There is not a complete lack of love for Duke, but among these high schools its matriculation rank isn’t quite as high as its USNWR rank. It tends to run in the 20-somethings not in the top 10. At Exeter, it captures only the 48th-highest number of matriculations.
Now, if I picked fewer top high schools from NY, New England, and California, the results might be a little different. At Lawrenceville (a NJ boarding school) Duke’s matriculations for 2013-15 were tied for 9th (almost exactly its USNWR national university rank).
Prestige, or quality judgements, may be colliding with other considerations.
Many students at the “top” prep schools seem to prefer northern/urban universities.
Colleges whose matriculation ranks are at least 15 positions higher than their US News ranks include:
NYU
USC
Michigan
Boston University
George Washington
University of Washington
Universities whose matriculation ranks are at least 15 positions lower than their US News ranks include:
UCLA
UVa
Wm & Mary
UNC-CH
Wake Forest
To some extent, the first 4 may be suffering from a preference for private universities as well as for northern/urban.
They also be suffering from a certain preference for LACs.
Among the top 20 by matriculation count, only 1 LAC appears (Wesleyan).
But then lots of NESCAC and other small colleges (Kenyon, Swarthmore, Oberlin, etc) start filing in.
Vanderbilt’s matriculation count is 12 positions lower than its US News rank.
Duke’s is 13 positions lower than its US News rank.
It is no surprise with lots of this. People sending their kids to exclusive , expensive schools expect results. A lot is regional. High stats NE kids may gravitate one way, California kids another , SE kids another, Midwest kids another. There are always outliers, of course. But there are even privates in some states for instance, that send a fair share of their kids to their instate schools. Norfolk Academy, Madeira School in Virginia (somebody posted that info and the top schools were W & M, UVa and VT) send many kids to state schools, as well as privates like Duke and Princeton. UVa and W & M are probably not on the list of lots of NE private school kids but doesn’t matter, they’re still considered good admits for lots of kids . Midwest schools are probably sending kids to Michigan, as well as Northwestern, Washington University in St. Louis, etc.
Regional preferences do seem to affect the rank order.
However, some schools get many matriculations from “top” high schools all over the country.
Harvard gets the 2nd-highest number of matriculations from students at 5 northeastern prep schools I analyzed; it gets the 4th-highest from students at 5 outside the northeast. NYU gets the 4th-highest number from Exeter (in NH); it gets the 3rd-highest from Harvard Westlake (in CA). All 8 Ivies are in the top 25, by matriculation count, at almost all 10 schools I analyzed. Dartmouth is the lowest, with an average matriculation rank of 18th among the schools where it gets any matriculations (but no matriculations from College Prep - Oakland or Lakeside - Seattle). Four Ivies take the top 4 spots by average matriculation ranks.
Of the 30 universities that capture the most matriculations from these 10 high schools, 25 are among the USNWR top 30 national universities. 4 of the 5 that are not among the USNWR top 30 are ranked 26-29 in the matriculation count. So there appears to be a rather close correspondence between the set of universities these students prefer and the ones US News prefers (although the rank order isn’t exactly the same).
I don’t believe prestige and quality perceptions necessarily are all that “regional”. However, they are competing with other considerations.
“What surprised me the most on your top 30 schools list is the lack of love for Duke. I understand why MIT and Caltech don’t do well at top prep schools, but why isn’t there more interest in Duke?”
I suspect part of the admission criteria at Duke is to what extent you plan on asking “but how come Duke isn’t higher?” In the future.
Gosh, maybe the world doesn’t flip over Duke the way Duke people wish it would. Cha-Ching on the prestigiosity scale!
Well, it is no surprise that some schools get many matriculations from “top” high schools all over the country, Harvard and the usual suspects have their own draw.
And Duke gets plenty of “love.” I doubt the admissions people are losing sleep over it.
No one doubts that Duke is a fine school and gets plenty of love. It’s just amusing, the “what about Duke?” crowd, worried that somewhere, somebody isn’t either genuflecting or salivating at the mere mention of the school To be fair, though, Berkeley fanboys give Duke fanboys a run for the money, at least on CC.
“OMG how come prep school kids don’t love meeeee more!”
Using @tk21769 ‘s private school indicator, but normalizing for college size, this is how colleges would rank by concentration of representation for one school, Forbes’ #1 ranked Trinity School (minimum 5 TS matriculants, 2011-2015):
Perhaps this is a naive question, but how does the relationship work between top high schools and specific colleges?
High school guidance counsellors must have relationships with admissions departments at colleges, and I know that high schools track where their students are admitted and rejected. It must also happen that when a top high school encourages a number of high stat applicants to apply to a college, that sometimes they are disproportionately rejected (they are sending students to many colleges, so this is bound to happen). I assume that schools like the ones on your list, would then contact the college who is not admitting their candidates and ask why this is happening, and that if the college continues to reject their candidates in large numbers, that the high school will probably stop recommending that college actively to students.
I am wondering whether colleges are aware of the number of candidates they admit from certain schools, and whether that relationship is sometimes considered in the Adcom. At a minimum, colleges must track which high schools their admits and enrolled students are from, over time, and work to maintain solid relationships with those schools.
