<p>^I think this really may depend on their lives beforehand. I was a day student for three years and only boarded my last year in boarding school. I don’t think it was particularly helpful for maturity or poise (for me at least). OTOH, I did feel that one did miss out on a large part of the school as a day student. </p>
<p>Even though I think this list is pretty silly I have to admit I’m sort of sad that my school which 30 years ago might have made the list probably never will again.</p>
<p>skylvr wrote:</p>
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<p>This is a very apt post. I do recall POIH in another thread a while back (sorry I don’t have it at my fingertips) writing about how they picked his D’s college list and it was HEAVILY based on college rankings whereby they only applied to ones that made the cut off of top X (I forget the exact number but it was something like top 15 or so). And they thought that schools that were ranked like 21 or something, did not measure up to ones ranked 1-15 (sorry for paraphrasing but that was the gist of it even if my numbers are slightly off). And so, NOW POIH is saying his D’s really good prep school that sends a high percentage of kids to elite colleges should have made the top 20 prep school list, but didn’t. But this HS was very worthy of his D’s attendance. So, why oh why do they think that a college ranked 22 is not worthy of application? Such a college may be as good as the ones ranked 1-15 too. Same idea! (there was a huge discussion on this relating to college rankings with POIH)</p>
<p>nychomie wrote:</p>
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<p>Sorry, but this generalization just doesn’t seem to have a basis. Sounds silly to me. Geez, my own kids went to measly 'ole no name public where 1/3 of the students don’t even go to college. but consider my kids having gone off to college pretty darn mature and poised. They are leader types. One went to college in a major city having come from a rural two of 1700 people. She was just 16 1/2 when she started college. Both were leaders at their colleges. Neither had ANY sort of adjustment issue…couldn’t wait to go to college and they were happy from the day they got there. Both had gone away every summer, however, growing up.</p>
<p>Frankly, the part I quoted from your post has an elitist quality to it.</p>
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<p>I can re-iterate it that we started with the top 50 US News colleges, national universities because we were not interested in LACs. We did look at all the 50 colleges, debating the merit and demerits of all with our DD.</p>
<p>I still don’t think anything wrong with it while on other hand it seems to me that DD came out with a very elegant strategy and executed it efficiently in terms of her college applications.</p>
<p>POIH, I don’t remember the details too much but I remember thinking that your daughter applied to way too many colleges. One thing C.C. is very good at, is making parents and students nervous about the college applications process. Even those who really do not need to. IMHO your daughter was the type of student who could have confined her search to her top 5-6 choices and then added a safety, and she would have been just fine.</p>
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Seriously? You honestly think any top school is concerned about upsetting the social structure by keeping an eye out for the popular student, lest the entire student body and faculty of Prep School #967436 turn against them. What then? They would only have 39,900 applicants to choose from the following year due to a boycott. I wonder if they could possibly find deserving candidates elsewhere?</p>
<p>I almost hate to ruin the moment here, but I can’t resist. You think top schools do not care about leadership positions at public schools (how common!), but they are awestruck by prep school SCA presidents and editors?</p>
<p>Prep schools can be amazing opportunities for growth, maturity, and leadership. The correlation between attendance and top school admits is strong. The claims made about popularity playing a part, or public school leadership being ignored in comparison to prep is bogus.</p>
<p>Now, if by popular you mean a student who is a legacy whose family is publically associated with the university, and is a very big doner, then yes that student is likely to be taken care of and admitted no matter where they go to school. The university isn’t worried about ruffling feathers over popularity.</p>
<p>You’re “sad”? Seriously?</p>
<p>I wanted to clarify that the quote in post #25 should have ben identified as written by nychomie. That is who my response was to. As this was a thread initiated by ParentOfIvyHope if another member did not read the entire thread they may misunderstand my response as being directed to them. That’s not the case and I apologize for not making this clear.</p>
<p>PoIH presented a topic that is interesting to discuss. I followed the link and found a resulting article (or WSJ blog response) that had some interesting points. One of which may or may not effect the OPs students hs from being included. In the methodology used in the list, international schools (such as Oxford, Cambridge, and McGill) were not considered. Elite prep schools that consistently send students to these schools would have an artificially lower matriculation rate to top level schools.</p>
