<p>Hi, I had a question about college selection and your high school senior acceptances. I know it's a crap shoot and unpredicable but I wondered if someone can tell me how many "firsts" get into a college. What I mean is if a senior in the last 3 years or so hasn't applied to a college, not rejected, just not applied, does it matter to the college at all? I was surprised at my son's CT catholic school, that a lot of PA schools weren't listed, except for Temple. The GC didn't know of Haverford and not much about Swarthmore. No student had applied there. They did have 5 go to Ivies last year and some to the top LAC's, but a bulk went to state and other catholic colleges for reasons that included grades,$$, and sports. I didn't know if a college never had anyone from your school or few, if it mattered. I remember in "The Gatekeepers" a book on Wesleyan admissions, he said if they had a lot of rejects from a school, a warning light went on, but didn't say if they never had any or many from a school apply, what they thought. Thanks for any thoughts. We will apply and see what happens.</p>
<p>I was worried about the same question when my kids applied to college from our large public high school near Philadelphia. My son is a junior at Stanford and my daughter will be a freshman at Kenyon next year. Few if any students from our school had ever applied to these colleges, and our GC, with 35 years experience, had never heard of Kenyon. In retrospect, I believe colleges are glad to have qualified students from different high school than their usual ones. For example, although I was worried that a student from an average public high school would be at a disadvantage, I have seen an article put out by Kenyon which mentioned the "increasing numbers of applicants from public schools" as a positive change in this years applicant pool.</p>
<p>This issue highlights one of the few advantages of national testing, AP and SAT. Colleges are less reliant on knowing a high school and evaluating grade points when they can compare some national data and are therefore free to take students from schools and geographic areas with which they are unfamiliar.</p>
<p>My son applied to Case where his GC did not recall any graduate attending in the past. He was accepted and offered a 17k merit scholarship. Same for a friend last year to Amherst though w/o merit aid which it does not offer.</p>
<p>However our HS has an excellent school report which it sends will all applications. Because our school's AP course policy is equivelent to a vg college course, there is often grade slippage. For instance, few of the AP Calc students receive A's and some A students even earn C's. For this reason the HS report offers an explainatory statement together with grade distribution/historic test score info for all AP classes. BTW, the historic AP test results are extraordinarily good.</p>