@privatebanker Interesting you mentioned the NFL combine stats. You’ll notice that the tests - 40 yd dash, etc - have maximum head room. Meaning that no matter how fast the 10 fastest runners get, you’ll still be able to distinguish between them. The SAT, on the other hand, lacks headroom, with too many scorers at the top, and no way to tell them apart.
Obvious solution is to make the test harder at the high end.
Good idea. But since only 3600 kids a year score a 1600 globally, what are we trying to accomplish with the higher outer band. The difference between number 50 and 2000. Or number 2000 and number 30000.
Only 40k or so scored a 34 or better on act or 1500 on sat. It’s already pretty well distributed looking at the test population as a whole.
Diminishing returns. Economic cost and realities for the test companies. Etc.
I was curious about where top 1% scorers actually ended up attending, so I made some estimates using IPEDS 2017-18. I estimated the number of students with >= 1500 SAT or >= 34 ACT, making some normal distribution type assumptions based on reported 75th percentile scores. This is obviously a rough estimate and has a variety of limitations, particularly with normal distribution assumptions and double counting students who submit both SAT and ACT. Ignoring these limitations, the colleges with the largest number of top 1% scorers were:
The majority of high scoring students appear to be attending large publics, likely as in state students. The same is true for the majority of students in other score ranges. Only an estimated 9% attend Ivies. While the specific numbers are extremely rough estimates, the point is it appears that the vast majority of high scoring students are not attending Ivies or similar. I expect the bulk of this effect relates to a large portion of high scorers not applying to Ivies and similar. However, another key factor relates to a large portion of those who did apply not being accepted.
@RayManta Please do not discount online schooling and homeschooling as not academically as rigorous - colleges absolutely do NOT “discount their academic records.” Your county’s online system might not be rigorous, but there are plenty of online programs that outperform many public schools. Online school students and homeschooling students get into Ivies and other Top 20 colleges, not to mention Top 20 LACs, every single year. I’d put those thousand right back into your estimations.
(I speak as the parent of a student who was told by our local high school vice principal to continue homeschooling D23 instead of entering her into normal high school next year, because the high school can’t give her what she needs. She needs far more rigor and advanced classes than the high school can provide - so she will continue to take advanced online classes for 9th and 10th and then do dual credit for 11th and 12th - and she has a ton of homeschooled friends who are similarly academically advanced - she’s not rare, there are at least twenty kids in a similar situation that we know of in our area, in just one part of the country.)
Now back to the conversation at hand. Don’t want to derail the thread - but I did need to point out that online/homeschooling students should not be dismissed from the competitive equation.
Edited to add - this all read as rather huffy when I took a look at it after posting. I write all of the above with respect, in a polite and matter-of-fact tone. No huffiness intended. 
Interesting. Because the vast majority of toxic elitism tends to fall around environment. Student x being surrounded by like minded brilliance in school type x vs public x.
@JanieWalker ???
Large publics are also…large. More students, period, attend them. If you account for school size what happens?
"So, 18,000 applicants are realistically vying for the non-hooked, non-athlete spots at the Ivies. I think we’re discussing just regular decision slots, and many of those 18,000 will be accepted through ED. Maybe we’re down to 15,000, but I think that’s pretty conservative. It may be closer to 12,000.
15,000 kids, not 112,000.
The chance a kid from this group is going to get into a specific Ivy, like say Harvard, is still low–maybe 1 out of 12 at Harvard, for example. The chance that a kid from this group will get into ONE of the Ivies or near-Ivies is pretty good, I think.
If you are fortunate to be in that group, you’re going to get into an Ivy or a near-Ivy, unless you totally mess up the rest of your application. The number of non-hooked slots available at the T-20 privates is > 15,000 (I’ve already pulled out the superstar kids who will decide to go instate, so I’ll pull the public universities out here). Maybe you won’t get into Harvard/Yale/Princeton, but you should still get into one of Duke/Vandy/WashU/Columbia/Hopkins/Chicago/Cornell etc. if they’re your cup of tea."
You’re talking a lot of applications to fill out and no mention of the kid who’s a good fit for one school also been offered a spot at another, or in some cases several others.
Anyone any idea how many unhooked kids get into one Ivy? How many get accepted to two, three,four, more? Amherst? Williams? Carleton? Amherst and Williams? Amherst, Williams and Carleton?
Someone recently posted that there are approx. 50000 seats. (you can only go to one school) for all the schools in the USA with less than 27% acceptance rate. Much less if you lower that number.
My gut would say that the most selective group of schools in that cohort would follow the normal pattern of 60% to 70% or so, representing athletes, development, urm, international, first gen, lower ses/pell/questbridge, legacy and staff related. It might be more.
I’ve heard stats that schools like Amherst are 50 percent student athletes alone.