I suspect that at least the very top high schools are able to leverage their relationships to selectively get a few more students admitted, but I really do not know. Is that the case?
merc81, normalizing for size does not make sense in this case. We are not talking about endowment, or absolutely numbers matriculating in a specific set of graduate schools. You are assuming that more students from certain high schools are applying to larger universities than smaller universities, and/or that larger universities will admit a larger number of students from a high school simply because it enrolls a larger freshman class. Neither one of those assumptions is verifiable, especially in the case of public universities since they admit a significantly smaller percentage of OOS students relative to the size of their incoming class (20% in the case of the UCs and 30%-40% in the case of most Big 10 schools).
In the case of a school like Trinity, which is located in NYC, it is quite likely the case that far more students will apply to Ivy League/East Coast elite universities than to Midwestern or West Coast universities
@Pizzagirl " It’s just amusing, the “what about Duke?” crowd, worried that somewhere, somebody isn’t either genuflecting or salivating at the mere mention of the school To be fair, though, Berkeley fanboys give Duke fanboys a run for the money, at least on CC."
So the important question for this thread is, what does that suggest for prestigiosity?
Does the consistent alumni outcry show connection to the school that implies a higher prestigiosity may be warranted? Or does being concerned about its position by an imaginary metric suggest an insecurity that warrants a lower ranking?
“I suspect that at least the very top high schools are able to leverage their relationships to selectively get a few more students admitted, but I really do not know. Is that the case?”
No, that isn’t the case, at least not for the 6 or 8 most elite independent schools of the San Francisco area. The kids that get into the best colleges from SF University, College Prep, and the like, get in mostly because they are really, really well prepared and well qualified. Those high schools are like 4 years of college level work, before the students even go to college.
Maybe Andover and Exeter can still do that, I don’t know.
@ThankYouforHelp “The kids that get into the best colleges from SF University, College Prep, and the like, get in mostly because they are really, really well prepared and well qualified.”
I wasn’t suggesting that the students are not well qualified. I would imagine that, at a minimum, the administration at those schools may be able to gain more insight into what the colleges are looking for, and specific factors that are being targeted than a typical school might have access to. Helping guidance counselors understand what the college is looking for in a candidate would seem to be beneficial to the high schools and the colleges.
@Thankyouforyourhelp “Maybe Andover and Exeter can still do that, I don’t know.”
I am not very knowledgeable. Why might that be? Are those high schools larger or perhaps have a higher percentage of top students?
Phillips Andover and Phillips Exeter and Lawrenceville and Groton and St. Paul’s and a very few other very old boarding schools used to have an automatic in Ivy League schools.
For example, if you graduated from Andover, you basically got into Yale. Period. Even if you were bottom of your class. If you went to Exeter, you automatically got into Harvard. If you went to Lawrenceville, you got into Princeton. These few schools may still have special pull. The only kid I know who went to Andover did, in fact, get admitted to Yale.
But I know lots and lots of students at SF University, and they don’t have that kind of pull.
With regard to the other schools, I wasn’t thinking it was a formal arrangement, but possibly a de facto advantage. Possibly by a Dean or GC having a greater ability to reach out to the colleges. idk
I don’t think so. Maybe there is an advantage because students from those prep schools have done well in the past once they got into the elite colleges. The colleges may check things like that.
There is also an advantage because the colleges know how hard those prep schools are, and how much work and brainpower it takes to do reasonably well there. For example, at a public school, there usually will be multiple kids with 4.0 gpas in every graduating class. At my daughter’s school, where everyone had to test, write essays and interview just to get in, only 1 student has managed to graduate with a 4.0 in the last 5 graduating classes, combined. That kid was a freaking genius. A kid who gets a 3.6-3.7 at this school will have done some seriously excellent work against seriously excellent competition. I have to think that the most selective colleges understand that and take it into account. So the reputation of the school will help, even if the college office and dean have no “special pull” for any individual student.
“colleges know how hard those prep schools are, and how much work and brainpower it to takes to do reasonably well there. For example, at a public school” Colleges have access to any school’s profile, public and private. Prep schools do not have a monopoly on brainpower , high SAT’s , great GPA’s and character. Public schools need to educate all and don’t have the luxury of being able to “test” kids and interview them as a barrier to admission.
Re #s 506 and 509: Alexandre, normalization is necessary because larger schools enroll more students of all types on average. Without it, you might see, for example, that NYU enrolls hundreds more Californians than Pitzer College, a statistic that – when not adjusted for enrollment – is simultaneously true and misleading.
@merc81 , I agree with @Alexandre . I don’t think normalization is necessary at all and really doesn’t provide much additional useful information. We are talking about a very small subset of top high schools - a fixed number of students each making an individual choice to attend a particular college. The numbers are so small that it in no way reflects any limits of capacity of any particular university.
If you insist on normalizing the public universities you need to remove the spots reserved for in-state students and add back the spots as a percentage from that state of the overall US population. That would normalize given the assumption that universities admit equally from all parts of the country. We know that that simply isn’t true - most universities show a distinct preference for locals, and especially children of employees. A research university with a large medical center will have far more employees relative to the UG spots available than a typical LAC.
To me the most interesting observation is how several universities desirability far exceeds their USNWR ranking. That is the difference in what people say vs what they do. I expect the presigiosity of those universities will climb over time.