<p>newmassdad: According to Harvard-Westlake's website, the following is the matriculation of the Class of 2004:</p>
<p>Amherst College - 2
Boston College - 6
Brown University - 8
Claremont McKenna - 3
Columbia University - 13
Cornell University - 8
Georgetown University - 7
Harvard University - 10
Massachusetts Institute of Technology - 2
Northwestern University - 5
Princeton University - 4
Stanford University - 11
University of California Berkeley - 9
University of Pennsylvania - 15
University of Southern California - 19
Yale University - 5</p>
<p>It appears that you are correct that there are more Harvard-Westlake alums at west coast colleges, seeing that USC has the greatest number of Harvard-Westlake alums, with 11 at Stanford, and 9 at UC Berkeley.</p>
<p>Here is a public high school.... drat! they don't break it down for each year, but out of the last 4 graduating classes, 2001-2004 there are currently 52 graduates attending Princeton! </p>
<p>That would be..... Princeton regional HS. :) (not ours)</p>
<p>You have to remember that these kids are pre selected for Andover. If you read the Prep schools thread , you can get some idea how selective it is just to get into these top prep schools. And then you have the development, celeberity and legacy kids in much greater proportion than in most schools. Also any of the URMs who are there are heavily courted as the curriculum at these schools pretty much ensure that anyone who can cut it there can make it anywhere. About a quarter of the kids at these schools usually end up at non selective schools, I believe, instead of the other way around.</p>
<p>TJHSST would give those Andover numbers a good run for their money, and it's free... provided you live in northern VA.</p>
<p>Private or public schools that pre-screen the kids should be getting much higher acceptances into the top schools, since they have tons of top kids.</p>
<p>stanford consistently gets terrible yield from my school (Andover) for reasons that have to do with its selectivity. they tend to accept only the YM cross-admits who choose Y or M at near 90% rates. dont take this as offensive please--it's just the truth of the situation. schools like Georgetown and Vanderbilt (which are commonly used as safeties by Andover students) are also screwed on the yield side by us. legacy plays its role most ostensibly with HY and Penn, which is not surprising. </p>
<p>please dont assume that its a free-ride for andover kids. i know of at least 6 people with very high gpas and 1590/1600s who did not get into HYP. granted, they're still going to very very good colleges that are of the same caliber, but there are no guarantees. i hope you guys aren't envisioning a country club of undeserved privilege.</p>
<p>I have to wholeheartedly agree with Justice. I have some friends who currently go to Andover, and, while some may be considered "privileged," the general concensus is that many are not. These kids work incredibly hard in an environment that you would imagine to be overly competitive and drowning in pressure, but the truth of the matter is that the facade is an illusion. I have to give Andover their repute of intense academia, but the environment is just not as cut-throat as imagined. Those who excel at Andover (those who don't are a small minority) are those who not only have the intellect to do so, but also the ethic to work hard and reap benefits. These are are the kids that HYP want, and it's no surprise that they'd pluck their future class from such an excellent field.</p>
<p>NJres, many of those kids from Princeton HS have faculty parents and as we've seen on other threads, that is a hook. Also, some of those kids have taken classes at Princeton while in HS so have proven themselves. Sure the HS is public, but that isn't the whole story.</p>
<p>"Stanford consistently gets terrible yield from my school (Andover) for reasons that have to do with its selectivity. they tend to accept only the YM cross-admits who choose Y or M at near 90% rates."</p>
<p>My question is why 90% cross admits chose Y or M over Stanford. Legacy reaons, locational proximity, or any superiority or inferiority?</p>
<p>its mostly location, but there are other factors. the stanford matriculants are almost invariably cali/west coast residents and internationals. andover has the yale tradition, and MIT is just flat-out better than stanford (again..no offense!) in sciences, and that's what many of the cross-admits are interested in. also, on the east coast stanford isn't as well-respected. the ivies: yale (10/15) and columbia (10/13) and harvard (17/22) and princeton (7/11) get consistently great yield from here.</p>
<p>I have to say-- about Andover and other prep schools-- I'm a bit disappointed. My friend applied as a freshman, and he had D's in almost all of his classes. But he played hockey! His dad pulled a few strings and they let him in. I had much better grades, EC's, etc. than he did and I got waitlisted at St. Paul's in New Hampshire (only prep I applied to; I'm a legacy), where he also got accepted. In the end it all works out, though, as I'm going to Washington & Lee University (#13 on US news) and he is going to Colby College (#19 on US news and my dad's alma mater BTW)... both with no financial aid or merit money :-(.</p>
<p>As for my public HS in Maine, we have two kids going to Ivies... both going to Dartmouth. One girl got rejected ED from Columbia, and I don't know where she got in RD but she applied to EVERY Ivy and then some prestigious women's schools. We have 3 Tufts, Georgetown, Williams, Carleton, Claremont McKenna, Middlebury, Amherst, among others, but a lot of those schools are from single applicants who got into a few of them. My good friend who is very gifted and a great person got rejected at Middlebury and Tufts, WL at Carleton, Georgetown, and accepted at Bates. He had a good hook of wanting to go into foreign service and he is fluent in Spanish, and near fluent in Russian. Very good with languages. I think the thing is that he applied to many schools where he had some competition within our HS. I, on the other hand, am the only person EVER to go to W&L from my HS, so I am very geographically desirable. </p>
<p>Basically, college admissions seem totally random to me. I have seen kids get into schools I never thought they would get into, and other kids get rejected from schools that would be lucky to have them.</p>