Hah! You got me. This is only in the context of DD22’s school (selective NYC public).
There was grade inflation during the pandemic; so a “moderate kid” would be someone 10th-50th %ile (kids do very well on SAT no surprise) reported. High stat would be someone top 10th-ile. Kids who reported SAT scored 1500+.
A college admission reader may also consider that a student with SES or other disadvantage may actually have achieved more than a student with comparable achievements starting from a more advantaged situation, because overcoming initial disadvantages is itself an (additional) achievement, even if there is no diversity motivation per se.
The top half of some of the more selective high schools may be pretty high end students in the context of high schools overall.
I imagine it is more about “potential” than “talent.”
Agree, so only speaking for this school’s experience.
I agree, in theory. In practice, college admissions readers cannot make those determinations with accuracy given the number of high schools and the time allotted to each application. In practice, heuristics are applied which in any other context would be considered stereotypes, or worse.
Again, people are holding the false assumption that admissions to “elite” private colleges is a prize which is handed out to the kids who are graduating with the highest GPAs, the highest tests scores, and the most competition wins. Because these people believe this, they also believe that the fact the kids are receiving this “prize” without having the highest GPA, tests scores and most competition wins means that “the system is Broken”, or “admissions are unfair”.
Admissions are only unfair based on the rules that some people have decided are the actual rules for admissions.
When a college writes in it’s CDS that GPA is “Very Important” it means just that - GPA is very important. It does NOT mean that they will always select applicants with the highest GPAs over applicants with lower GPAs. That is simply a assumption that people are making.
The mission of every college is to educate students. At no college does is it written that their mission is “to educate only those students who have the highest GPAs, the highest tests scores, etc”. In fact, at no college is it written that their mission is to “educate only the very smartest and most accomplished high school graduates”.
On the other hand, college DO have Mission Statements that include having a diverse student body.
So would people please stop talking as though “elite” private colleges are required by some rule, policy, or law, to accept the kids with the highest GPA, test score, or academic achievements, or that these rules, policies, or laws ever existed.
If both students are full pay then Americans abroad are def NOT in a stronger position - full pay + international is the golden ticket 
International students do not get much if any FA and this pool of applicants has grown significantly over the years
For americans - being in the US pool of applicants is better overall
bc if schools have a quota in mind for a particular region or country - they are thinking of admitting international students for geographic diversity/HS diversity first.
We have a graduating senior class of almost 300 and with 2 other international schools with similar size classes PLUS the turbo charged local schools …not enough spaces in the T50 for achievers from this small country
I wish I could give this post a thumbs up a thousand times! It should probably be pinned, so as many people as possible see this.
I completely agree. We are on the (highly rated and very large) public school side and our top students didn’t get into top colleges - locked out. Top colleges are either going elite prep or URM.
How exactly can you so assuredly extrapolate that your highly rated public HS is representative of all public HS and then further draw a conclusion that top colleges are only accepting URMs and elite preps?
I wouldn’t find such a generalized statement credible across all schools if it came directly from one AO at an elite much less some random parent from a large public HS.
Yale’s class profile directly contradicts your comments…
And Princeton…
Yes you absolutely convinced me of their equality with your data showing that they accept 40% of their students from a population set of 10% of the population of students (non-public schools).
Of course, I didn’t realize I needed to be an Ivy League AO to have an opinion or share my experiences on a CC board. So sorry to ruffle your feathers!
And you convinced me that everyone from public HS gets “locked out” of elite schools when 60%+ of kids are from public HS. Sorry when the facts contradict a convenient belief.
Your individual experience does not reflect a universal truth even when stated with confidence and sorry the apparent rejections at your local school “ruffled your feathers”.
Your experience is appropriate to share, extrapolating it into a universal truth contradicted by published facts not so much.
Got it so the rich White kids and or the black kids took the spots your large white middle class public HS students previously got and that dynamic is taking place across the country at all elite schools. Thanks for your insight and candor!
An interesting sidebar to the above is the composition of the public school students. Princeton, for example, has been about 60% public school for many years, but whereas that used to be drawn from typical middle class schools, I am told a substantial percentage are now from public charter schools.
