<p>Do colleges only admit around the same number of kids from the same school per year? I go to a medium sized public school by the way, which sends around 0-2 kids to my dream school per year</p>
<p>in general, yes. They protect their brands this way by distributing the product broadly. You are competing with your classmates who are applying to those same colleges you are.</p>
<p>There is no official per-high-school quota practiced by college admissions offices. </p>
<p>Colleges do not have a particular number they are aiming for from each school. School A may have 10 kids accepted into DreamU one year but only 4 the next year. However, you can be sure that you are competing with kids that apply from your school.</p>
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<p>Colleges which place great importance on class rank do indirectly limit the number of admits from each high school.</p>
<p>@saif235 : @ucbalumnus is 100% right. It may not be “official,” but it’s something many colleges always keep in mind…</p>
<p>So years they don’t see anyone interesting they take 0. They will take 3 one year if 3 are really compelling.</p>
<p>@theeecsadvisor : I understand that, but so many people on this forum have a notion that they “shouldn’t bother” applying to Reach School X because “our school valedictorian is applying” that I find it easier to just say that “There is no official per-high-school quota practiced by college admissions offices”.
Case in point: At my high school we once had something like 12 or 15 kids get into Stanford. The next year only 2 kids got in. This year nobody got in. If your class is particularly impressive Reach School X may accept more people than you’d think so don’t keep harping on that “quota”. </p>
<p>Here’s another case in point: Both my kids attended Stuyvesant High School, which admittedly is not the normal HS. Approximately one-quarter of the graduating class (about 200 students) applies to Harvard every year – and every student is a stand-out in their own right. There’s also a high likelihood that those same kids also apply to Yale, Princeton, Stanford and the like, so in-school competition for top colleges is fierce. Although Stuyvesant doesn’t rank, the HS college office assumes admissions lines up files in GPA order to determine relative ranking. That said, Harvard takes who they want to take and they don’t concern themselves with minimums. I imagine it’s the same with peer institutions. However, no matter how stellar everyone is, when 200 kids apply from one school, Admissions cannot take everyone, so they probably do have a maximum number they will take from one school. Some years Harvard has skipped over the Valedictorian and taken kids with lesser GPA’s – as in students ranked #6, #10, #37, #71, #103, #162 etc. Some years they will admit 8 students; other years they will admit 15 or 16. The year my daughter applied, Admissions took 28 kids and then the Regional Admissions Director retired and was replaced with someone new. The next year Harvard took 6 students. Was it because the students in that year were less impressive than the year before, or was it because the new Admissions Director wasn’t as keen on the school as the recently retired director? There are so many variables and unknowns in the applications process that you never know why a college takes who they take. But I think the word to use if “fluid” – the number of students accepted from an individual high school will most likely change from year to year depending upon the scholastic potential of students and what Admissions happens to think of your school in any given year.</p>
<p>Yeah, let’s look at it this way. Can you believe that when they get to the War Room, any AO isn’t aware of how many applicants she or he is likely to get? Remember, often the AOs have a region. Can you imagine Harvard giving any AO many more admissions than another AO if Harvard wants to remain a (inter)national university? In addition, at places like Harvard the AOs know their high schools but the experienced AOs know them, too, might have covered them at one time. So the names of the high schools are in the air in the War Room, and if the name of any one high school that usually comes up doesn’t come up, there are 2 or 3 or more people in the room who are aware of that. To have many more admissions at one high school than you did the year before means that those admissions had to come from some other high school in the region, or they had to come from some other AO’s region. How long do you think that can go on before things even themselves out again? </p>
<p>Colleges don’t have a set in stone minimum or maximum number of students they accept per HS.</p>
<p>Admissions officers each go through a few dozen applications per day in “reading season”. The applications are segregated IS and OOS for public schools that see a significant number of OOS applications and must limit their OOS admissions. They don’t segregate by HS. They are very busy reading from January to March. They know before they start the approximate numbers (portion) of IS and OOS admission offers they must produce to reach their targets after yield. The applications are reviewed in random order. Two admissions officers read each file separately, and they each get a vote; if they vote the same, that’s the decision. If they vote differently, the application goes to committee, or gets kicked up to Dean of Admissions, for tiebreaker.</p>
<p>With the possible exception of a few nationally famous High Schools, they neither know nor care how many applications came from, and how many admission offers went to, students from a particular HS in the present or a previous application cycle. They get the school’s information when they do the reading, to put your application and transcript in context, but your HS really doesn’t matter beyond that. They could black out your HS’s name and do their jobs exactly the same.</p>
<p>Note that, in generally, colleges want to admit the strongest possible well-rounded <em>class</em> they can get. They are not as interested in well-rounded <em>students</em>. If you were first percussionist in your HS ensemble, but their orchestra is full and the gaps they really need to fill are that the English department needs a writing student, and the Chemistry department needs a Physical Chemistry major, and the Engineering department needs an experienced firefighter to study Fire Protection Engineering, and they have too many prep school kids and not enough low income URM students to bring that perspective, well… your percussion experience is nice, but it doesn’t fill any gaps in their incoming class.</p>
<p>Interesting. This is the way it worked where you or a loved one worked, @FCCDAD?</p>
<p>@FCCDAD
Actually, the likelihood of an admissions officer knowing, or caring about this information is low. They don’t interact with faculty except in special cases.</p>
<p>It mostly comes into play late in the admissions cycle. Early on, they expect they’ll get a certain number of applications for Engineering, a certain number for Arts & Sciences, etc. But by the end, they might find they’ve gotten an unusually large number for A&S, and a third less than expected for Architecture, or whatever. They don’t just have to admit an entering class for the entire university, they also have to match the number of incoming students in each college to the available seats.</p>
<p>This is also the reason the waitlists (at larger schools) are not ranked. If they have seats for only 50 incoming nursing students, and it looks like they can expect 60 admission offers to be accepted and matriculate, there’s no way they’ll take another application to study nursing, regardless of whether the applicant is objective “better” than others on the waitlist. The various colleges will tell admissions what seats they still have to fill after the regular decision offers have been accepted, and admissions will go to the waitlist to find the best candidates they can for those particular seats.</p>
<p>They also like to put together diverse, well rounded classes. For example, an east coast school might already have a few students from the Dakotas; adding another won’t add any diversity, but adding a Pacific Islander when they don’t have any yet, will. They generally like ALL KINDS of diversity: gender, racial, geographic, economic, religious, political, etc. Putting together a diverse incoming class is really an art.</p>
<p>This is why you should explore schools that don’t get many applications from people “like you.” Whatever it is that would make you stand out in the student body at a particular school, that would differentiate you from the majority of other applicants there, is helpful. You can use that to your advantage if you target the right schools.</p>