According to the Andoevr’s class profile at https://www.andover.edu/files/CCOProfileBrochure2018-2019.pdf , Andover’s mean SAT scores were 740 Math and 720 EBRW. This implies that ~50% of the class had >1460 SAT scores. So it is theoretically possible than nearly all 138 Harvard applicants from Andover received a >1460 SAT. In contrast, across the full US population only ~3% of students get a 1460+. Andover students appear to be ~17x more likely to get a 1460+ SAT than the overall population, yet Andover only has ~2x the acceptance rate of the overall population.
I imagine there is some overlap between what Andover looks for in its applicants and what Harvard looks for in its applicants (+4 years of maturity and experience).
…interesting list of 7 “feeder” schools. I turned down a full tuition scholarship at one of them.
Yup - and interviews. Applying to college was no big deal to me, I’d been through it before, basically. That’s got to help kids (like me I guess) who have played the game before.
Also:
Good find. I skimmed through the article to quickly. Nevertheless the general point still remains. Andover is highly selective, accepting only 13% of applicants only ~2x the acceptance rate of Harvard (at the time of sample). This results in Andover’s population having a high concentration of academically qualified students who excel in criteria Harvard values, including both hooks and acadmic qualifications. This is reflected by Andover’s mean SAT of ~1460. In addition to being highly qualified, Andover students have a high rate of applications to Harvard. Students attending highly selective private high schools in MA are tremendously more likely to apply to highly selective private colleges in MA than the general population. With an extremely high rate of applications among an extremely selective and highly qualified pool of applicants, a large number of acceptances are expected. This leads to the number of acceptances providing too little information to say whether attending Andover is a hook or certainly to estimate the strength of the potential hook.
I hear you Data10 but we’re, or maybe I’m, trying to compare academically-superior apples with other academically-superior apples.
I don’t care about comparisons with the general population.
The Q that I’m trying to answer is, if one of us were to send his/her unhooked, non-ALDC/URM/Int’l. child to Andover – as opposed to Plano H.S. or [insert name of excellent suburban non-connected public high school] – what kind of boost would this give to our academically-superior but unhooked child when he/she applies to HYPSM?
The answer, from the admittedly incomplete data available to us wretched and less-than-fully-informed parents interpreting shadows in the cave, appears to be 4-5x.
Whether that justifies investing (or spending? risking? hazarding?) another $200,000 on four years of a top 80 prep school, I don’t know.
The first generation boost disappears entirely, when controlling for disadvantaged and other variables. Unless it was a regression variable in the lawsuit, I don’t believe there’s any evidence a geographic hook exists. If you could increase your kid’s probability of admissions ten fold by moving to Mississippi or the Great Plains, a lot of parents would be moving there.
“… and you get 66% + 5% + 20% = fully 91% of the admits to our top schools are hooked in one or more ways.”
As others have mentioned, you’re double counting a lot there for the 91%, schools like Andover ooze ALDC applicants that sticking with the data in the lawsuit on ALDCs without bringing up feeder schools probably makes the best sense. And geography while a preference is not a hook.
“In contrast, across the full US population only ~3% of students get a 1460+. Andover students appear to be ~17x more likely to get a 1460+ SAT than the overall population, yet Andover only has ~2x the acceptance rate of the overall population.”
Interesting, I tried to do something similar to Harker, but they don’t release how many apply, I don’t think anyway. Their sat average is 1492, and they got 17 kids into Harvard over three years. Their class size is 200 or so and you have to figure about half are applying to Harvard, so that would put them around 6%, pretty close to the national average. But if you assume that only 50 apply, then it jumps to Andover levels. Also Harker only had one kid get into Yale over those three years, which I found surprising since 27 got into Stanford, 11 into MIT, etc…
Harker is located in Silicon Valley. Many admits to Stanford is expected both due to a large number of applications to the nearby college and due to a large number of special hook connections. Stanford is expected to have far more acceptances than HYPM… and other east coast schools. There is a similar effect with nearby public HSs, such as Palo Alto High and Gunn.
There is probably a typo in the Harker Yale acceptances, as listed on their website. I suspect they mixed up Yale and Yale-NUS College. The latter usually gets 1-2 acceptances per 3 year period. The specific numbers by year as listed on Harker’s website is below. If there were 17 acceptances in 2016-18 and 1 in 2017-19, then that means there were at least 16 acceptances in 2016. However, if there were 16 acceptances in 2016, then 2015-17 would have more than the listed 8 acceptances. The totals don’t add up correctly.
2015-17 8 Yale acceptances
2016-18 17 Yale acceptances
2017-19 1 Yale acceptance
Data10, Feloniousmonk - those are matriculations, not acceptances. You’re failing to factor in the likelihood of multiple admit letters to your acceptance rate calculations. It’s a safe bet that many of the Harker kids accepted to Stanford were accepted to Harvard and chose Stanford. Ditto for Cal Tech over Harvard, and perhaps even for MIT.
