Strategy for Attaining Admission to Top Colleges

Prep School Admissions Prep School Parents
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<p>If college prep and college counseling weren’t strong at boarding schools, they wouldn’t be able to stay in business. That’s what they do. That’s what you are paying for. Trying to assess which schools are “better” at it by looking at matriculations falsely assumes that the school and not the student is somehow responsible for where the student ends up. The strongest students (anywhere) end up at the strongest schools; the weakest students (anywhere) end up at other (often very fine) schools. What college counseling does is help your child craft a realistic list of colleges well-suited to help your child attain his/her goals based on what your child has accomplished at BS. What’s the point of going into this game with an Ivy as a goal if, after three years at BS, your child assumes a shape not suited to an Ivy but finely shaped for other great schools? Will you be disappointed? Whose life are we talking about here anyway? It’s all about our kids and where they will thrive, may be an Ivy, may be your state flagship.</p>

<p>Will you be disappointed in your child’s college counseling if the college list your child crafts with his/her counselor is not as “shiny” as you expect or doesn’t contain the schools you had in mind? At Choate, the CC office abides by the policy (in general) of a ten-school application list that contains three reaches, three matches, three safeties/likelies, and the student’s state flagship. (Some students need more, some fewer, but that’s the general target.) It’s a small list because it’s honed. Your child’s BS will know your kiddo as a student better than you will by junior year, so the CC and your child will be in the best position to come up with a short college list perfectly tailored to your child that will ensure a good outcome. An ED rejection says nothing about the suitability of the list. The ten schools on my child’s list are perfectly matched to him and are not the same as his roommate’s or any other student on campus. CK doesn’t have an Ivy on his list, but not because he’s not competitive. He’s just shaped differently. Also, his current list looks absolutely NOTHING, and I mean NOTHING, like any list we might have come up with for him pre-BS.</p>

<p>@london203’s comment about kids changing over time is spot on. Will you be disappointed if, say, your freshman STEM kid ends up applying to college as an artist because s/he found and excelled at something undiscovered and heads off to an arts college instead of MIT? That happens. Or what if Harvard is not well-ranked for the program your child has become interested in? (Believe it or not, Harvard and other Ivies are not tops in every field.) Or what if your pacifist freshman decides on a military academy? Will you hold your BS CC office accountable for these choices? Will you consider these “bad” choices?</p>

<p>I found it telling and rather amusing that the very lengthy college intake form that Choate asked us to complete toward the end of junior year asked if there were any colleges we felt were well-suited to our child and why. I think that question was there, partly, to ferret out if we were likely to be a PITA come senior year. Preconceived college lists tell the school what to expect when dealing with parents. I don’t believe that question is there to guide the CC office toward enlightenment about the student.</p>

<p>To end this ramble, I think you can be confident that wherever your child lands among boarding schools, the college counseling process will work with experience and your child’s best interest in mind to shepherd your child toward a great college outcome–whatever that outcome is.</p>

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Sometimes it’s neither the school nor the kid that’s to credit. Truly nauseating are the kids from s1’s school who got into ivy w a famous last name or a development case (parents donated a bldg to the college), in spite of middling academic performance and multiple serious disciplinary infractions. Much be great to be born on third base.</p>

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<p>Touché, GMT. That’s a whole 'nother ball of wax and must be considered. Some of those slots you’re eyeing for your kid are already taken.</p>

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<p>What’s wrong with getting the best education you can get at Exeter, regardless of whether you go to an ivy or not? You know many successful people didn’t go to an ivy. What if you go to an ivy from a less rigorous school and not able to do well there?</p>

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<p>Yes, the Tabor stats are apparently unique, and posted on them some time ago. The bottom half had some very fine destinations. A general rule of thumb is, given the fortunate opportunity of being able to choose after M10, taking into consideration whether your child has a realistic chance to be a top-third academic performer at any given school. Exeter’s top-third do very well, particularly with Ivies, but the top-third at any top-30, or even top-50, BS should be positioned to get into a highly-selective college. There are certainly other considerations, though. What about the strength of the College Office? What about the feelings of “belonging” at visit-back, or before? </p>

