@mynameiswhatever Where does it say in the Gateway application portal “Have your school call our BS Admissions Office and make a personal plea for your child to be admitted or to give us assurance that he/she will attend if admitted”?
Most kids don’t get the benefit of this “special call” - they need to advocate for themselves. It’s pretty easy for a student to demonstrate interest in a school so it can have a reasonable feel for its prospects of having that student matriculate.
It is sometimes the BS that calls the local school GC to inquire if a student is admitted whether he/she is likely to attend.
No outrage required here.
I can relate. I went to a public school where they flat out refused to write my rec’s because the principal of the school “didn’t want to lose talent” to a private school and wanted to send kids like me in the Gifted & Talented program to the G&T high school. I did NOT want that. I finally got them to cave in after talking to the superintendent. It gets very annoying. Luckily my teachers supported me and wrote good recs (hopefully) haha! Just fight it through OP and bring it to a higher level until you can resolve it.
Also, my public school was underfunded in a poor neighborhood. I doubt that they even called the boarding school, let alone know where I was applying. Don’t worry, AO usually understand this about public schools and accomodate for that so you’re on the same field compared to private schools where kids have more support to apply to prep schools.
Boarding school Admissions Officers DO rely on established relationships with private schools and consultants with which they have long standing relationships. Yield IS all important to the top tier schools and they report it immediately to their Board of Trustees with great excitement when it’s in the 70+%. (I was formally a Board Member at one such school). The AOs look for guidance as to who will accept their offer when that guidance is available to them. Secondary school placement officers (typically only found at PreK thru 8th or 9th grade private schools) or secondary school consultants WiLL be asked by the top tier schools if a particular candidate has a 1st choice and if the applicant will attend their school if accepted. If not, they aren’t likely to award a spot and offer only a waitlist. This was true when I applied to boarding schools in 1976 and is even more true today. My son applied this year for the 10th grade to several of the very top tier schools. He is a legacy at two of the schools to which he applied. He is well liked/respected at his PreK-12 private school by students, faculty and administration. He’s a two season varsity athlete and captain (top 5 swimmer in our state), president of his class, president of two school organizations, an accomplished musician and singer, has done some very unusual extra curricular activities that have garnered significant media attention, straight A+s, has won several national writing awards and apparently interviewed extremely well (according to consultant). We used an outside consultant so he would have an advocate since we knew his school wouldn’t want to lose him (I’m currently on Board of Trustees, so his leaving was a very sensitive matter). Punchline: my son’s very clear first choice was Choate where he was accepted. He was waitlisted at SPS and Lawrenceville (the two multiple generation legacy schools), waitlisted by Groton, Deerfield, Andover and accepted by Hotchkiss, Taft, Westminster and Brooks. Our consultant was very honest and revealed to the two legacy schools that asked him outright if my son would attend - he told them (in the interest of preserving his relationship for future years and candidates) that neither school ws my son’s first choice and that they would have to fight for him. Likewise, he signaled to Choate that it was his first choice when they told him my son was “reading well”. As it turned out, the consultant signaling to the AOs that my son would not attend if accepted definitely had an impact on his acceptance rate BUT it also signaled to Choate that they were safe in accepting him which in the end was all that mattered. AOs don’t have the ability to do that if there is no secondary school placement officer or consultant to talk to but when they do, they do everything they can to protect their yield.