That is a bit sobering. If you think of Prep Schools as “College Preparation” and not “Life Preparation”, to see matriculation averages below the average matriculation for all applicants to the college as a whole (say, under 10% for the top 25 national colleges + the top 15 liberal arts colleges), is an eye-opener (I know I am technically comparing apples with oranges, but still!).
The year of these data, for example, Governor’s Academy sent one student to HYPMS, and an additional 3 students to other ivies. That is probably better than a local public school, but by how much? One would hope that life values and balance are learned EXTREMELY well, since that is another (arguably more important) mission of Prep Schools.
I find it interesting and satisfying to find that people are still using the information that I compiled a few years ago. To address one question mentioned above, how Lawrenceville ranked was definitely not my motivation in compiling the data though I was very pleased that it did show very well. I started with NYC private day schools since that’s what my sons were applying to at the time. Ironically, though, they both chose to attend elite public schools in NYC instead of the the private schools that accepted them.
In anticipation of the obvious question, I do not intend to update that information. It was a tremendous amount of work and my primary motivation for doing that no longer exists.
I actually started on a new version of Lvillegrad’s stats, but ran into difficulty finding matriculation information as many schools just post the schools most often attended, without breaking it down by precisely how many at each school. I’ve only got data in the spreadsheet for 8 schools (Blair, Brooks, Concord, Groton, Hotchkiss, Loomis, St. Mark’s, Exeter), but if anyone’s interested in drumming up the information on other schools, I’d be happy to put it in the spreadsheet. (mind you, the fact that I didn’t include other schools doesn’t necessarily mean that I looked at couldn’t find the data, just that I hit a few road blocks – Deerfield, St. George’s, Choate, I’m looking at you – and stopped.)
Only problem is that the only way I know to make a document available on this site is by making it a Google doc, but I can’t upload to Google docs at work. I could email it to anyone who’s interested and wants to give me an email address. Or maybe there’s some other way to post it here that I don’t know about.
I’ve posted Choate’s breakdown after each graduating class for the past three years. Just to lazy to go find the link, but it’s there somewhere, This data tells you NOTHING about the quality of the school or your child’s chances at any particular college, so I’m in the camp that believes that just posting the colleges students have matriculated to over the past five years is sufficient. All these lists tell you is which colleges those particular students at those particular schools that particular year preferred. Could be a very different pattern the following year.
I am interested in the topic. I agree that the college matriculation statistics are not helpful in determining the quality of education received. Can someone help soxmom post her spreadsheet on googledocs? @thelittleswimmer ?
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
While anybody can certainly put together a spreadsheet, please note that posting a link to google docs is not allowed, and will be deleted, particularly as past performance is not an indicator of future success.
I agree with @ChoatieMom that the matriculation list tells you nothing about the quality of the education at that school. And certainly it doesn’t tell you about your own child’s chances of getting into, say, Columbia to know how many students went there over the past five years. But I think it does tell you something about the composition of the student body. And if you have four or five years of recent data, you get a pretty good snapshot of the relative mix of schools that students from that BS attend. Assuming that your child isn’t some anomaly among that student body (i.e., your kid didn’t get into Choate with a 20th percentile SSAT just because you gave the school a new dorm), then it gives you some sense of the relative likelihood of attending different categories of schools. Just to take two schools for which I had data and which are on relatively opposite ends of the spectrum: at Exeter, 51% of the students attend a “top school” (defined at top 25 nat’l universities plus top 15 LACs), and 70% attend a “strong school” (top 50 nat’l plus top 25 LACs), whereas at Brooks the numbers are, respectively, 22% and 50%. In other words, an “average” student at Exeter is likely to end up at a top school, whereas an “average” student at Brooks is much more likely to end up at a strong school, but not a top school.
Anyway, I’m just a data geek and I find this stuff interesting. Everyone can draw their own (or no) conclusions from it as they wish.
Or, perhaps, Exeter attracts the students who prefer and would end up at those schools anyway, and Brooks attracts a different type of student. My issue with matriculation lists is that people may be misled to believe that there is a causal relationship between a particular BS and a particular set of colleges.
Yes!!! I am very smart (I think) and driven and like a challenge but I am nonplussed with Exeter and some of the other “big” schools. I also am nonplussed with some of the “big” colleges. It’s fit, personality, philosophy, and maybe some kids are drawn to “name” places which makes they choose different colleges just like they would choose different boarding schools. Or their parents/social circle, etc are like that.
I would say that there’s correlation, not causation. Let’s change my example to Groton and Brooks, to pick two schools that are more comparable in size and feel than Exeter and Brooks. I mean no disrespect to Brooks at all when I say that Groton is filled with kids who could also have gotten into Brooks if they’d applied there but the reverse is not true. This is not to say that there’s no one at Brooks who chose it over Groton (or its ilk), undoubtedly there is and maybe that kid gets into Harvard anyway. But that’s not going to be the norm. Let’s say we have a kid from Groton and a kid from Brooks who both really, really, really want to go to Harvard. Statistically speaking, the kid from Groton has a better chance at getting in than the kid from Brooks – not because Groton gave him a superior education, but because the Groton kid was more likely to have higher SSAT scores to start with, which in turn means that he is statistically more likely to have higher SAT scores too (someone had a great analysis on here a year or two back about strongly SSAT scores correlate to SAT scores), which means he’s more likely to get into Harvard than the kid from Brooks with the lower SSAT/SAT scores. So going to Groton didn’t “cause” him to get into Harvard, but there is a correlation.
Now, whether that kid with the higher SSAT/SAT scores would still have gotten into Harvard even if he had chosen to attend Brooks instead of Groton is an entirely different question, and one that I agree cannot be answered in any way by matriculation stats (or indeed by any stats that I can think of). That’s the question currently being debated on the big fish/small pond thread, and I think it’s clear that this is one of those existential questions to which there can be no provable answer.