@uesmomof2 you make some good points, though with regard to legacy, I think there is a lot of that going on at all the privates. If you add the other 5 Ivies in, you get to 46% of the class at Ivies, Stanford, MIT. Even discounting for legacies and URMs, its very impressive. They must be doing something right!
@ferrarepatrick73 More kids or a bigger % of kids?
Both actually. However for the medical ones you see a ton of kids in accelerated programs.
High Tech and Bio Tech in Monmouth County show up on most if not all of the national 25 schools and have staggering college placement, as do similar schools in other counties. In some cases families opt for merit but there is no doubt where high stat kids come from in this area, in NJ anyway. The concentration of this level student is higher than any private school.
Again, Collegiate is an excellent school but based on friends with kids there, Dalton, Spence, Fieldston, Trinity, Horace Mann, etc., I suspect that a very high percentage (75% to 90% or more) of the kids who end up at Ivies are legacies, development, URM. Any non-hooked kids tend to be the extraordinary Intel winners or top ranked squash players or national youth orchestra members.
@wisteria100, I’d guess that what Collegiate is “doing right” is admissions. I’m not discounting the quality of the education, but they are clearly good at picking winners when they decide who’s going to attend their school.
While that may be obvious, I have been surprised when I’ve talked to parents considering prep school for their kids at how much they attribute college matriculations to the schools alone vs. legacies, exceptional talent, athletics, etc. If a school admits the 10 kids who placed in the top 10 in a global math competition, odds are good that they’ll have 10 matriculations to prestigious STEM schools in 4 years.
@gardenstategal . But the thing about Collegiate is that it is a K-12 school and they are ‘picking’ 5 yr olds. A few kids come in at 9th, but not many. What you say is very true for some of the top boarding schools that are 9-12 though.
The $45,000 a year tuition will do wonders for self-selecting parents that value education and have the means to pursue it.
OK, here’s the equivalent chart for the three most academic Quaker schools in and near Philadelphia. I included numbers for Penn, because that’s super important here, and for other Ivies (the majority being Brown at all three schools – Brown is very popular).
School. . . . . . . . . . class. . .Harvard. .Yale. .Princeton…Stanford. .MIT. .Penn. .Other Ivy
Germantown Friends. 85. . . . . .3. . . . . .11. . . . 3. . . . . .7. . . . . . 2. . . . 60. . . 25
Penn Charter. . . . . .110. . . . . .0. . . . . . .5. . . . 6. . . . . .2. . . . . . 0. . . . 47. . . 14
Friends Central. . . . . 90. . . . . .0. . . . . . .6. . . . 3. . . . . .0. . . . . . 0. . . . 36. . . 15
Looking at this was interesting to me. Ten years ago, I saw cumulative 10-year totals for Germantown Friends (i.e., 1994 - 2003), and the top four colleges in descending order over that period were Penn, Harvard, Chicago, Yale. For 2011-2015, Penn was still the top college by a mile, followed by Pitt, Brown, and Drexel, with Yale and Temple tied for 5th. The Harvard numbers at all three schools are a little shocking, too – a big change from the past. But at GFS, the total Ivy-Stanford-MIT percentage is pretty much exactly where it was a decade ago, around 25%.
@gardenstategal Bingo. A childhood friend of mine is a Trustee at Lehigh and they find no relationship between admissions and college GPA public vs private. Clearly that school draws from several top public systems so there is bias.
@wisteria100 The analysis has to be qualification driven. The other thing that will swing it is parent profession and ethnicity. An Indian will likely choose Wash U over any Ivy or Michigan or Purdue over Columbia for engineering. The kid whose parents are jewish, italian or irish bankers or lawyers will make very different choices.
My sil’s kid attended Sidwell Friends and felt that as a scholarship parent with no legacies or money or politicians in play that her kid got the short end of the stick in the advising department and that her kid wasn’t getting the support to get into the schools she felt were right for him. His first choice was MIT. (I believe his grades were excellent, but less than perfect, and his scores were stellar.) He did not have some of the summer opportunities some wealthier kids had. She found out about Rice through her dentist.
