"The most competitive high schools do not necessarily lead to acceptance at the most

Parents Forum
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<p>Here is an excerpt from a Washington Post article by Jay Mathews.</p>

<p>"The most competitive high schools do not necessarily lead to acceptance at the most selective colleges.</p>

<p>Many parents think that if their kids can get into the private school where all the Supreme Court justices sent their children, or into the public magnet school that rejects 80 percent of its applicants, they are guaranteed admission into the Ivy League. The opposite is true. A 1997 survey of more than 1 million high school seniors by Paul Attewell of the City University of New York Graduate Center found that, except for a few superstars, attending a very competitive high school hurt students' chances of getting into a very selective college. The reason is that selective colleges take only a few students from each school. A student with a 2200 SAT score is not going to stand out at a high school with several 2300s, but will be at the top of Yale's list in a school that has only one or two seniors who score over 2100. (The top score is now 2400.) Of course, those competitive high schools will still give your child a great education, and perhaps that is more important than which college sticker you get to put on your car. "</p>

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<p>How would a survey of high school seniors be competent evidence for this assertion? (In other words, how much do seventeen-year-olds really know about what influences their chances?) </p>

<p>BTW, what appears to be a different Jay Mathews column </p>

<p>[url=<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/03/AR2008030300659.html%5Dwashingtonpost.com%5B/url"&gt;http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/03/AR2008030300659.html]washingtonpost.com[/url&lt;/a&gt;] </p>

<p>has a very interesting idea.</p>

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<p>Here's a citation to a description of Paul Attewell's study in 2001. </p>

<p>Elite</a> High Schools Do Not Mean Entrance Into Elite Colleges </p>

<p>I don't suppose this is cited too often in selective high school viewbooks. ;)</p>

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<p>And here is a citation to what a Jay Mathews article about the issue. </p>

<p>washingtonpost.com:</a> In College Admissions, Magnets Are Negative</p>

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<p>The survey is 11 years old.</p>

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<p>The firist article cites a CUNY study of elite public schools. One can certainly get lost in the crowd or frozen out of special programs at a large public magnet/selective schools like Stuy (3500 students). OTOH, even kids attending less competitive day/boarding schools do disproportionaltely well w/ college admissions.</p>

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<p>Very interesting thread! My husband and I were just discussing this very subject this past weekend and came to a similar conclusion based on anecdotal evidence from observing acceptances and rejections for DD's friends in the local "elite" high schools vs. the local public schools.</p>

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<p>Some parents call it the TJ Effect in Fairfax.</p>

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<p>i think i agree. so would a semi-competitive public school be like the BEST in terms of acceptance @ top schools? cuz its competitive and you get good facilities...but it's not TOO competitive</p>

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<p>One of my sons friends went back east to a private school with the idea of Ivy league. He really wanted to go to Penn. Well he was rejected from Penn but back home in Montana one of his friends was accepted and another waitlisted and later offered a spot at Penn. All three students had similar stats on tests, grades, etc. Class Rankings were a bit different and obviously geography was different.</p>

<p>Not much you can draw from an isolated case but it was interesting.</p>

<p>Of these three students one ended up in Harvard, one at USC, and one in a small LAC in North Dakota LOL</p>

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<p>I have no experience with very competitive elite high schools, because we live in a rural area (only the one public high school around here), and also because we homeschool. However, I do know a lot about how the kids here fare in terms of acceptances to elite colleges and it's better than I would have guessed.</p>

<p>It's a small-ish high school. They offer no classes designated as "honors", and only a small handful of AP classes. They don't weight grades and they don't rank students. The graduating class is somewhere around 200 kids, and shrinking every year.</p>

<p>Still kids here do very well in terms of elite colleges, given the size of the community and the one basic public high school. My intuitive sense is that it's more of an advantage for the kids to be rural and western, and relatively underrepresented at elite schools esp. in the East, than it is a disadvantage that they don't have access to a more high powered college prep program.</p>

<p>But that's just my impression from this side of the divide. ;)</p>

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<p>If the goal of attending a highly selective public HS is to gain admission to an "elite" school, then perhaps there is a disadvantage when competing against all the other superstars in the county.</p>

<p>On the other hand, if one is choosing to attend a highly selective HS for the extraordinary opportunities it offers, and the ability to be with a critical mass of peers, then there is no contest. And, I will posit, that those opportunities and the friendly competition may take a student far, far beyond what he/she could have achieved at the local HS.</p>

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<p>Jay Mathews is a [redacted] n00b who assumes that college is the only thing on parents' minds rather than giving their child an actual education.</p>

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<p>I don't know anything about this Jay Mathews, but to me the interesting question isn't about the relative educational merits of one kind of high school over another, but the far more limited question of whether or not the "most competitive" high schools are a plus in applicatinos to "elite" colleges. I'm not suggesting there is any special moral value about it, or even if acceptance to elite colleges is all that important in itself (I tend to think not), but did find it interesting to ponder the OP's more limited question.</p>

