<p>collegealum,</p>
<p>you might want to check your facts a bit. Prep school kids live all over the country. Granted schools in the heartland may not have crew, but they have field hockey, lacrosse, fencing (Blake School Mpls) and such. </p>
<p>Kids at prep schools are also much more likely to have played on a varsity team, because the schools are smaller and they often have more teams. </p>
<p>Know too, that the prep school advantage is not necessarily that their grads are recruited to PLAY on college teams, although that happens for obscure sports. They also get an advantage when adcoms give weight to having been on a team. Read the sources and you see that this is in part what “holistic” admissions is about. Hard for a kid at a public HS of 1800 (like my D’s) to meet a “holistic” athletics criterion when compared to a kid who went to a prep school of 400 that offers 20-30 sports (or more, depending on how you count.)</p>