As to Harker: like Silicon Valley, this school’s parents and social vibe are overwhelmingly oriented toward tech. A few Harker kids manage to avoid that well-worn path, but most of them are children of Tiger moms and dads and have been primed for years by their tech- (and money-) obsessed parents to knock down science and math prizes along the road to MIT-Stanford-UCB-CMU, also CalTech.
Every year there are a handful of exceptional musicians, debaters, and others but the vast majority are focused on STEM, esp CS.
For that reason Yale is definitely not a preferred destination for Harker kids; only 2 kids went to Yale from Harker in 2016, so it’s not unreasonable that a total of 1 Harker grad matriculated at Yale between 2017-2019.
This surmise is way off the mark-- even your class size estimate is wrong:
“Their class size is 200 or so and you have to figure about half are applying to Harvard, so that would put them around 6%, pretty close to the national average.”
Not so. Relatively few of the 150 or so Harker kids in each class care about Harvard or the ivies. They like their parents tend to put far more stock in the great CS, EECS and other STEM programs than in the Ivy League.
That means Harker kids are focused on getting into schools like Cal Tech and MIT-- which together over 2017-19 attracted more Harker kids (19 matriculations in 3 years) than Harvard (17), and 19x as many matriculants as Yale.
More Harker kids go to Carnegie Mellon (25 in 2017-19), or U. Illinois (22) than to any ivy. Purdue is also very popular (9).
It’s likely that many kids who were accepted to Harvard and MIT, or Stanford or CalTech, would turn down Harvard for these hugely prestigious-- in Silicon Valley-- schools that have superior CS and STEM programs, so the likely # of acceptances to Harvard was significantly higher than 17.
It is also unlikely that more than a third of Harker’s ~150 students would go to the trouble of applying to Harvard or any of the ivies in any given year, given the strong preference for Stanford-MIT-CalTech.
This implies a three year acceptance rate for Harker kids applying to Harvard of at least 20%, probably significantly higher-- ie not fewer than 30 accepted out of maybe 155 applicants over 3 years, and probably more like 40 acceptances, or a ca. 25% acceptance rate.
Again, elite school attendance is a hook.
The Harker kids are not smarter or better prepared than their peers down the road at Lynbrook High School, an equally intense school which sends fewer than a dozen kids to the Ivy+ schools every year-- out of ca. 430 graduating seniors.
Nothing against Harker, they’re great kids, but they have a huge advantage in elite college admissions relative to their peers.
One more reason for disbelieving your contention that these schools’ acceptance rates are not out of the ordinary: If your surmise were true, why on earth would any parent spend $200k over four years (many of these parents have spent more than $600k over 12 years) to get the same admission odds that could have been obtained at zero cost, in a competitive local public high school?
Of course the odds are dramatically higher if a child attends an elite top 80 prep than if that child achieves the same stats at a Lynbrook or a Plano H.S.
Lots of reasons, mostly to do with the educational experience, not the college admission odds, though I’m sure the perception of strength there (counseling, a leg up, whatever) plays a part.
Some reasons - small class sizes, great teachers , superior individualized counseling, expansive athletic and academic facilities, a high achieving peer group, less conventional (perhaps more creative) teaching methods, peers who are high achievers/kids of the rich and powerful…really many of the same reasons people choose to pay for elite private colleges.
Some do. There are a few middle-class Harker families that spend every spare $ on their Harker tuitions.
But most of the Harker parents don’t really care about the benefits you describe, or else you’d see more of them seeking to place their kids in Menlo or Priory or Castilleja. These Harker parents – the majority, by all reports and by their own admission-- are going for the gold, defined as admission to one of the great CS or other STEM programs.
These are the types of families that complained to the Dean a year ago because Harker’s advanced math courses-- in their (bizarre, warped) view-- were not sufficiently advanced to give their kids a leg up on admissions to CT, MIT etc. Note that the kids in question were studying til 4 in the morning and had already taken 3 years’ worth of calculus. This is the ethos of the brutal college admissions grind one sees in India or China.
But you’re right that some of the parents do care about art, creativity etc. Amd of course Harker attracts phenomenal teachers (although it was too bad about the Symphony conductor). There’s a lovely young pianist who graduated from Harker a few years back and who intends to use the fellowship she received from Soros to pursue graduate studies in piano performance. So there’s that.
“Again, elite school attendance is a hook.”
No one is saying it doesn’t help, but it’s not a hook, which is an institutional priority (urm, first-gen, athlete, legacy, develoment etc), while elite school is more a preference.
You can compare acceptances at https://web.archive.org/web/20190828184841/https://www.harker.org/upper-school/support-services/college-counseling/college-acceptances to matriculations at https://www.harker.org/upper-school/support-services/college-counseling/college-acceptances . 18 were accepted to Harvard in 2016-18, and 17 matriculated in 2017-19. That suggests a nearly 100% yield, which is not unreasonable considering Harvard has a nearly 100% yield on REA applicants, and Harker kids would be morelikely to apply REA.