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<p>'rentof2,
If one goes to a selective HS, the highly selective colleges are far more likely to know about that school, what kinds of kids attend the selective program, and <em>how those accepted students from that school will fare at their college.</em> To me, that's the key distinguishing point. </p>

<p>The colleges will know who has taken big academic risks vs. who's sliding through. They'll know that if HS X offers a research program and your student hasn't taken advantage of it, there'd better be a good explanation forthcoming.</p>

<p>Ultimately, for a student in a selective HS program who may not be at the top of the class, I think the best strategy is to take advantage of the EC/research/personal opportunities that are available. Find a way to make one's mark that isn't necessarily reflected in the GPA. Long-standing interests, developed throughout HS, can pay off far beyond GPA alone.</p>

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<p>Yeah, I assume colleges know more about selective high schools and what is available at them, but does it help in the application process to elite colleges more than, say, coming from somewhere else that is more novel?</p>

<p>I don't know. I just think it's an interesting question. Especially for parents who are specifically hoping a very competitive high school is (along with providing a good education) an advantage in admission to highly selective colleges. Lots of parents make big life decisions about such things; moving, investment of money, milking connections, and who-knows-what-else.</p>

<p>The guy who wrote the article is saying, maybe it's not the advantage people think... but I don't know.</p>

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<p>As a rule of thumb, being in a highly selective high school helps a ton if you can manage to be in the top 10%, and will harm you otherwise.</p>

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<p>We have lived with this dilemma on a personal level. Our county has very good public high schools, each with its own specialty center, which probably have about a 20-40 percent acceptance rate; center subject matter does somewhat self-select the applicants (Humanities, Math &Science, Arts, Engineering, Info Tech, IB, Foreign Language Immersion, etc). We also participate in a regional magnet school with an acceptance rate from our particular county of 8-10% from a pool that needs to meet application qualifications to even allow application.</p>

<p>Our four children all attended our county's IB middle school (basically the county's magnet school at the middle school level). Our sons still were not really challenged, our daughters did have to do some work to get their A's (but they are more social than the boys). Both boys were admitted to all of the high schools they applied and went to the magnet school. Both girls were waitlisted there but accepted elsewhere.</p>

<p>BOTTOM LINE FOR US: Boys really needed the challenges offered by the course selection, teachers, and peers of the magnet school. We were not even thinking about college when S1 made his choice, except that we had been told that the IB program was more recognized by colleges than the magnet program (not true). We decided that from what we had seen of the options as well as the higher level of classes offered, eight languages offered, etc., he would be better prepared for whatever college he wound up at if he attended the magnet school. Turned out to be soooo true. Their quest for learning has been nurtured and encouraged by both teachers and peers. S1 is at a top school known for its grade deflation, taking more classes than required at 2-3 levels above his class year and doing extremely well. S2 will know his choices in a few weeks.</p>

<p>That being said, our sons were/are at the very top of their class at the magnet school, had nat'l/int'l awards, perfect/near perfect scores,etc. Had daughters gone to this same school, they would not have been at the top of their class like their brothers, their stress level would be sky high, and they would be in a very precarious position to garner an acceptance to our top state schools all because of the caliber of the student body at this magnet. Instead, D1 is at the top of her class, has time to relax with her friends; will never do as well as her brothers on AP or standardized tests due to the claiber of teachers, peers, and her own abilities. But compared to her classmates, she will have an excellent shot at very good schools, schools she wouldn't have a chance at if she had attended the magnet school. The price for this is that she will not be as well prepared and she will have to work harder in college once she gets there. </p>

<p>All in all, it's a trade off. For us, it worked out well in all cases. But a few years ago the student newspaper at the magnet school addressed this very issue highlighting the frustration of students who did not get in to our state's top two very well respected public universities who probably would have been the valedictorians / salutatorians of their home schools had they chosen to go that route and easily gotten in to these schools. It was a tough pill for them to swallow after four years of very hard work. </p>

<p>I think it all depends on the student and what's important to them. It's much easier to think a magnet school is a fantastic thing when your child is one of the few doing superbly well as opposed to one stuck in the middle of the pack seeing his/her college dreams fading and stressing out all the time.</p>

<p>Sorry for the long post!</p>

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<p>You really have to look closely at the numbers at these schools. It may well be the case that a student's chances of getting into a particular elite school is less if he is at a magnet high school competing with several dozen other kids with aspirations to the same school. However, I think that almost all of those dozens of students will get into at least some elite schools if they apply to enough of them. My son is in a magnet IB program, and when I look at the scattergrams, I do see students with very high scores and grades being rejected from elite schools (i.e., Harvard, Columbia). But when I look at a bit lower but still elite tier (Georgetown, Hopkins, Chicago), I see almost no rejections among students with those grades and scores. You should also add in the fact that you will never know for sure how well your kid would have performed at the "regular" high school--he might have slacked off, fallen in with bad companions, etc.</p>

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<p>Jay Mathews needs a stronger editor. He's given far too much free reign at the Post.</p>