@quietdesperation : I happen to have decent, although not overwhelming, experience, mostly second-hand, of both Swarthmore and Colby (relatives and friends who went there, relatives and friends who teach or taught there). I am somewhat more familiar with Swarthmore because it’s part of my community, but I probably have more current inside info about Colby.
Anyway, Swarthmore is very self-consciously intellectual, and also politically engaged. Colby is really neither; it wears its intellectualism very lightly, and the political engagement of its students is more of the “Hey, it would be so cool to work in Washington!” type than the “I must change the world!” type you find at Swarthmore. Swarthmore takes itself pretty seriously, and it attracts students who tend to be pretty serious, even when they are having fun. Swarthmore applicants are also considering Williams and Amherst and Wesleyan, certainly, but also often Reed, Chicago, Yale, Pomona. (Yes, and maybe Bowdoin.) Swarthmore does not take kids who are not at or near the top of their high school classes, even athletes, and once accepted kids don’t enroll there unless they prioritize academics above everything else.
Colby, I think, has a more normal student body – perfectly smart kids who may not be fully in focus yet at 18, and whose interest is divided more evenly between academics and fun. Colby, of course, is really in the middle of nowhere, so everyone there has to be ready to make their own fun, and to enjoy being out of doors in the country, even under challenging conditions. Swarthmore has a lovely suburban campus with woods to walk in and a nice creek. But it also has a train station on campus with a $5, 25-minute train to downtown Philadelphia every 30-60 minutes, it’s a 10-minute Uber ride from an international airport, and it’s a half-mile walk from a decent-size mall. And Swarthmore is about three growing zones south of Waterville. You can bring your cross-country skis if you like, but you won’t be using them more than 2-3 times per winter.
I’ve done both “House” and “Senate” calculations (by total matriculations, which would bias results in favor of larger high schools, and by relative preferences, which counts the Florida rank-order equally with the Seattle rank-order if a college shows up in both.)
There will be so many possibilities once I quit my distracting day job. For example I’d like to look at mid-Atlantic Quaker high schools.
Meanwhile I notice that the continental-corner-dwelling Seattle and Florida preppies show relatively more matriculations to state schools and fewer to LACs. At Ransom Everglades, UMiami is #1, the state flagship makes the top 10, and the highest-ranked LACs are Colgate/Barnard/Wellesley (tied for 36th most-preferred at 4 matriculations each). This is a very different pattern from CollegePrep-Oakland, where Swarthmore is #1 and Carleton tied for #3 … or from Horace Mann, where UChicago is #1 and 5 LACs (but no state schools) make the top 25.
The 8 Ivies make the top 20 almost everywhere, or are not far behind.
Exceptions:
Princeton gets no matriculations from Swarthmore-loving CollegePrep-Oakland;
Dartmouth gets no matriculations from CollegePrep-Oakland or from Lakeside-Seattle.
From Harvard-Westlake (in LA) Michigan captures more than twice as many matriculations as Berkeley and UCLA put together. Odd?
Knowing many graduates of Harvard Westlake and having children at a comparable, although slightly inferior in prestige, LA day school, the Michigan students are those in the middle ranges of class ranking. Since the UC’s are very much influenced by class rank, these students would not be accepted to Berkeley or UCLA. I know that to be a fact for many.
That is pretty odd. Two things may help account for it, though.
First, I suspect Berkeley and UCLA take into account GPA and class rank heavily in their holistic analysis, and that’s going to disadvantage the kids at H-W who might think about going there. Kids in the top 10% of the H-W class are going to HYPS, maybe even kids in the top 15%, and I wonder whether the top UCs are dinging the kids in the second or third quintile of the H-W class notwithstanding their 2200 SATs.
Second, as I said above, my impression is that H-W is sort of an eastward-looking place. Of course, maybe that’s my impression because most of the people I know connected to it either came east from there or went there from here. In any event, since I find my own views to be a wonderful source for determining the Northeast Establishment version of prestige, and Harvard-Westlake has always been the place I would have wanted my kids to go if they had to grow up in Los Angeles, I assume (with some confirmatory evidence) that there are a lot of kids there with parents like me. My kids applied to Michigan, too, and would have gone there if that had been their best choice.
Also, I suspect H-W kids are less likely to want to stay close to home for college than kids at some other SoCal private schools, and nowhere would be closer to home than UCLA.
As for Oakland College Prep . . . everything you are saying jibes with the families I have met from that school. It’s kind of like a little Swarthmore in the East Bay hills.
Not many “preppy” kids at the two in NYC. Brown, Vassar and the Quaker colleges (Earlham, Swat, Haverford) seemed most popular when I was there. Looking at recent matriculations I see multiples at those, plus Bard, Amherst, Bates, Colby, Carleton, Conn, Eugene Lang, Hampshire, Hopkins, Oberlin, Skidmore (highest of all), Ursinus and Wesleyan.
The same is true at Sage Hill in Newport Beach (private prep school, fairly big name in oc I think, its no Harvard Westlake, but nevertheless filled with “brand name” status seekers).
Of all the schools in the country, Michigan had the most matriculations last year. More than any other school.
IMO its because Michigan is accessible for the middling students who could not get into UCLA, ucb or usc, and has more perceived status than UC Irvine or UC Santa Cruz.
And I’m sure Michigan likes the out of state tuition.
The question, through, is why Michigan? Why not UNC, wake forest, Rochester, UCSD, etc?
For whatever reason, Michigan is trendy, others are not.
Interesting. At HW the past 5 years Michigan is the second most matriculated to college.
This is definitely a public/private high school divide. So cal/orange county has some very highly rated, competitive high schools (oxford academy, troy, irvine schools) that have high test scores and send to ivies etc every year.
