Re: #62
The Texas public university rank-based admission system can be unforgiving to students in your situation (and encourages other problematic behaviors like grade-grubbing and rank-grubbing). On the other hand, some private schools are likely to recognize the difference in rigor between various high school and consider that accordingly (assuming that your grades are not too low compared to their usual standards).
I definitely feel it was worth it for S to attend his magnet school, but it may have hurt in college admissions. As stated above, the competition makes it very difficult to be one of the tippy top students there. I would not send a child to a competitive magnet school to increase his/her chances of elite admissions.
Interesting read. My personal take from the article and the discussion is that while it is not necessary to send your child to the “best” high school, you definitely need to send your child to a great school. And, “great” is subjective from one area of the country to another, as well as from one child to another.
I think @tutumom2001’s right - it’s very hard to generalize here. As some have noted, a super-elite magnet public like Stuy that draws on a population as large and deep as New York’s (with a large population of highly-academically-focused immigrant parents) is going to have a student body that’s much stronger academically, on average, than the best public school in a much smaller regional city. Other top ten cities will fall somewhere in between.
Similarly, a super-elite private school in a city like New York (say Trinity), or a super-elite boarding school (e.g., Exeter, Andover, etc.) is likely to be a lot stronger academically than the best private day school in a small regional city, and will probably have a higher number of students who are hooked by virtue of being legacies, development cases, children of celebrities or stars of high-SES sports (e.g., sailing, squash, golf) – which flatters their college admissions results.
The choice for parents, it seems to me, is to decide which of a local public, local magnet, local private day school or boarding school somewhere else offers the right mix of academic challenges and opportunities, at a price they can afford. That answer will be different for everyone. The elite colleges really do take their unhooked kids from all over, although there aren’t nearly enough slots for them.
@Blossom and @JHS, as usual, are right, too, in my opinion – once they get to the elite colleges, even though the kids from high-quality privates are on balance better-prepared, the motivated and disciplined ones will thrive and those who aren’t won’t, whether they came from public or private school.
I found this in the draft study. I view the bold as a way of saying you can’t test for what would have happened to the best students at a mid or bottom tier school, since almost none of the best students attend mid or bottom tier schools.
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The propensity scores for students who do not attend a selective enrollment school ranges from zero to over 0.95, but the vast majority of students have a zero propensity of attending a selective enrollment school. The propensity weight of zero effectively removes them from the estimation model. Among counterfactual students with a non-zero propensity for attending a selective school, the vast majority attend top-tier schools. **This is particularly the case among students with a high propensity for attending a selective enrollment school (>0.50)—almost all end up at a top-tier school. **
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