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<p>What I’m saying is if you’re president of a well-respected club at a prep school, that can be enough to be classified as an exceptional extracurricular activity (e.g. president of student body or editor-in-chief at Andover). At a regular school, just being president pf the student body won’t cut it. You typically have to have something else. If a college denies the president of Andover, other students will probably think less of the college, unless it’s HYP. If you deny the president of the Latino/Black/Asian club, same thing. Sure, colleges can find people elsewhere but they also care about maintaining their relationships with the prep schools. Why exactly? I don’t know, but that’s been the case from my experience. Some (former) admissions officers have written on this very topic, and they confirm this.</p>
<p>Sometimes the “popular students” who get elected to be president of this that or the other thing are NOT the strongest students. My kids did NOT go to a prep school but in both cases, the presidents of the student counsel at their school were popular but not particularly strong students.</p>
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<p>Certainly she did and in the hind sight it was not necessary at all. But it was her decision, her strategy and I didn’t want to influence one way or the other because the pressure would have been on her and not me.</p>
<p>My only fault was that I sent score to all colleges on her list in november itself and gave her the CC to pay for application fees. Yale, Columbia, U. Penn, and Brown were the colleges where her scores were sent but she never applied. That might have been the reason that Columbia came back as late as February with a letter from the Engineering Department head for her to complete the application.</p>
<p>This was her thinking:
<p>So JHU, Duke, Dartmouth and Cornell were the only applications that she should have waited for EA but these were common application and she did the common application for Caltech so she sent all these together.</p>
<p>This was her time line and I think she did an excellent job on it.</p>
<ul>
<li>Sep/October - MIT/Caltech/Stanford.</li>
<li>Oct/Nov - Harvard/Princeton/UCs</li>
<li>Nov/Dec - USC/Rice/Olin</li>
<li>Dec (Early before 9th) - CMU/Common Application based JHU/Duke/Cornell/Dartmouth</li>
</ul>
<p>Planned for post Dec 15th - Yale, Columbia, U. Penn and Brown.</p>
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<p>LOL, funny quote of the day for me. Non HYP adcom committee…“uh, can we really afford the wrath of the students from Andover if we don’t admit this guy/girl? Don’t you know who he/she is?” :eek:</p>
<p>Thanks for the good laugh homie ■■■■■.</p>
<p>GA2012MOM:
I’m not sure about student body president but according to my tracking of DD’s prep school matriculation/acceptances no college have denied admission to the school’s Valedictorian including Harvard.</p>
<p>Don’t bang me on it but it’s very close to a fact. I’ve posted it before as one of the guaranteed way to get into Harvard.</p>
<p>GA2012Mom, “homie ■■■■■” love it! </p>
<p>POIH, you are “sad”, be happy your DD is at MIT, who cares about prep school rankings?</p>
<p>I haven’t read the whole thread but I have to respond to this:</p>
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<p>You are confusing correlation with causation. </p>
<p>You don’t know if students who have attended a prep school have better chances of attending a top college, or if students who are strong candidates for top colleges are more likely to choose to attend a prep school. (or a combination of both). </p>
<p>I think it’s more likely the latter, given that most prep schools also have very selective admissions, and accept only students with strong academic records.</p>
<p>SLUMOM: I think the school genuinely deserve to be there. Just because DD graduated doesn’t mean that I should stop caring about it.
Last year I contributed to DD’s prep school, and Stanford Institute of Medical Research along with MIT parent alumni.
The reason to contribute towards SIMR and DD’s prep school was that I believe that these institutes really helped shaped DD personality.</p>
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<p>Your analogy is true to some extent but it’ll be true iff
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Apples and oranges POIH - A valedictorian is in that position due to academic achievement while the president of some club is in that position through a popularity contest and really means very little other than the popularity IMO.</p>
<p>ucsd<em>ucla</em>dad: True, I won’t bet on student body president but another noticeable path to Harvard from DD’s prep school was the Student Directed Showcase. 3 seniors get a chance to direct three shows and 1 have always matriculated/accepted at Harvard.</p>
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<p>POIH, that is great that you think Harker should be there, but what are you basing that on? Do you have personal experiences with every other school that is on that list?
What is your basis for Harker being in the top 20 with Forbes? </p>
<p>Here’s your link to let them know they’ve made a mistake.</p>
<p>[Forbes.com</a> About Us](<a href=“http://www.forbes.com/fdc/contact.html]Forbes.com”>Contact Information)</p>
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<p>This. </p>
<p>I think he must be sad now that he realizes his daughter is less worthy than before since she graduated from a HS that isn’t worthy of the top 20. Not to mention all the money he wasted on tuition to a school that can’t even crack top 20 in the country. </p>
<p>I, on the other hand, am happy as I realized that the fact that my son graduated from the top HS in our city (#1 of 4, has a 30% drop out rate and they’re all public, but who cares as long as its #1) suddenly makes him more worthy than I previously thought as the glow of #1 HS clings to him for the rest of his life!!!</p>
<p>Good grief, get a life.</p>