Do top schools & top LACS tend to choose only one or a few people from each school? If someone else from my school applied, would it hurt my chances that we attend the same school? I have heard it does not matter, but I’ve seen a lot of people on CC complaining about it! Thanks!
Our school has around 150 per grade, but is very rural in flavor because so many get bussed in from farms. We have few APs and few high-end ECs (except music), and the top students often apply to Cornell and some other Ivies. Two years ago one got into Cornell, last year three did, this year one RD and one guaranteed transfer. I don’t remember any others getting into Ivies though. So, Cornell doesn’t seem to limit us to one per year (but perhaps being from a small rural school whose kids have a history of doing well there might be a bit of a hook?). Just one data point.
People always complain about it, and assume there is some type of quota or min/max. There is not. Last year, my school with a graduating class of ~330 sent 10 or more students to Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Penn.
@auggie104 not sure how much it matters. 5 students at my school (class size is 363) were accepted to Cornell, 3 to Princeton, 1 to MIT, 2 to Harvard, and 4 wait-listed at Dartmouth.
No, universities of this selectiveness try very hard to assess the individual holistically and to go well beyond the admissions documentation and statistics. However, they certainly compare applicants from the same secondary school.
From my experience, there’s some pattern recognition but students are generally judged individually. The admission committee may have some pattern recognition like “Palo Alto High School normally sends a few awesome students our way each year so maybe we’ll spend a little more time on them” but they won’t be thinking “wow we have 11 awesome students from PAHS but we have a quota of 8 so we have to drop 3”.
Think about it - if you were a college and you wanted the absolute best students - you’d just pick the best students quotas be damned.
Thank you all for your responses! It makes sense that they would look past the quotas, but also compare applicants from the same school!