For a white un-hooked student, which yields better results in admission to selective colleges?
Being in the Top 20 of his/her class rank in a very competitive private high school or being in Top 1% of his/her high school? All other parameters are the same.
To be more specific, please look at below 2 school profiles in Northern New Jersey.
You may be tempted to look at admissions for selective colleges at the 2 schools and conclude that the private school is superior because even though it is half the size, many more of its students matriculated to top schools than the public school. It’s obviously a lot more complicated because the private school is already selective in its students and what are the probabilities of your boys (if I remember correctly) making the top 20 there vs the top 1% of the public school.
I, however, would approach the question from a different angle. I would ask which school is a better fit for your boys – where are they going to be happier and more motivated to learn? Are there materially different resources and opportunities (academic and extracurricular) in their areas of interest? Where are their friends going (assuming these are friends that are positive influences)? Have you included your sons in a discussion of their preferences? Assuming finances are manageable, if your boys are more likely to thrive at one school vs another, choose that one. It’s not as if the public school is a troubled school and rarely sends students to top schools – in fact it sent quite a few to the top schools.
I would never, never, never, not ever, choose a high school based solely on college admissions. High school is its own experience. A child who is happy and successful in high school will end up at the right college. We pulled our kids out of their top-performing, sends-loads-of-kids-to-the-Ivies, public school and put them in a lower tier private school for which we paid tens of thousands per kid every year. I will never regret that decision. They both ended up in excellent colleges.
Very few in the private school seem to matriculate to the NJ state universities. So if the private school is under consideration, do you have the money to pay for both the private school and a more expensive private or out-of-state public university, since it seems that NJ state universities are probably looked down upon there?
But also note that the public school lists college acceptances, not matriculations.
What do your kids think? Where will they thrive? Will paying for private school make a difference in the family budget?
I glanced at the two school links. Remember that some colleges do not use weighted grades so the inflated gpa’s from some schools will be lower when you compare them to college acceptance stats.
Wisconsin is on the radar for a fair number of students from NJ, as are other top public U’s in the Midwest. Coming from a public school will not hurt. Colleges will look at what the student did with opportunities- getting top grades with the most challenging curriculum offered by the school, not lesser grades with more AP’s.
The bottom line is finances now and for college/grad/professional school. Your kids will do best where they are happiest. I still remember when my sister gave her kids a look at their local public kindergarten and the parochial one- her son liked the piano in the public k’s room and the kids went there while mom worked at the parochial school. In Wisconsin public schools are generally good so why bother with lesser private ones, especially for the gifted? If your location has top notch public schools why bother with private? I’m from the Midwest so attitudes are different I suppose.
@wis75 No disrespect intended, but nobody would describe Pingry as a “lesser private school.”
It’s hard to compare college acceptances with matriculations. It’s entirely possible for any school to have a superstar who gets accepted to 20 top colleges. I note that Chatham doesn’t even tell you how many students applied.(My offspring’s public high school alma mater shows how many applied and how many were accepted.)
Even if it were matriculations vs. matriculations, lots of things make comparisons difficult. Maybe more public school kids passed on the chance to go to a top private for financial reasons. Maybe a much higher percentage of Pingry kids were legacies…or developmental cases. Maybe Pingry offers “prep sports” like squash, water polo, field hockey, etc that aren’t offered by Chatham and a lot of the kids involved in these were recruited athletes. Maybe Pingry has a number of disadvantaged minority kids who got in through programs like A Better Chance or Prep for Prep. If so, this subset of kids might make Pingry’s results look better than Chatham’s. But that might be wholly irrelevant for a white middle class kid.
So, look at your kid. Is (s)he an above-average athlete who with great coaching might genuinely excel at field hockey, fencing, water polo, or squash? If Chatham doesn’t offer these and Pingry does…advantage Pingry.
Are there courses at Pingry in which your child would excel that aren’t offered at Chatham? For example, if your child has an interest in art history, on paper Pingry might be a better choice.
What is your child’s learning style? Some kids -mine included–excel in discussion based classes. Others hate them.
Again, remember that if your kid isn’t a legacy, and is unlikely to be a recruited athlete in any sport, and you’re not in the position to donate a hefty sum, then the better college admissions results for Pingry are probably meaningless.
