<p>Maybe that’s their plan, JHS, suck you in with something you can believe, and then stick whatever else in there they want. I know nothing about the organization, but I think sometimes we’re just ready to accept a list, as long as it seems reasonable, without necessarily investigating the source or the methodology. Though I don’t know enough about this group to disparage them.</p>
<p>I remember awhile ago, I was reading a Forbes magazine top college list. West Point ranked #1, with the USAF Academy in the top ten, Naval Academy not far behind. Great schools, for sure, but…number 1? When I looked at how they ranked them, two of their top factors were cost of school (zero for military academies), and job placement after graduation (100%). Then it made more sense. </p>
<p>Mirabile, it seems an odd way for a respected publication such as WSJ to order their ranking, basing it upon matriculation into only eight schools. I guess everybody wants to make a list to sell more copies.</p>
<p>The WSJ thing was a stunt, but a pretty clever one. It, too, produced an almost perfect map of mainstream, Establishment prestige. </p>
<p>Using only 8 colleges as their index created some distortions (like the high ranking of Ithaca High School, which was based almost entirely on sending faculty children to Cornell), but they claimed to have tested the effect of a wider index and found it not worth the trouble. They were also a little distorted by the fact that Stanford and Columbia wouldn’t cooperate. They used Pomona as a stand-in for Stanford, which made sense in terms of demographics and selectivity, but Pomona’s class is only about a quarter as large as Stanford’s, and the geographical footprint isn’t exactly the same, so that created some distortion, and they decided just to ignore Columbia, probably because it just would have made the list even more New York-centric. The other thing they did was to to exclude schools with class sizes smaller than 50, which actually knocked out a number of the usual suspects among NYC schools. (If I recall correctly, Brearley and Trinity would have been #1 and #2 if they had met the 50-student threshold.)</p>
<p>But the WSJ never pretended they were measuring academic quality. They were measuring which schools sent the greatest percentage of their graduates to the most selective colleges (which to some extent meant where the greatest concentration of families of students who were going to be attending the most selective colleges chose to send their kids to school). It made a perfectly good story.</p>
<p>That’s interesting, JHS. It certainly makes a difference when you investigate the methodology. Seeing as there are so many fantastic NYC schools, it seems irrational to ignore Columbia, just because the list would have been too NYC heavy. If that’s where the best schools are located, then why ignore them? Apparently to make a more interesting outcome. I suppose you can choose any factors you want, in order to get the results you desire.</p>
<p>applejack brought up some great points. At first, I thought he/she was talking about a different website, that rated colleges, not high schools. It certainly pays to do some research onto what exactly is being measured, and whom is doing the measuring. When I look at their college list, I have to say ??</p>
<p>busdriver11, the original story made clear that they didn’t ignore Columbia because it would make the list too NYC-heavy. They ignored Columbia because Columbia refused to cooperate. They decided not to replace Columbia in the index because the best substitutes for Columbia were already there. (And, I surmised, because including yet another college with the same profile, but even more weighted towards New York, would have made their list less, not more, interesting. Because it was deliberately a little frivolous – a stunt – and not social science.)</p>
<p>(In the original survey, they had set out to use the eight Ivy League colleges, plus Chicago, Duke, and Stanford. Stanford and Columbia wouldn’t cooperate, so they wound up using seven Ivies, Chicago, Duke, and Pomona. They supposedly tested the effect of including Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore, and found that it didn’t make enough difference to justify the trouble. A second version of the survey some years later used a different index of colleges that was slightly less Ivy-heavy and included a few LACs.)</p>
<p>The other goofy thing the WSJ did was use matriculation numbers rather than admission numbers. This meant that when a kid chose to go to Cal or UCLA for financial reasons and passed up one of the eight chosen schools, the school looked worse (even though the student was admitted to the list schools). In the case of our school, where students who get in to the list schools also tend to get in to equally (or more) selective non-list schools, the results of student choices could have a perverse impact, especially because Stanford (a non-list school) is our number one school of matriculation (year in and year out, we send more graduates to Stanford than to any other school). We ranked very high, but given this quirk, we probably should have ranked higher.</p>