<p>Well, how the heck would one accurately predict the academic stats the kid will achieve some three years down the road, in any given environment? I think it folly to ever say Johnnie, you are not Exeter top-third, but you are Concord top 10%. Too many variables.</p>

<p>Ditto on the CC offices and their outcomes. Lists vary, and look more or less “impressive”, but you can’t extrapolate/predict accurately, imho, from Gr 8, 9, 10 to where the kid will land on the BS matriculation list for senior year graduation. Agree that one might find enough evidence to feel one CC office has been more “effective” than another, but nothing hard enough to know your own child’s college admit experience years ahead of time.</p>

<p>to wit: Super-high SSAT scores, great grades at a good middle school. Lovely child in so many ways. Four years on, these kids are getting rejections or deferrals right now by the boatloads for their ED/EA apps. Numbers are numbers at “lottery schools”. And, lo, some are getting in. (Congrats to those. Aren’t athletes and development and brilliant kids the major, but not only, beneficiaries of the early admit process?)</p>

<p>Know your child well enough to help her make a BS choice based on better “fit”, with some assurance that the CC office has a track record suggesting a fine outcome. After doing that, keep the view more on the present experience, though of course you (yes, you!) can’t help researching the various college possibilities. </p>

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Come to think of it, last admissions cycle, i did plot avg SSAT score for incoming enrollees vs. avg SAT score for graduating seniors:
<a href=“Question on "second tier" schools - #39 by GMTplus7 - Prep School Admissions - College Confidential Forums”>Question on "second tier" schools - #39 by GMTplus7 - Prep School Admissions - College Confidential Forums;
Refer to post #38. The schools in bold font seem to be outliers in producing graduates w SAT score much higher than their incoming SSAT score might suggest.</p>

<p>If u go thru that entire thread, you’ll find around a half doz other lists i posted for a number of school attributes i looked at, trying to tease out the outliers.</p>

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<p>^^^ I’m thinking more grades on transcripts than standardized testing scores. Did notice that own kid’s SSAT overall percentile in 8th was exactly the same as the PSAT percentile, though sub-scores zigged and zagged from 8th to 10th to 11th. </p>

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<p>Some ideas for getting into a good college that have slowly developed after going through this with both Ds</p>

<p>I think the school doesn’t matter as much as the student (barring truly horrific fit problems), but I am consistently surprised how schools (boarding, private or day) do little of the following:</p>

<p>1) I think families can help their students focus on what makes them stand out and foster it during summers starting after 8th or 9th grade. This can be in collaboration with counselors and advisors and is especially relevant to Boarding School kids. We did this a lot, even with D at Exeter. </p>

<p>2) Enter any high school with a very good sense of the specific curriculum, any “tracking” or prerequisites needed, especially in math, and a tentative 4 year game plan. Meet with a counselor if needed (I had my D tromp in to the relevant Dept. chair’s office with a 4 year game plan when she arrived - a little aggressive, I agree, but it gets kids familiar with the curriculum, requirements, and trade-offs since they can’t take every class.) Unexpected curves will come your way, so be ready to adapt the plan. Know the curriculum inside out.</p>

<p>3) Encourage exploration of different extra-curriculuars early. Then focus on a couple of them.</p>

<p>4) Encourage supportive friendships</p>

<p>5) If practice is needed with standardized tests, start early and often. Know about SAT II tests EARLY, prep for PSAT if they may be NMSF material. Schools will not tell you these things. </p>

<p>6) Encourage students to talk with teachers, ask questions after class, visit their offices. When letter of rec times come it will be much more natural</p>

<p>7) Little failures mean they are trying new things. Cool. Encourage. Big failures mean they need help. Help.</p>

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<p>@charger, would loved to have examined GPA, but that stat is not so easy to collect.</p>

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<p>Thank you 2prepMom - your advice is very helpful. GMT - Have you done a 2014-2015 Analysis? Some of the numbers have changed.</p>

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<p>@heartburner, </p>

<p>If HYPSMC is the goal, it is probably safer to stay at home in local public school and shine brightly. </p>