It’s hard for me to feel too sorry for her in the long run though. Her kid was rejected by MIT, accepted by Cornell and Rice gave him a great financial aid package. He flourished at Rice. Ended up as one of the authors on what dh describes as the paper of the century from a summer lab job. Was interviewed by NPR for some research he did at Rice. Got a Goldwater fellowship. And he’s in grad school at MIT.
(Never heard the kid complain about any of this BTW, only grumpy Mom - but it was interesting to compare our college counseling experiences. I was always impressed with how much our public school managed to do with so little.)
Back when I was at Madeira 20% of the class went to HYP, now it’s maybe one a year. Unfortunately for them when the boy’s boarding schools went co-ed they sucked up a lot of the talented girls. Not to mention some horrible things that occured involving the school shortly after I graduated.
“and that her kid wasn’t getting the support to get into the schools she felt were right for him.” I’m missing the skills to underline “she felt were right for him” but that’s what caught my eye.
Sounds like she might have been wrong – things turned out GREAT for this kid. Maybe the CC didn’t recommend Rice because she already had a list? CCs have a challenging task when it comes to managing parent expectations, especially when the playing field isn’t even.
Why the massive preference for Penn? For the Chicago schools, there was a preference for Northwestern and UChicago, but it is clearly not as pronounced.
I think according to the most recent census, Pennsylvania is the state with the lowest degree of geographic mobility of all 50 states, i.e. a person born in PA is more likely to die in PA than anywhere else.
Sort of astonishing.
Also, the relationship between Penn and the region is very different from that of either UChicago or Northwestern. It’s the largest employer and a central civic institution. If has charter provisions requiring it to provide free education to a certain number of city residents, which in years of litigation has been interpreted to apply to the 5-county Southeastern Pennsylvania region and to be satisfied by regular, non-loan financial aid with equivalent value for a greater number of students. It’s also worth noting that there are a lot of Penn facbrats and legacies at these schools.
Actually, Penn cut back markedly on regional admissions when Amy Gutmann took over. At my kids’ public school, most likely Penn’s single largest feeder historically, my daughter’s graduating class in 2005 had at least 34 kids accepted at Penn, most of them RD, and 27 who enrolled. Two years later, after the administration change, only 18 kids were accepted at Penn, only 6 of whom were accepted RD. For the first time anyone could remember, going back decades, Penn waitlisted a kid with a single-digit class rank. For years, the GCs had been telling kids with class ranks 20 or below that they could use Penn as a safety.
Penn has a bigger undergraduate student body among the Ivies to begin with. Their clear preference of ED applications helps motivate many high stats kids “lock in” early. It is actually the school that enrolls most students (43) from Andover as well based on the 3 year running matriculation numbers I posted earlier, slightly more than Harvard (41) and Yale (38). So it may not just a Pennsylvania thing?
Money and legacy often has more to do where kids enroll than GPA and test scores
@ClarinetDad16 A better or more “refined” way to describe it is that for the majority, GPA and test scores are a given. On top of them, you will need something else that is special. Money may not make someone special, but A LOT of money will. Mere legacy status may be too common to make a difference, but legacy of “high impact” may do the trick. On the other hand, special talent, economical disadvantage, URM status may be just as effective a differentiator.
@panpacific - if the less affluent don’t apply to prestige schools then they don’t enroll there.
These may be the top students but they don’t land at the top ranked schools…
Nah, the most prestigious schools have half or more of their students on financial aid. Diversity is the key word here. While the wealthy is over-represented, theses schools are just too small to have all the “top students” from any one kind of background.
If your newspaper published an annual story where the valedictorians and salutatorians go to college match that up with the relative wealth of the areas. Typically the less affluent area schools are sending their top 2 to state schools and the wealthy town HS are sending theirs to prestige privates…