<p>It’s funny that here in DC National Cathedral isn’t as well respected as St. Albans, it’s brother school, which didn’t even make the list. Likewise, Georgetown Day School didn’t make the list when it’s generally considered a school that is at least on par with Maret, if not better. Sidwell is also criminally underrated, it has a much better reputation than any of the other DC schools on the list. Potomac school also is an outlier on this list. Not many consider it an elite DC school at least in this area. </p>
<p>Mirabile: It wasn’t “goofy”; it was necessity. They had a tough enough time getting the colleges to release the facebooks (the real ones) of their freshman classes, and the WSJ had to figure out where the kids went to high school if it wasn’t included in the book. Do you really think the colleges would have given a couple of journalists the names and addresses of everyone they accepted? And thus given the WSJ the ability to figure out head-to-head winners and losers? Ummm, no . . . .</p>
<p>Again, anyone who actually read the WSJ article knows that it was presented as, “Hey, here’s an interesting quick-and-dirty way to compare schools objectively! Pretty cool, huh?” much more than, “This is the definitive quality ranking of high schools, using the best methodology possible.”</p>
<p>Khalilzhad: I agree completely about the DC schools, especially Sidwell and GD.</p>
<p>I recognize that colleges would not give the WSJ the needed information (and that, if the high schools would have, their data would not be entirely trustworthy). I still think that what they did do was goofy. The article was called, “How to Get into Harvard.” It began, “As college-application season enters its most stressful final stretch, parents want to know if their children’s schools are delivering the goods – consistently getting students into top universities.” Though the WSJ was very frank about its methodology, the article and rankings were read by most as making a broader claim than simply, “these schools are best at having their students enroll in these eight colleges.”</p>
<p>Given that dh went to Sidwell and my younger brother attended Georgetown Day for a while I have to agree - the list seems suspect! A friend of mine left Maret to attend the school I attended. We were day students, but there were also borders. One of the smartest guys I know went to St. Anselm’s. National Cathedral regularly turns up on lists of top feeders to top colleges and universities, so I suspect it’s place on the list was deserved.</p>
<p>Khalil, I thought the same thing about the DC schools. I would probably throw Holton on your list too. The few people I’ve met from St Anselm’s were all brilliant and liked the school. One mom told me their entrance exam was basically an iq test.</p>
<p>Something that is very misleading when looking at schools and the achievements of their students which cannot be emphasized enough is the resources given to the students, and I mean by the parents NOT the school. My teen attends a school that ranked quite high on the list. This year many of his classmates are taking up to 4 AP exams for subjects not taken at school but studied online, in addition to the 3,4, or 5 at school, and paid for by the parents. Further, most kids have tutors from middle school on. They take SAT prep courses starting the summer before 9th grade. They have private athletic trainers, college consultants, and interview coaches: they even had these when applying to this school pre-9th grade. The result is a “product” that is not necessarily the result of the school at all. The school may do a wonderful job for what it does supply but the data does not adequately represent the reality of the matter.</p>
<p>the list obviously has the very top schools on it and some good ones as well but is missing any Florida ones and there are several great ones and several upcoming: in South Florida: Ransom Everglades, The Benjamin School, Pine Crest, St.Andrews and in Tampa: Berkeley Prep</p>
<p>Just a belated note on BUA and NM. Yup - BUA usually has a high percentage of NM commended/semi-finalist/finalist/whatever-the-minority-award is kids. It varies from year to year, and given the small size of the school, the percentage variance is somewhat large. I would estimate that a third to half the kids get some NM award.</p>
<p>St. Alban’s is missing because it has a boarding component. The list only includes schools that are completely day students. </p>
<p>I think the list is ridiculous in many ways, but I’m not sure I agree with your order either, but then I don’t really think that the quality of schools is a linear thing, or that any kind o order makes sense.</p>
<p>Does anyone know anything about the organization that put these rankings out? I believe it is Bestschools.org. Is this a yearly thing - I have not heard of them.</p>
<p>I mean where is Episcopal Academy on the main line (5 into Harvard from the class of 2013)?</p>
<p>Potomac School; Former Potomac School teacher was just sentenced to 43 years in molestation cases dating from the 1960’s-1970’s. Five Potomac School victims testified, (would have been 12-14 yrs. old at the time). I’d take this school of my list.</p>