On the flip side, if your kid could be a fencing or squash star…you’ve got more to think about.
@BKSquared - Regarding your fit question. That’s the thing we are suffering right now. My wife and I are expats and we didn’t go to school in USA. Now we are trying to navigate the US educational system for our kids. One wants to think that private school will give more to kids and allow them explore new things easily. Our kids are 6th graders and they started in public middle school. Both have received the first marking period grades and they have straight A+ in everything. Problem is, one of kids Science was B+ due to a missed homework. He said he didn’t miss it and he submitted it on time. We emailed the teacher and my son talked to the teacher. Guess what. It took 3 weeks for that teacher to get back to us with a correction. Another thing. I sent an email to Guidance Counselor of said Middle School and it took 2 weeks to receive a response which was 2 sentence. Is this really it? Is Public School teachers and counselors be like this?
@ucbalumnus - We can afford private school for our 2 boys(twins). That will leave us very little if any extra money for enrichment opportunities. Like sending them to a camp or doing international trips for vacations etc. Pingry is the best day school in New Jersey in terms of matriculation. But no idea about anything else.
@jonri - We look at our kids. They are very good academically but could care less about sports or music. I can see the writing on the wall in 7 years. Straight A students with very decent SAT scores but little to none EC’s of significance. Also my boys say the accelerated math class they are in isn’t challenging enough and they don’t know why some kids are in it. My wife just gave them an Upper Level SSAT test and one of them did 39 out of 50 questions in math and they other 37 out of 50. So they are very good in math and we feel like Public School will not challenge them enough. But at the same time we don’t want to throw them to a competitive school like Pingry as we want them to enjoy high school and try different sports and arts opportunities.
I don’t think you can compare the two like you are trying to do. Large public schools also have large classes of special needs children that those private prep schools would not have. They also have populations of kids who intend to go to trade school instead of college. That changes the percentages of who gets in where. Generally, I have heard, that large public colleges like the kids that do well in large public high schools since navigating such a large school presents its own challenges. My kids have had to learn to speak up for themselves, seek out answers on their own, etc., things that don’t necessarily happen in a private prep school. They are, however, both interested in attended a large university rather than a small private one.
You live in one of the best public school districts in a state that has some on the best public schools. Pingry is a good school; is it work $50k + for two kids while you are likely paying $15k a year or more in property taxes for a great public distrct? High school will have very challenging AP and Honors classes; my daughter goes to a top NJ public very nearby Chatham - all of her straight-A, high honors friends are struggling mightily their first semester freshman year to maintain A’s and B’s; some even have the dreaded C. Your kids will be plenty challenged in Chatham. Put that money aside for great colleges, because if you live in Chatham I can almost guarantee you aren’t going to get any financial aid.
As for the e-mail to the teacher…I get your frustration, but I guarantee you that that teacher gets about 50 emails a week from parents complaining that Johnny has a B+ and needs an A because he’s applying to PIngry and Del Barton. And for some reasons parents are convinced not making high honor roll in middle school is a completely unacceptable fate when in actuality it means nothing.
OP- if your kids finish HS with no interests other than academics that’s on you, not their HS.
Spend weekends doing cool and interesting things- teach them how to use a telescope and spend the night on a mountain in the dark looking at the stars. Volunteer as a family at a soup kitchen or Habitat for Humanity learning to install bathroom tile. Have a family book club and each person gets to pick the book and then lead the discussion over pizza one night a month. Do an oral history of your family-- one twin does your side, the other does your wife’s side-- interviewing family members about what they remember of their childhoods, place of origin, etc. and try to get some documentary history via online archives. Build a car out of scrap wood and a small motor (there are plans online if you aren’t technically proficient). Compete to see whose home-made canoe survives the longest on a local pond.
The idea that the HS is going to turn them into interesting and fun HS seniors that a college would want to add to their campus is incorrect. YOU get to turn them into interesting and fun HS seniors. The kids who get groomed and coached for college come off as exhausted robots with a string of AP’s and standardized test results. The kid who decided he loves bugs in the 8th grade because his dad took him camping and he saw 12 different kinds of crickets that night- isn’t that a better way to go?
