I’d conjecture that the yield for day students is higher than the boarding students, just based off of the fact that many of the day students that I know only applied to the one school.
For the MX statistic, you need to assume that they accept more students then slots available since not all accepted students choose to attend (yield rate).
edit I didn’t originally read @zeebee619 's similar comment. Regardless, the point still stands.
Exeter said at the NYC admitted students gathering this year was a record year in selectivity for the school-- 13% were given acceptances!
SPS says that this year they had 1,461 applications and admission rate of 12%.
@zeebee619 Yes, that makes sense. I’m a little surprised that the yield is that low at Andover and Exeter. I would have guessed ~80% (as MABlue mentions), and 60-70% at the other top 10 schools.
So it seems this year might have indeed been more competitive, but not massively so…?
I think a very strong economy and stock market has played a strong role in increasing selectiveness.
Milton said over 1600 applications for 150 slots. They didn’t mention the amount of students accepted.
In terms of competitiveness, you also must consider that Most prep schools also admit small batches of students int the upperclass grades, and often also a PG year. It is usually more selective for freshman admission. I at least know that for Andover, freshman admission is a little bit more selective than `10th grade admission. This is not a take on the quality of students, however. It simply works out that more people apply for admission for 9th grade than 10th grade.
To go off of MABlue, one thing about Exeter is that the class of 2017 is the largest it’s ever been, with an upper class of already 300+ students. Because of this, along with the fact that we have been over-enrolling so much, we accepted about 40 less students than last year, in order to control the population swell. It was affected dorm situations and was starting to make things feel a tiny bit more cramped. I’m sure the admit rate for seniors and PGs this year was ridiculously low, but hopefully in the future we can get our admit rates back up.
Same thing was happening with the dorm situation at Andover. It was due to a slightly over-admitted number of students, in anticipation of a lower yield than what actually happened. There were significant problems in creating dorm space.
Doesn’t it seem as though we hear the “most competitive year ever” thing every year? I think that, yes in general applications are up, but the acceptance rates are generally in the same ball park from year to year.
Yep, every year is absolutely the most competitive. It’s a great phrase to make those accepted feel great about being one of the chosen while also enabling those rejected or waitlisted to know that is was especially hard to get in so don’t feel too bad.
No, I think this year was much tighter than usual. If Westminster School ( which has always been competitive) has in the past been in the 22-25% range( depending on what data you use) , and this year took 10% of their applicants- that’s a huge difference. That particular school may be on an upward trajectory in terms of popularity (for example, they have a beautiful new academic building and are still upgrading their already amazing facilities)) , but I’m guessing that a huge difference like that is also related to a larger general applicant pool as well. ( fyi the 10% number comes from the school acceptance letter).
@jktnyc. I don’t believe for two seconds that Westminsters accept rate was 10%. That would be more selective than Andover. According to Boarding School Review, Westminster had a 26% accept rate last year with an average SSAT of 69%. The applications would have had to go up 2 1/2 times to admit the same number of kids as last year. What changed in 12 months.? Why did admissions applications go up so much? They are letting in the same number of kids. Now it is possible that more middle of the road kids are having to broaden their applications with the growing numbers of international applicants but a two and 1/2 times increase in one year strains credulity.
Yes, I have no idea why. Maybe it will turn out that many of these schools had a similar change this year??
@Jktnyc did they say “x amount of students were accepted” or something like “x amounts of students applied for y amount of spots”? the latter does not factor in yield (the amount of people accepted that to not matriculate)
I don’t have the letter in front of me, but they mentioned something like “you were 1 in 10” applicants to be accepted. Again, that’s not their exact wording, but they definitely said 1 in 10.
Regardless. There is heavy massage of numbers from these schools for marketing purposes.
Maybe BS review is wrong. Who vetts their data
Boardingschoolreview data is supposed to be entered/provided by the schools themselves. I don’t believe Westminsters has reached the admit rate of 10%. It’d be probably lowest among all BS this year.