018.5. Mudd’s president has also previously made vague statements like, “We don’t really have legacy admissions,” which leaves a lot open to interpretation. Perhaps legacy is considered, but offers limited admissions influence.
The colleges are fairly clear on LORs. For example, the page linked in my previous post says Pomona requires 2 teacher LORs and specifies, “These should be written by teachers of core academic subject areas: English, foreign languages, math, science or social sciences.”
LORs doesn’t strike me as an area where it primarily depends on wealth. The Harvard lawsuit did a regression analysis on LOR score. They didn’t control for family income directly, as they didn’t know applicant’s income. However, they did control for legacy, which is well correlated with wealth. With controls, the regression analysis found that legacies had slightly worse LORs than expected from the rest of controls. Kids who were flagged as SES “disadvantaged” (typically lower income) had a slightly better LOR score than expected from rest of controls. . At first glance the most influential controls in LOR score appear to be Academic Index and planned field of major, rather than factors more closely correlated with wealth.
This fits with the reader guidelines at https://s3.amazonaws.com/media.thecrimson.com/pdf/2018/10/29/1333554.pdf listing the following guidelines for above average LOR scores. Note that all the quoted statements are a comparison to other students in the class. It might be more difficult to get something similar to the quoted statements at a selective HS like HW than elsewhere.
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
Pomona requests “two letters of recommendation from teachers of academic courses” and a recommendation from the applicant’s school counsellor. I think this is pretty standard.
Added: sorry posted this at about same time as @Data10 data who covered this above.
I’m not sure where you saw ME just reference only Pomona, but my first post about 3 schools of the Claremont consortium came with Post #376, which was posted tongue-in-cheek, because I also posted a gif from Animal House in the same post.
A quote from my post is below. Note that I was replying to CateCAParent’s comment about Pomona, not your much earlier post about other Claremont colleges.
Count me cynical then. Unfortunately, I can’t see applicant files. 
Somehow, I believe “other paperwork” gets included (or stapled) into the file, but maybe not reflected in the college’s marketing or their CDS. Let’s call them “development cases.”
And then how does an applicant get their EC’s, including, but not limited to, paid or unpaid work.
Check.
The linked Independent California Colleges and Universities report is also interesting for the schools not included; USC and Stanford chose to send in their own reports. Here is a summary of this report as well as the Stanford and USC reports. Lot’s of interesting (but not particularly surprising) tidbits regarding USC and Stanford.
I prefer to call them bright, talented, and hardworking kids blessed with an excellent education and a little luck in the admissions process. Whatever you call them, these kids didn’t buy their way into Pomona.
Now if you want to talk about USC . . . 
This is a great question. For kiddo’s school, there are organized, scheduled community service opportunities (like bingo at an assisted living facility), with a driver provided. There are loads of leadership opportunities on campus. What is difficult is becoming an Eagle Scout, doing club sports or community performing arts. To my knowledge the school leaves the kids to their own devices over the summer, and if anything recommend they get “real jobs” instead of summer enrichment programs. If someone is getting an internship, it isn’t happening during the school year, and probably through family connections.
Eta: for example, kiddo has had the same gig every summer, junior coaching for a rec swim team. His advisor knows about it, and to the extent they have voiced anything, I get the impression that they couldn’t be happier that he is doing something totally normal that he genuinely wants to do. In contrast, the charitable tourism trip to the Bahamas is highly discouraged.
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@CateCAParent brings up a great point about money and education. While part of this discussion has focused on people buying their way into schools (as major donors) and the desire to have FP students, it has also focused on private school acceptances and assumed that all kids at privates are rich.
It is absolutely true that the whole system, including public, favors kids who have what money can buy. Better school districts, tutors, test prep, travel sports, music lessons, enrichment, connections to internships, etc. Certainly, a kid living at home is dependent on his parents ability to fund these extras.
Boarding schools (so not H-W) usually have about a third of the class getting FA. My son’s school had 50%. Every kid at those schools is getting those advantages. So it isn’t as surprising to me that having been selective in the first place and offering every kid all the advantages families buy for their kids that they have great college matriculation lists.
In particular, colleges find first Gen, high need kids at these schools who are likely to succeed because they have been well-prepared. So when I read that a disproportionate number of students at Tippy Top come from private schools and know that the author means for me to think “rich”, I know that a meaningful part of that pool are actually the "Priveleged Poor " – the high need kids who came from private schools they attended on scholarship.
I know from my son’s classmates that these kids had excellent college acceptances and havecontinuedto thrive. (And it’s one of the major reasons as a parent of an alum that I continue to support his school financially. It was transformative for my kid and truly life-changing for others.)
It’s hard to tease out all these things.
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Here is a recent article on the disproportionate enrollment of private school students at ‘highly rejective’ schools (a newish term coined by Akil Bello that the author uses). Overall, it’s pretty negative, and I don’t agree with some of the conclusions/recommendations, but some tidbits here:
Graduating from private high school is a far larger advantage at many top ranked colleges than playing sports or being a legacy or even having a connection to a donor are. (Viewed a certain way, a private school is almost a more reliable income source for an elite college than a donor.) While 10 percent of students admitted to Harvard’s Class of 2018 were recruited athletes and 12 percent were legacies, almost 40 percent of the class went to a private school.
That special bond is cashed in through one of the least-well-known rituals of college admissions: the counselor call. It’s a decades-old tradition, in which school counselors and admissions officers review a list of students who have applied to a college, and counselors get a chance to make a case for their students. Swarthmore College put an end to the practice this past year after it discovered that more than 90 percent of their requests for counselor calls came from private high schools. This spring, USC began telling counselors requesting a call that any conversation would be informational, and asked counselors to “refrain from advocating for candidates.”
There are many good nuggets in this article, and references to research. One of the most eye-opening: at Horace Mann in NYC, college counselors earn significant salaries (one at ~$350K).
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/06/private-schools-competitive-college-advantage-problems.amp
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