Wikipedia mentions about 800 kids in the upper school at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harker_School , which would suggest ~200 students per class.
According to Harker’s school profile at https://www.harker.org/uploaded/assets/documents/pdfs/counseling/ADM_CC_Harker_Profile_F_1920.pdf graduating students had a mean SAT score of ~1500 . The class had 63 national merit scholars and 72 national merit commended, which was 69% of the class (implies class size of 196). One would expect a much higher acceptance rate than average among this group. If you combine this with the much higher rate of applications than typical, then a large number of acceptance is expected. In any case ~6 acceptances per year is not enough information to assume attending Harker is a hook.
A comparison of school profiles is below. Both look like very selective high schools, with a high concentration of stellar students. However, by every metric Harker does a little better than Lynbrook. Harker also seems to offer more rigorous courses, with a larger number of post-AP classes. Where do you see less than a dozen kids to Ivy+? The profile doesn’t list number of matriculations, but it does mention sending students to all individual schools of HYPSMC…
Mean SAT – Harker = ~1492, Lynbrook = 1435
Mean ACT – Harker = 33, Lynbrook = 31.8
AP Pass Rate – Harker = 98%, Lynbrook = 94%
Why has this thread turned into one about Harker?
Cotton Tales - beats me. I’ve no interest in pursuing this further.
My last word is that it seems obvious to most of us with intimate knowledge of such schools that sending one’s kid to an elite prep increases his or her chance of admission to an ivy+ by a factor of 4x or more.
To come back to the main point, the real % of ‘hooked’ admits to the elite colleges is north of 80%, prob’y close to 85%.
Maybe people on this thread assume ‘hook’ equates to ‘having a lock’ on admissions. I confess I don’t see a difference, in functional terms, between what someone calls an “institutional priority” and a “preference.” It’s the institution that has the preference. When does a preference become a “priority”, exactly? A distinction without a difference, I think.
I’m defining it as “significantly increasing one’s chance of admission” e.g. from 3-5% to 15-20%, or from 6% to 25%, or from 10% to 50%.
In that sense, elite prep schools are a hook. Not just LDCs but also athletes and URMs from elite schools are many times more likely to be admitted to ivy+ schools than their unhooked, high-achieving academically-excellent peers.
Even extraordinarily accomplished, academically-superior students, if unhooked, should not expect their chances to be better than playing the daily lotto.
It’s not obvious at all, which relates to why many posters disagreed with your statement. The 4x or more factor seems like just a wild guess, without controlling for the higher quality of the admit pool with mean SAT scores of as high as ~1500 and a high rate of hooks; and without controlling the higher rate of applications.
Many with intimate knowledge also disagree with your “obvious” belief. The previously linked article has quotes from Andover alumni saying that they believe attending the selective HS doesn’t offer an admissions advantage, and instead the larger number of admits relates to a high concentration of top students. Some members of the forum who have attended selective prep HSs have made similar comments in forum posts, saying that the HS offers little advantage and instead the larger number of admits relates to the high concentration of top students and/or larger number applicants.
Getting back to the race theme of this thread, this would be like saying ~30% of non-hooked (besides race) Harvard domestic admits are Asian, while ~6% of the US population is Asian. Therefore it seems obvious to most of us with intimate knowledge that Harvard gives a 4x or more hook preference to Asian applicants. Instead you need to consider that Asian students are far more likely to apply than the overall population and far more likely to be academically qualified. I’d expect that when you control for these 2 factors, the apparent Asian advantage at Harvard becomes insignificant.
geez, louise.
“However, by every metric Harker does a little better than Lynbrook. Harker also seems to offer more rigorous courses, with a larger number of post-AP classes. Where do you see less than a dozen kids to Ivy+?”
Ok but Lynbrook is a neighborhood school that can’t charge tuition to hire teachers for more AP classes. The top 200 kids at Lynbrook would match if not exceed Harker’s numbers.
I have some friends at Lynbrook who gave some info on their college acceptances:
They don’t do as well with most of the ivies about 1 or 2 a year, sometimes it will be zero, Cornell and Columbia are two that get maybe a 4-5 a year. They don’t have nearly the same number of applications though. They’ve done with better Chicago MIT, CMU, Michigan Purdue, UIUC and CA colleges - Stanford, Cal Tech, USC, Berkeley, UCLA as others have mentioned. Most of the kids though go to CSUs, Cal Poly, the other UCs and comm colleges, so it’s more a neighborhood school than a private. They also said not too many LACs.
Start a new thread about Harker! I come to this thread to read good information about race in college admissions, not about Silicon Valley High Schools.
@skieurope or any mod.