@roycroftmom here is the matriculation data from Bergen Academies. A large public HS in NJ that is a magnate school. Per your comments they have over 100 Ivy admits plus a comparable number of non Ivy elites.
I have also heard anecdotally that many of the NYC elite day schools (Dalton, Trinity, Riverdale, Horace Mann, etc) experienced fewer acceptances to elites than their traditional 30%+ as legacy was not as much of a hook as years past. Not sure of the extent of the “disappointment” but I have heard it from multiple parents.
Apparently the days of applying ED as a legacy (generosity still matters) while in the top 1/3 of the class no longer translates as readily into a golden ticket as it used to.
That makes sense, because that group of students from elite NYC day schools comprise a large portion of those who deferred their admission from the prior class. The wealthy and well-connected have better alternatives often so are more able and willing to defer.
Legacies who end up admitted often have an additional hook, like athletics or extraordinary accomplishments. Regular legacy isnt worth so much now.
Magnet/charter/selective public kids seem to do pretty well. Whether they should count as public is for another thread…
No American college perhaps. The University of Cambridge explicitly states that its mission is “to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence”.
They have no problem stating that they want the best students and that they intend to achieve this through “the widest possible student access to the University” while regarding “freedom from discrimination” as a “core value”.
Yale Freshman Profile – 25% Asian
2020 Census – 6% Asian
You mentioned non-public school kids are 4x overrepresented compared to the US population. Note that in the stats above Asian students are also 4x overrepresented compared to the US population. Does this mean that Yale favors Asian students over other races? Or might it more relate to Asian students being more likely to apply to Yale than average, and being more likely to be well qualified than average? It’s a similar idea for private school kids.
So applying to Cambridge is an option.
What do you consider “top colleges”? So my kid’s great and very large high school in Chicagoland sends almost nobody to the Ivies, but then again, almost nobody applies. However, there are always a few who go to U Chicago, students who go to WUSTL, a few to Northwestern, USC, UCLA, OOS to U Mich, UVA, and UNC, one or two to Stanford and/or Caltech, a couple always go to Tulane, and Midwestern LACs like Carleton, and maybe a few NE LACs like Vassar (Wesleyan seems to like the high school).
Since no more than 20 generally apply to any Ivy but Harvard (which may get 30 applications), with RD acceptance rates of 3%-5%, it’s not surprising that there are almost no kids from the high school attending Ivies.
On the other hand, there are always a good number applying to Northwestern, U Chicago, WUSTL, and other Midwestern colleges with low acceptance rates, and there are always students who are accepted to these colleges, sometimes with scholarships.
I don’t know about the class of 2026, but that has held true for the previous decade or so. I would REALLY be surprised if there were no students from my kid’s high school who were accepted at the usual list of colleges this year.
It is, however, hard to know - only the students with perfect GPAs have their chosen colleges announced. Students with 3.95 UW will not join the ranks of the “valedictorian group”, but have the same chances of being accepted to an “elite” college. However, the high school made a decision a few years back that it would not publish the lists of the numbers of kids who are accepted to each college. It’s part of the policy of not having a toxic college admissions season. Congratulations on your admission to Yale, but that, in and of itself, is not more noteworthy than the the acceptance of students to UIUC, Purdue, Kent State, or UIC.
Bottom line, I have not seen any evidence that our kid’s public school has been “shut out”.
There are high schools in the area which are higher ranked, and they have better numbers of students who are accepted to “elite” colleges.
Again, their stated mission is education at the highest level, not “teaching the highest achieving students”. They are trying to achieve the very best teaching practices, which is not the same as exclusively (or even preferentially) teaching the highest achieving students.
Be that as it may, I specifically referred to PRIVATE “elite” colleges, and Oxbridge are not private. The mission of public universities is generally based on the needs of the state (or in the case of Oxbridge, the country), not the interests and needs of the university. Often the needs of the state include the retention of high achieving students.
However, not always - Berkeley can fill its incoming classes with applicants whose weighted GOA is over 4.2, but they reject 70% of the students with those GPAs, and 40% of their admits are of students with lower GPAs, albeit at a much lower acceptance rate. Still, there were 22,000 or so applicants to Berkeley with weighted GPAs of over 4.2 in 2020 who were rejected, while around 5,500 students who were accepted had lower GPAs than those 22,000.