I think you are looking at spending a whole lotta money for a whole lotta the wrong reasons.
Your kids are in middle school. At that level, my belief was that eating and sleeping were the most important activities. My kids developed “passions” in high school that are still the center of their lives 10 years later, but nothing much in middle school. Let them grow.
I don’t think you should worry about admissions at all for a few years. Together with them, assess what is the best experience for their high school years. If they are still in 6th grade and the decision is about high school it can wait too.
I went to a private high school and was top of my class. The workload and academic pressure prevented me from developing real interests and burned me out as well. I sent my own kids to a mediocre high school where they had enough free time to do things they loved outside of school, and they landed in the kinds of schools you seem to want. But we didn’t discuss college at all until mid junior year of high school and there were many many schools that would have fit.
Thanks. well in our case we weren’t even asking for a grade. She just made a mistake and we wanted her to fix her mistake. We aren’t one of those parents who fight teachers for grades believe me. I will take your word for the challenging high school curriculum. Thanks for providing the input.
Yes, public school teachers and counselors may continue to be like this. Though I found as my kids got further along in school the teachers got less harried (AP classes tended to be smaller) and the GC’s were really great about guiding kids through the college application process despite being somewhat overworked. The high school was very, very different from the middle school.
In general from all the anecodotal evidence I’ve seen kids who were on par in middle school seem to end up about where you’d expect come college. I have one friend whose two kids both ended up at U of Chicago. Her older son went to Horace Mann, her younger son wanted the arts program at our local high school. She’d be the first to tell you that the writing instruction at HM was more demanding, but that otherwise both kids are happy with the education they got.
I went to Meet the Teacher night at our local high school every year and I was impressed by the quality and enthusiasm of almost every teacher we met. We have no regrets and we did think about private school (my parents had offered to pay for it, so there was no money issue.) In the end we decided that our high school had a big enough cohort of high achieving students that my kids would be challenged, that the school offered enough advanced level classes to keep them busy (barely true for the older boy - but he was happier becoming an expert computer programmer than writing weekly essays.) They had a phenomenal art program. It was particularly strong in music - multiple orchestras and bands, a regular and a gospel choir, and unofficially a pretty amazing set of rock bands as well. They had an award winning Science Olympiad team - basically my older son’s freshman class took them to States and they qualified for States for the next seven years beating out schools like Stuyvesant to their glee. My younger son, who through music, really had friends across socioeconomic and ethnic/racial lines thought he was much better in touch with the real world than his friends at Tufts who had attended less diverse schools.
Most private schools do have scholarships and are more diverse than their reputations, but it’s just not the same. It is a bubble. I went to a private high school myself and loved it, I’d been to a very diverse public junior high school.
Anyway, not an easy decision, just remember the public school is more than its average test scores and list of college acceptances.
At the moment, Chatham is ranked as the top HS in NJ by NJ Monthly. Your kids will not get an inferior education there. And, no offense, but your kids may not end up in the top 1% of their class at Chatham. There are lots of very smart kids in that HS that come from families with extensive resources.
However, a private school like Pingry offers smaller classes and likely more connected college counselors. The kids that go there love it, but not all of them end up at Harvard or the equivalent, even if that is their initial goal.
As others have said, the real decision is whether Pingry is a good fit for your twins and whether it is worth the money. Having the opportunity to travel, have interesting summer experiences, or deep dive into an interest through classes or extra coaching, is also very valuable and makes for an enriching life, but costs money. You could hire a private college counselor for a lot less than 6 years at Pingry for two kids.
I would make sure your boys are in the correct math placement. Are they just in honors math or are they in the pre-algebra 7th-grade level class that seems to exist for a select few students? Maybe that is the question to ask at this point.
Do not underestimate the quality of education that your kids will receive at a public HS… especially in NJ. Additionally, there are a lot of very smart, motivated, talented, highly involved, and driven kids who receive a public education. Your kids may or may not be in the top 1%.
I would send my kids where they would be happy and thrive…if I had a choice. I would also think about cost- can you afford to send your kids to a private HS… and… a private or OOS public college? Lastly, there is more to HS than grades and acceptance to a highly selective university.
