Private prep schools and "hot" colleges

Btw @gardenstategal , we did visit Lehigh and Lafayette with d this summer and she liked them both. Lafayette looks like a good safety, we visited Lehigh the day before the Lehigh-Lafayette football game and the campus was abuzz. The tour guide, to my amazement, talked about cutting classes to ski, consuming red bull and sushi to fortify himself for the resulting all-nighters and partying on campus. My wife whispered to me it sounded like a biker bar with all the people that finished at the top of their class. I looked over at D and she was furiously texting. After the tour she sheepishly admitted she loved it.

hence the search for a place where she can have some fun but advance her intellectual engagement.

Thanks to you, jhs and everyone else for letting me hijack this thread a bit, it really helped change/solidify our thinking around lacs.

@gardenstategal I suppose your speculation could be a possible explanation. There are so many CCs in so many schools that could do things in different ways after all. That said, there are some common practice for private schools to maintain relationships with colleges and help manage yield. One measure is to limit the number of schools each student can apply and make sure each student has a balanced list so that there are only limited number of high reaches on each student’s list. Another is to have an early “read” of the student’s intention when the target college have shown sufficient interest in the student. The colleges the school has good relationships with usually have interactions with CCs during the application process and some let CCs know who they admit a day or two before the official notice is out. If that’s the case in this girl’s school, I wonder if she actually misled the CC into believing she would be happy to attend Yale so the CC who “fought for” her chance ended up in an awkward position.

@wisteria100 Colby’s Greek life has gone underground. Bucknell still probably wins on the Jello Shot Index but I doubt by much.

In the case of Bowdoin and Bates, those schools are more of a first choice for students that apply. Colby has much lower yield than the other two.

@quietdesperation, lol!!! This whole process can be so nerve-wracking – it’s great when it’s punctuated by one of these hilarious moments. One of the most fun things about this process is seeing how your kids see themselves and their wishes for their future. If this was the reaction, I’d definitely look at Colgate. (And Bucknell.)

I see no matriculations to ND from Horace Mann or Dalton.

By my count, Georgetown is the 7th most popular by matriculations at Horace Mann and 27th most popular at Dalton. Among my elite 10, its popularity peak is at Exeter where it gets the 4th highest number of matriculations; its popularity is lowest at San Francisco University HS where it gets the 46th highest number of matriculations.

Georgetown appeals to kids who want to go into government/politics regardless of religion. I know several Jewish kids who go there for that reason and/or because they liked the school or wanted to be in DC. Notre Dame, while a great school, is not going to appeal to those kids.

Highly possible, @panpacifc – I wasn’t close to the situation throughout and don’t know what the communication was between all the parties. I know that she had a “likely” letter from Yale, and she was clearly a desirable candidate. Throughout this process, I’ve come to realize that the CCs have particularly difficult jobs – giving sound advice to the students, managing parental expectations, doing what helps admissions, managing relationships with college reps, etc. It’s hard – perhaps impossible – to keep everyone happy.

"That may be a regional thing. I can promise you that CS and engineering is not looked down upon by kids at top prep schools in CA. "

AGAIN, there is a difference between using the word “prep” as a shorthand for “high intensity academic college preparatory” and using the word “prep” as a shorthand for “preppiness.” They are two entirely different concepts.

As an example, Harker is high-intensity academic college preparatory, but it’s not high on the preppiness scale. Ditto for many math-and-science magnet schools.

MIT and Caltech are (obviously) world class colleges with intense academic prestige, but they aren’t preppy destinations. I really wish people would clarify their terms, and also distinguish between academic prestige and social prestige.

@uesmomof2 - ND definitely has a more ‘Catholic’ vibe than Georgetown, but it all depends on the kid. I know Jewish kids who felt G’town and even BC seemed too Catholic for them. Bothered by the symbols present on campus and such. And one was a legacy! But for others obviously not an issue.

As someone with kids that go to one of these independent prep schools (a rival of both SF University and Oakland College Prep), let me make a couple of observations. I know students and graduates from all of the San Francisco independent schools and .

First, as good as these schools are, they do not have the ability to just cajole their students into the most elite colleges. The high schools are difficult to get into, are very rigorous, and prepare the students well, but the kids still have to earn their admittance letters themselves. College counselling is mostly a matter of providing information and managing expectations, not magically opening doors to the Ivies. This is true for SF University and College Prep and all the others. Those days of “you go to the right prep school, you get into Yale automatically” have been gone for decades, and really only existed for a couple of boarding schools like Andover and Exeter anyway.

Second, the reason that a student chooses, say, Princeton over Stanford and Yale and where ever, is not because Princeton is more “hot.” It is almost always because the student got accepted by one and not by the others. Even at these schools, only the very top students in the class have a chance at that kind of opportunity, and even those students still get plenty of rejection letters from the most selective colleges. When the sample size is this small, there is too much noise for the data to mean anything.

