Results from 2014 Thacher Admissions Cycle

Prep School Admissions
1

<p>• Only 12.8% of the students who applied were accepted--and this is the April 10th number that includes wait pool action as opposed to the March 10th number that schools push out before they accept another round of kids. Lowest acceptance rate in the School’s history. </p>

<p>• No 9th graders were taken from the wait pool in 2014 because yield was so high.</p>

<p>• 85% of the students who were accepted decided on Thacher. Another school record. </p>

<p>• Geographical distribution: students are enrolling from Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina, New Jersey, Nevada, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Washington, Wyoming and Argentina, China, France, India, Japan, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and New Zealand. </p>

<p>• 41% of the new students identify themselves as students of color.</p>

<p>• Students self-report on a Confidential Survey that less than 1% of students try drugs/alcohol at Thacher. This is further buttressed by the bi-annual Independent School Gender Project Survey. </p>

<p>• One of my favorite stats is attrition because I believe that the combination of attrition and yield provide a worthwhile view into how well the Admissions team matches students to the School, which leads to high levels of community health and happiness. The attrition over the last few years has been <1% and zero this past year. </p>

2

<p>These are some really impressive stats! Congrats to everyone who will be attending Thacher next year - it sounds like it’ll be a great experience!</p>

3

<p>Wonder why Thacher and Cate don’t admit PGs?</p>

4

<p>No connection to either school, but it’s easy for me to think of a few reasons why any school wouldn’t want/need PGs:</p>

<ul>
<li>Not interested in fostering a “one and done” culture, and prefer for kids to be 4 year students…so that as seniors, they have been fully immersed in culture and can transmit that to underclassmen</li>
<li>Don’t care about padding athletic teams</li>
<li>Don’t need the extra revenue</li>
</ul>

5

<p>Probably because of the athletics thing. Isn’t that mostly why PG’s get admitted in the first place?</p>

6

<p>PGs are primarily athletic people, but there are also just some who need some stronger classes or maturity. A PG year can be compared to a gap year in a lot of ways.</p>

<p>Also, I agree with the “one and done”. A lot of schools are not about that. I can’t remember exactly which ones, but there are many schools, even ones offering PG years, that will not admit seniors. And Hill, along those same lines, requires at least one year of boarding as a graduation requirement. It just depends on the school.</p>

7

<p>Whether it’s huge Exeter or small Thacher, Andover or Groton, Hotchkiss or St. Andrews…these sorts of statistics are just brutal. SevenDad and many others have said time and again how incredibly hard it is FOR ANYONE to be admitted and that hubris (witting or not) is to be avoided at all costs. I wish we could get a paragraph on Featured Threads on this point and title it something like: Think You’re a Shoo-in? Guess Again.</p>

8

<p>^^ Andover is not small. St. Andrews is way too small to accommodate PGs, as are St. Paul’s and the others, but one thing PGs generally bring to campus in a “tight-knit boarding school” is exactly the opposite of what SevenDad posed: they usually bring immersion in a wholly conventional “high school,” with all that separate and attendant culture. They are not at all “immersed” in the culture of the boarding school they have dropped into. Precisely. A healthy thing in many ways, indeed. From the point of view of someone whose only high school experience is 4 years in a boarding school, the introduction of a few people with a different point of view, actual lived experience, and context on the concept of “high school” can be invigorating. For example, at Exeter, PGs are regularly given “illegal visitations” (dark marks against their character and standing in the school) for sitting around chatting with the opposite sex IN A GROUP SETTING other than in a pre-approved location. They “regularly” are give these demerits because, in the context of a conventional, normal high school, sitting around with a mixed group of girls and guys is totally normal to them, no one pays attention to where the group is and the PGs are simply not alert to the nuances important to ingrained boarding school culture. WHERE your are (even if numbering in the hundreds) is very important in an in loco parentis, hovering type of culture such as one finds in a boarding school (especially a mixed sex one). The fact that boarding school students can see that the PGs define “normal” differently from boarding school normal, and that boarding school isn’t representative of high school, is sometimes a real eye-opener, if not perhaps the most interesting form of “cultural diversity” most relevant to a teenager!</p>

9

<p>@makennacompton‌ she wasn’t saying Andover was small. She compared the sizes of Exeter to Thacher, followed by Andover versus Groton, Hotchkiss versus SAS. However, on your same point I would argue that Hotchkiss is not large- it’s one of the smallest HADES/GLADCHEMMS schools.</p>

10

<p>Not sure what PG’s have to do with low admission rates. But on the point of PG’s, I’ve never been a fan of their impact on a school.</p>

11

<p>I think PGs, particularly in the larger schools where there is actually a community of them, are sort of seniors- just a bit older. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Plenty of kids with summer birthdays or who need a little more maturity are old for their grade because they remained in preschool for a year or attended junior kindergarten; it’s the same type of thing. Many PGs are also public or day school kids looking to amp up their course selections and AP scores for college applications- rarely prep school kids. Many are recruited for sports, but they also have the opportunity to show leadership and mentor the younger kids. PGs, I think, can actually be a welcome addition to the school for leadership and different perspectives. </p>