That would roughly lead to approx 15000 to 20,000 seats for non hooked, white and Asian students from the 50k so called elite seats available
That’s essentially the point. The largest portion of high scoring students tend to attend bigger flagships that have large student bodies. These are often the same colleges that a lot of their friends and family applied to and highly praise. They often personally know people in the community who have attended, sometimes including teachers. The flagships usually have good in state job networking and favored by in state employers. In contrast, many of these kids don’t personally know anyone who attended an Ivy and don’t feel pressure to apply to one from their friends and family. Many with a quality in state flagship don’t favor Ivies over their flagship, so they don’t apply to Ivies as a backup in case they are rejected by the flagship.
If you mean making a list with the largest portion of students who are top estimated 1% scorers, it’s nearly the same order as other colleges with highest test scores type lists. Caltech comes out on top of any highest average score type list, yet only a minuscule portion of top 1% type students attend Caltech because they have such a small student body. Instead the overwhelming majority of top 1% kids choose to apply and attend elsewhere.
@privatebanker Zowie. Is really 2/3 of the students at these schools hooked in some way? That’s…unreal.
@RayManta I know it was shocking to me. I was spitballing for this post. That’s kind of the info coming out of the Harvard lawsuit.
I may be off by some percentage. But directionally its close. @data10 probably can tell us or has the exact figures from the h lawsuit.
Recruited (67 factor athletes who are below average academically plus 60-90 coded athletes who get a tip but are typical admits academically) number about 140 a year of a target class size of about 475.
So more like 1/4-1/3. There are walk-ons in some sports but that’s not an admissions factor. Probably more than half PLAY sports, including club and intramural but again, not an admissions factor. As this is a NESCAC thing, I’ll venture the rest of the NESCAC numbers are similar.
https://www.amherst.edu/system/files/media/PlaceOfAthleticsAtAmherst_Secure_1.pdf
@privatebanker Last fall I compiled a spreadsheet with various stats, which are now probably two years out of date. At that time, I had identified 54 colleges that had acceptance rates of 30% or less, which in total had enrolled 70,242 students the prior year. I need to update it. At any rate the schools that were between 28-30% at that point, and may have shrunk to 27% by now, were: Carnegie Mellon University, Boston College, Colgate, Colby, University of Virginia, Wellesley, and the University of Richmond. Without those schools, we’d be at around 60,000 enrolees. The schools under a 27% admittance rate included the ginormous monolithic entities Cornell, Cal Berkeley, USC, and UCLA, which combined enrolled 17,000 of those 70K.
If I removed the state schools from the calculation (but including the 28-30% group), we’d eliminate the three CA schools and UVA, and be at just around 50,000 students. That’s a reasonable check on that number, I think.
@OHMomof2. Thx. That’s helpful
[edited as no longer relevant]
In the Harvard lawsuit sample, 44% of admitted students were unhooked RD, non-URM, non-economically disadavantaged applicants. If you include RD+SCEA, then the clear majority of admits would be unhooked. ~90% of these unhooked RD admits had a 1-2 academic rating (the overwhelming majority had a 2). Unhooked RD non-URM applicants with a 1-2 academic rating had a 9.7% admit rate.
Getting a 2 academic alone, largely corresponds to having high stats, and clearly doesn’t mean you have a good chance of admission. Instead the bulk of the unhooked admits had 2’s in multiple other core ratings besides just academic… often a 2’s in academic, EC, and personal. ~79% of unhooked admits had a 1-2 personal rating, and ~75% of had a 1-2 EC rating,
Forbes reports 38% are varsity athletes. However, being Div III, athletics admission boosts works very differently from Ivies. The report at https://www.amherst.edu/system/files/media/PlaceOfAthleticsAtAmherst_Secure_1.pdf defines 3 categories of athletes at Amherst – “athletic factor, coded, and walk-on”. The athletic factor are the ones that are endorsed by coaches and more comparable to recruited athletes. Amherst had 67 of those per year during the report year or ~5% of admitted students. Coded athletes sound more like the athletic 2 rating at Harvard. They have similar academic stats to other unhooked admitted students, but are admitted at a higher rate. Amherst has 60-90 of those per year.
@RayManta I’ve been quoting you thanks for the refresher. The big schools don’t usually make that admit rate. Funny things keep getting more selective. Bc was 26.7 and bu and neu under 20. But some schools play with the math a little with alternative programs. Overseas and spring admits. With Ed coming next year my friends at BC tell me it will be more like 17 percent. We will see.
@Data10 I’m not following the numbers. How many of the admitted students were not in the categories below. That is the true middle class and a higher ses non hooked Asian and Caucasian.
Because the number I’ve seen are quite different than your numbers
These were the categories of hooked or non hooked international.
Legacy
Development
Z list
Deans and directors selections
Professor and staff related
Athletics
URM
International
First Gen and Low ses pell
And Ivy League is division 1a. Not d3. Big difference. But not monetary scholarships.
@Data10 I reread and it seems you were referring to Amherst as d3. Never mind.
And maybe the numbers are the same. Or I am not following correctly.
H as our proxy with 1962 admits and we subtract out all of the preferences listed above, what number would be left? Can we tell?