<p>If a fabulous education is the goal, I don’t think you’d be disappointed at Exeter/Andover or the other similar schools (they are each amazing). 30% of graduates matriculate to IvySM, but that does not mean the full merit kids at Duke, Vandy and Emory are any less happy, or the U Chicago crowd, or the Cal or U Mich kids with phenomenal instate options, or the full ride state flagship crowd, or the musicians or artists at conservatories or art schools, or computer folks at Harvey Mudd, or the future finance or political science masters of the universe at liberal arts colleges. A few enter the service academies. Here is the list</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.exeter.edu/documents/College_Matriculation(1).pdf”>http://www.exeter.edu/documents/College_Matriculation(1).pdf&lt;/a&gt; </p>

<p>Ivy matriculation is a very limited metric upon which to rank the quality of a high school. </p>

<p>I think a survey of the bottom of the class, asking if they thought attending prep school was worth it, would be the most enlightening statistic. </p>

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<p>Whoops, it won’t let me link a pdf, sorry. Try <a href=“http://www.exeter.edu/about_us/495_7095.aspx”>http://www.exeter.edu/about_us/495_7095.aspx&lt;/a&gt;, or go to <a href=“http://www.exeter.edu”>www.exeter.edu</a> then academics tab, college counseling and profile for colleges and the matriculation data is there</p>

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<p>HeartburnerKid will be unhappy staying at the LPS and will resent the fact that the he did not pursue the BS opportunity. He is completely all in on this now. He would paradoxically lose his shine by staying home at this point. The Ivy matriculation metric only holds value because both of his parents matriculated at one and had a fantastic experience there - that will probably help him when the time comes and he may be the person that Henry Park complains about.</p>

<p>At this point, interviews are completed and applications are almost done (waiting on those essays!). So we will just wait until March 10 to decide what we should do. Predicted happiness/success at the school based on very little information and vibe will be part of the selection process, if there is one. </p>

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<p>

No, I’ve moved onto crunching college numbers. But I explained the relationships on that thread, so it shd be an easy matter for u to get updated numbers from boardingschoolreview.com and plot them in Excel.</p>

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<p>Heartburner, you are better off giving, even if it’s only $50 a year, to the ivy you and your wife met at. From an AO friend of mine, they look at that, and even if the gifts are small, if they are regular, then your kid will get the legacy treatment at your ivy. Honestly the only ivy I’ll be encouraging my kid to apply to is Stanford- she has an aunt that went there so there’s some family nearby, and the financial aid grant packages for families that make under 60k a year (which is us) are awesome. I see little utility in Harvard,which seems to carefully screen applicants for the kids who will do well in life later and rubber stamp them (I read a study a while ago where being admitted to Harvard was as much of an indicator of success as attending- even if you went to a state school), than a school with a reputation of taking people and turning them into stronger, better versions of themselves. </p>

<p>So even among those of us aggressively pursuing BS, not all parents care about ivy. I’d rather my kid not get saddled with ivy league student loans, when with work and luck, she should be able to snag some serious scholarships if she goes through a BS.</p>

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<p>Someone’s gonna do it, might as well be me. The Ivy League is an athletic conference consisting of eight universities in the northeast. Stanford and MIT are not Ivies. </p>

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<p>Touché, @stargirl3.</p>

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<p>When I was applying to Harvard Business School eons ago, an admissions rep at an info session explained that getting into Harvard is like applying to a bank for a loan (pre-80’s, of course): you had to prove to the bank you didn’t really need it. This rep was also very honest about how HBS would impact our earnings. She said that most people drool over the average starting salaries of B-school grads, but the telling metric is the delta between what students were making when they entered compared to when they left. That’s an entirely different number. I and most of my section mates were making very good money and already in promising career tracks when we entered the program. Two years of foregone earnings getting that MBA represented a lot of lost opportunity cost. When I left HBS during my first year (the ten-year breakeven just wasn’t worth it for me), the B-school admissions person processing my exit told me, “There are no admissions mistakes, only acceptance mistakes.” I’ve never forgotten that statement as the arrogance of it stunned me, but because there was some truth there, I kept it in mind during our son’s BS process and it comes to mind again as he goes though the college process. When I consider all he has achieved and experienced at BS, I realize that he is already an “elite,” already positioned for great success. His BS has prepared him well to be competitive at any level. He is going to do fine in life just because of who he is and how he takes advantage of what is placed before him, so he’ll choose his college based solely on fit and goals. Whatever college that is will not add any more shine to him, so nitpicking over athletic conferences seems futile to me.</p>