Third, the big preferences are for urban over rural, Northern over Southern, “intellectual/artsy/nerdy” over “social/fratty”. Most kids who grow up in San Francisco want to be an urban environment. When I checked Naviance, I found that over a fifth of the class applied to NYU every year. Not because NYU was everyone’s first choice, but because so many of the kids could at least see the appeal of living in Manhattan. For a few of them, NYU was a top choice (especially if they were interested in acting), but for most it was a throw in or even a safety. Lots of applications to MIT, UChicago, Northwestern, WashU, USC, Tufts, Johns Hopkins, Tulane and Boston University and any other good college that is inside a city.

Many more applications to Yale, Columbia, Harvard and Penn and Brown than to Princeton, Dartmouth or Cornell, presumably for the same reason.

Meanwhile, there were less than ten applications, total, to Duke in a five year period. Less than ten to Rice or Vanderbilt or Emory or Virginia. Only 5 applications to Notre Dame and Wake Forest over 5 years. San Francisco kids have trouble envisioning themselves in the South or in the rural midwest, or at places that are perceived (correctly or not) to be either conservative or more social than intellectual.

If kids want to go rural, its almost always LACs. Each of the top LACs gets multiple applications every year.

Fourth, students are admitted to UC Berkeley but almost never attend. To get in, you need to be at the very top of the class grade-wise, and if you are at the very top of the class grade-wise at these schools, you are a tremendous student and probably also got into other elite schools. Berkeley also feels too close to home.

Anyhow, I don’t think you can get the information you are trying to scientifically create here. Your sample size is too small. But carry on.

@gardenstategal likely letter is a different story. Colleges don’t expect high yield on likely letter candidates because they are usually the ones other selective colleges want too (hence unlikely to blame CC for the low yield). I wonder why this CC was making the girl cry when she had so many good choices she could make.

@tk21769

It’s interesting to me that at least at my old school, LACs are far more popular than Us, even in absolute numbers. My school was small - I graduated in a class of 40 - and the school still is, so that may explain why those kids choose LACs…they’re used to knowing their teachers, comfy in smaller numbers of students, etc.

@ThankYouforHelp, the other issue for Bay area kids is the travel required to reach the school. When my daughter started looking at schools, I considered carefully the ease of getting to the schools. Many of the LACs and several otherwise popular schools require connecting flights and a long bus ride at the end of the journey. There were several excellent schools that my daughter reluctantly dropped from her final list.

@gardenstategal , I’m sure my daughter would love colgate (or bucknell) It will be her decision but she’s a smart, mature kid and I’m confident she’ll balance what she wants with what she needs, hopefully landing a little closer to swat than colgate. best,

In another thread last year, the matriculation stats of a magnet prep school in Chicago was compared with those for an affluent suburban Chicago school, and the results matched your observations. The city school has very few college towns on the list. If the kids left the Chicago area, it was primarily for urban locations in the northeast. Even the safety schools like Loyola Chicago or UIC were urban in nature. In contrast, the suburban schools had a much wider variety of school choice with traditional college town schools being most popular. Once outside the elite schools, Big 10 or similar schools like Missouri, Colorado and Alabama were well represented. Very few people choose high end LACs.

I went through the matriculation data for the three highly considered Chicago area prep schools, Chicago Lab, Latin School and Frances Parker and calculated their HYPSM index, or how many kids attended HYPSM in the past four admission cycles. The results are as follows:

*********LabLatinParker
Harvard
672
Yale
171110
Princeton
7*72
Stanford
11
36
MIT
****920
Total
5030*20

I would be interested in seeing the HYPSM index of other well respected schools across the country. A little help with tables would be appreciated as well.

@Zinhead What are the sizes of the graduating classes at the schools you listed above?

From a quick internet search, UC Lab has 129, Latin has 108, and Parker has 80. With that information, over a four year period, 9.7 percent of UC Lab students go to HYPSM while the ratios for Latin and Parker are 7.0% and 6.3% respectively.

I looked at Collegiate in NYC which graduates about 50-55 boys per yr.
Over the past 5 yrs
Harvard - 19
Yale -19
Princeton -13
Stanford - 5
MIT - 2
That’s about 22% of the class each yr to those 5 schools. Wow

What you need to know is the number of legacy applicants. Collegiate is an excellent school. Probably the best single sex school in the city (with Brearley a close second) but I suspect that a good chunk of the HYP admits are legacy and/or development and/or URM. Notice that the numbers at Stanford are lower. Partly that is because NYC parents don’t want their kids to go to California for college and partly that is because there are fewer Stanford alums in NYC so fewer legacy applicants.

@wisteria100 More kids from the public NJ vocational/magnet/STEM schools got to top 25 universities and top 25 colleges than any private school in the area.