Michigan is not a commonly matriculated school from the top publics.
The kid I knew at Colby had perfect SAT scores and grades all over the map including a D in gym because he forgot his uniform regularly. He did Outward Bound type stuff in the summer. Got in off the waiting list.
Michigan is quite popular from our public school. Draws kids from the top quarter of the class or so.
Michigan has been a ‘hot’ college for NE Jews since the 1920’s when the Ivy’s started restricting access by religion. That spread to other NE students over the past century. Now, you see the same with Asians. Only a few states like California and Michigan prohibit race as a basis for admission in their public institutions. Michigan admits Asians at a rate appx 4.7x the Michigan Asian population - now 13.6% of the student body. That’s far more than Cal with about 2.9x the California population percentage. I think history is repeating itself as many of descendants of those NE Jews (now 5th generation) go to Michigan, just as you have 2nd and 3rd generation Asians attending Michigan.
There is a lot of regional variation. The NE doesn’t have many great public universities, probably because they were overshadowed by the many excellent private ones for many years. In the mid-west, central and west regions many universities were established by graduates of those Ivy league colleges and were bolstered by the great fortunes made in the 19th and early 20th century. Their missions were different too - look at the focus on science and engineering in the midwest, and the emphasis on agriculture in the plains, and mining/ resource extraction and technology in the west.
In my experience prep schools are fairly localized by region. My son’s Michigan prep school sends 40% of it’s kids to Michigan, with about 90% of the others within a 1 day drive. I’d expect the same for other regions. The favorite school besides Michigan & MSU varies year by year - teenagers tend to run in packs - some years it’s Northwestern, then WUSTL, then Hopkins, etc…
“Second, as I said above, my impression is that H-W is sort of an eastward-looking place. Of course, maybe that’s my impression because most of the people I know connected to it either came east from there or went there from here.”
Anecdata only, but as I thought about JHS’ remark, the 5 students I know who went to Harvard-Westlake were all students whose families had East Coast backgrounds / ties (3 from NYC, 2 from Philadelphia).
@TooOld4School That sounds right. Michigan is popular not only with the NYC private school kids but also the suburban high schools with lots of Jewish and Asian kids. Also good point about the relative dearth of great public universities in Northeast. I hear of a lot of kids applying to Michigan, UVa and then Wisconsin. I think Chapel Hill would be more popular but it is very competitive for OOS kids. Cal and UCLA are obviously great schools but there is a negative buzz about them in east coast private school circles due to budget problems and difficulty getting into classes you need for your major and consequent need of an extra year to graduate.
Berkeley and UCLA and the other UCs weight grades and class rank more highly than standardized test scores. That is a deliberate decision to ensure that they get representation from the entire state, not just from the richest suburbs of SF and LA. You basically have to have a perfect GPA to get into Berkeley or UCLA, and there little room for out of staters.
This is true even for students at the best prep schools in California. Be right at the top of your class, or forget about Berkeley.
thanks @gardenstategirl and @JHS , for your insight. What are other schools like colby? Based on your description I’m thinking maybe colgate and middlebury?
it’s interesting that emory has not been mentioned as a target for prep schools.
Actually, UCs do not use class rank as calculated by the high school. They do use ELC status, which is determined by comparing the applicant’s GPA from a pre-calculated top 9% threshold GPA based on past students from the high school (all GPAs as recalculated by UC). GPA (recalculated) is the primary academic criterion used in UC admission, so if the high school has more difficult grading than usual, the lower GPA can put the students at a disadvantage.
This seems like a remnant of the old upper/upper-middle class WASP attitude that STEM…especially engineering was “too grubby” or “blue collar” for their progeny.
An attitude one engineering colleague of a former supervisor encountered from his WASP upper-class father back in the late '60s. It was bad enough that said father went so far as to insist he continue the family tradition to attend Princeton at the risk of being completely cut off from the family. While the colleague gave in to the father by attending Princeton, he refused to back down when his father tried forcing him to reconsider majoring in engineering on grounds it was “too lowly” for people of their social class background.
Another factor for Caltech’s lack of popularity among prepsters is how Caltech is more of a hardcore engineering/Tech school than even schools like MIT which has strong internationally recognized departments in non-STEM fields like Philosophy, Linguistics, Poli-Sci, etc. Something which Caltech lacks.
There’s also the factor viable contenders for Swat are also viable contenders for the most selective elite colleges including HYPSM whereas that isn’t as much the case with many Colby applicants. This was much more the case in the '90s when Swat was placed in the highest tier regarding admissions difficulty in the college advising section of my HS’s handbook whereas Colby was placed in a much lower tier alongside schools like NYU*.
Swat also had a reputation for having a campus culture receptive to students who are intellectually inclined, want to pursue it 24/7, and be willing…sometimes even happy to ensure what can be viewed by most outsiders as an inordinately high academic workload. Very similar to the rep UChicago and Reed has.
Back when NYU was transitioning from being a Tri-State area "commuter" school to becoming a popular national/international college.
The point @TooOld4School makes about schools with regard to religious/ethnic backgrounds is true. If you took a prestigious Catholic prep school And put it in the mix (Regis nyc perhaps) you are going to see a whole lot of Notre Dame and Georgetown and not much Michigan or WUSL. I’d be surprised if you get any kids going to Notre Dame from Horace Mann or Dalton and while there may be a few to Georgetown that would not be a popular choice.
@quietdesperation Bucknell is very similar to Colby. If you have a daughter Colby is a good application since the acceptance rate is 30%. Middlebury, Bowdoin and Bates are all below to well below 20% for females.