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<p>I think the Exeter Dad in the closed thread may have spoken too soon. If his childs’ stats were reported correctly in that thread and there are no disciplinary issues or LOR grenades, then he may very well feel differently in March/April.</p>

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<p>I think that Exeter Dad was upset because he felt that the early acceptances handed out to the Joneses would have gone to his son had he stayed home. Then the barrage of comments about how narrow minded and superficial he was came in and the thread was closed. I will say, the tone of the posting was rather anti-Exeter posted in a forum of parents, some of whom are considering Exeter and the like. It was rather inflammatory in that respect.</p>

<p>HarvestMoon - I think that you and others are right and everything will be fine by March/April. </p>

<p>However, the original issue/question remains - Does attending Exeter paradoxically hurt one’s chances for being accepted at certain highly competitive schools. Many people have had strong reactions to this question. It is probably unknown as the number of variables included in the equation confound any meaningful analysis. But I would leave this to GMT who I am sure could figure it out. </p>

<p>Then there is a separate issue of whether it even matters as one should not consider college matriculation and only consider goodness of “fit” as this will translate into lifelong happiness and success. </p>

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<p>First, I did not read the thread by Exeter Dad, so I will confine my remarks to what is in this thread. I really think you have the answer, though.</p>

<p>You have stated that you went to an Ivy League school from a rural high school, the first student from that school to go to an Ivy in something like 75 years. Therefore, being one of the top students from that school does not guarantee acceptance to an Ivy League school- you going was closer to a singularity than to a statistic.</p>

<p>@stargirl3 provided a link to Exeter’s 'College Profile" which indicated that at least 200 students in the last 3 years attended one of ten listed schools, and at least 170 more students attended an additional 17 schools. Assuming that around 1,000 students graduated from Exeter in the last 3 years (~350/yr), that says that about 20% of the graduates matriculated to an Ivy (or MIT or Stanford). If you give about half of those over to uncontrolled variables (legacy, donors, uber-famous or political people), you are left with ~10% of the class for merit. No guarantee, but you do have a 225 year track record of a large percentage of the class going to an Ivy League school to compare against a 75 year track record from your own school of zero. That’s as close to a guarantee as I can imagine. Any given public school in any given year will likely be a crapshoot with regards to Ivy League matriculation.</p>

<p>So here is your formula:</p>

<p>You already have the legacy boost, do the 7 things in @2prepmom’s post #27 that, frankly, Mr. Parks and his parents likely failed to do, encourage your son to take up a recruitable sport and get really good at it, select a school which is a good fit, and in which your son will likely graduate in the top 10 - 20% of the class (and have him graduate in the top 10-20% of the class), and hope that he “fits” very well with the ivy from which you and your wife graduated and desires to go there by the time he is a senior. Oh, and apply ED (or SAEC). That is the formula!</p>

<p>What can you control?</p>

<p>1) Select a school where your son feels a good fit, and where he is likely to be in the top quartile of the class (assuming the school has similar matriculation stats to Exeter) at graduation.
2) Do the 7 things in post #27. Particularly in item #3 choose a recruitable sport(s) and get good at it.</p>

<p>Note that while getting in from a good LPS is also a good option, the odds of any specific student getting into any particular ivy from any particular LPS are much lower, even if you follow the formula outlined here, than they are if they graduate from a “top” BS and follow the formula outlined here, because of the institutional history and familiarity and track record, as well as the competence of the college counseling department.</p>

<p>And, for the record, I am in the camp with @twinsmom in feeling that the boarding school provides the growth and challenge (life preparation) my kids need, regardless of college preparation or matriculation. Still, an interesting mental exercise.</p>