Hi @compmom - Not a native English speaker. Can you open what you mean by opennes? Thank you very much for the great post.
Hi @blossom - I probably did a bad job explaining the situation. I didn’t intend this to be about just my kids. I wanted a broad discussion about publics vs privates. And I provided a public school profile vs a private school profile. Now, we try to maximize our kids’ experience. They have been to multiple different countries and multiple different US cities. They have been to multiple sporting events from NFL to NBA. They have been to plays circus shows. Even though we aren’t Christians they have been to many Christmas themed events. Even though we aren’t Christians we donate to Morristown, NJ church for their food drive and yes they have been to a soup kitchen at Morristown church. Now the issue isn’t my kids only. Sorry if I portrayed it as such.
@mathmom - Thanks for this great post. Appreciate it.
@twokids - I didn’t think my kids would be 1%. They might be but I just don’t know. Mine was a discussion starter. 1% of a good public school kid vs a 20% of top Private School.
@mom2and - Thanks for the post. Unfortunatelt if it wasn’t about money, we would send our kids to privates. If we send them, we will not have much money left for anything else. Oh. For college, if we are lucky our boys will go back to Europe for free college. So this isn’t only about our boys and top US colleges. But what if they decide to go to college in USA and snub European schools? Do we give them the best option in a Public School or Private School? That’s what we are trying to figure out.
IMO, the choice between these options doesn’t matter regarding college admissions. Assuming both are decent schools, with a full range of academic options and a good set of extracurricular options, then future success in college is all on the student. We live in an area where attending private school would have meant boarding school 90 miles away, which we couldn’t afford. For our older one, the range of subjects and EC’s was perfect in our local large public high school. He put major time into the debate team and newspaper editing. As a debater he traveled a lot to tournaments, and spent a couple of summers at debate camp. He had an excellent coach. He attended college at UChicago.
For #2, there was a time, after her freshman year in HS, that our daughter declared an interest in attending a major arts-oriented high school. This would have been a boarding school about 90 miles from home, and the annual costs would have busted the family educational budget. So we (the parents) ruled it out. But we did support summer pre-college art programs for her (at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago). She ended up attending an excellent art school for college (RISD). Would she have been better off attending the boarding school in high school? I’m convinced in retrospect that her interest in that had less to do with the curriculum than with the environment. I came to that conclusion during the college search process, when she declared “I don’t want to find myself in a college classroom sitting next to kids from my high school.” So there may have been something in the social environment at her local high school that was bothering her. I’m sorry we never decoded this at the time.
Are you asking which is better… top 1% in a public school versus top 20% in a private? Students will be evaluated within the context of their own school. Also… we can’t assume ( not saying you are) that the same student will be top 1% in his/her public and top 20% in the private. Too many variables. There are super smart, driven, talented kids attending both public and private HS.
If your twins attend a school where they are happy and do well ( this does not mean top 1%), they can get into a very good college in the US.
If you are giving your twins the option of attending college in the US, I would send them to an affordable HS and put money away for college if you can.
In the US, there isn’t the divide between public and private as there is in some countries. We have terrible private schools; we have exceptional public schools; we have mediocre public AND private. And there are kids who attend mediocre public schools who do exceptionally well in college admissions and kids who attend private schools who do not-- either because they are great kids who look mediocre compared to some of the superstars, or they are great kids who burn out in a competitive private school environment.
So we can’t help you on that. I have neighbors who have scrimped and saved to send their kid to private school for HS who end up aggravated that the kid “only” got accepted to Muhlenberg, Fairfield, Providence, when kids with that same profile end up in much more highly ranked colleges coming out of our local HS. And parents who send the kids to the local HS who end up at Hofstra or Franklin and Marshall and the parents think those kids would have been at Swarthmore or U Penn if they’d gone to private school.
You need to pick the HS which you can afford (and still have money left over for college) and provides your kids with the right academic, social, artistic, whatever challenges AND teaches them how to write, read, question plus a healthy work ethic.
If you get that right, you’ll be fine for college.
My kids developed “passions” in high school that are still the center of their lives 10 years later, but nothing much in middle school. Let them grow.