The Official M10 2019 Freakout Thread

@TheSwami @YoungThriver when are your andover revisits? id love to hear about your experiences and how it compares to exeter (on the appropriate thread of course ;))

@ffsophiar It’s actually today!

@YoungThriver he has not. We have one more revisit day. I expect we will make a call this weekend. We are letting him process all the information but he’s said the schools are very close.

@YoungThriver awesome! have fun

It’s official! I’m a Phillipian! ?

@YoungThriver Welcome to the PA family!

@YoungThriver Congrats!! That’s so amazing—you’ll love it there!

I filled out Choate’s online enrollment form, so now I just need to send in my package to make it official!!

@CavsFan2003 And you’re going to love Choate!

When I declined Exeter’s offer, I was asked which school I’ll be attending next year.

Why do they need this information and what do they do with it?

@YoungThriver congrats!!! i assume the revisit was convincing? should i commit to andover?

@ffsophiar I want to say yes but that’s not a decision that anyone else should make for you. Just know that regardless of which you choose, you’re going to have an amazing, world-class education.

@YoungThriver They just want to know for marketing purposes, to understand who they are competing with and what kinds of students choose which other schools.

Not that anyone asked, but Andover’s acceptances rate for this cycle was 12% and Exeter’s was 15%.

Are these numbers likely to go down in the upcoming years?

@YoungThriver that could explain why i can’t find many future andover kids on this site? it’s odd really

Wow, that is actually higher than I would imagine! From what I know, Taft has an acceptance of around 11% this year (about 180 out of almost 1800, data from admission letter) and about 12% for St. Mark’s (99 out of over 800, data from revisit). The applicant pool is definitely self-selective, but I would suspect the admission office of PA/PEA is putting a higher acceptance rate than it actually is.

Such low acceptance rates… yikes

Why would they need to? This has been Andover’s lowest since its inception. As for Exeter, this has been its lowest compared to the last 2, maybe 3 years.

@sparkatzz Boarding School Review has Taft’s acceptance rate at 20%, so they should really update their stats there if their acceptance rate has gone down that much! Did they share that acceptance rate percentage or did you do the math yourself? Might they have had 180 students revisit out of a larger number that were admitted? Or been referencing ALL of those admitted, not just freshmem admissions? Seems like a huge change in acceptance rate?

Groton and Thacher boasted the lowest acceptance rates of any boarding schools for many years at 11-12%. (No idea what the current rate is for those two schools…)

@sparkatzz I have heard the same thing, but keep in mind that when schools say they have 180 or 100 spots, they are usually telling us the amount of students they expect to enroll, that does not meant that they made 180 or 100 offers of admission. It is really likely that most schools are looking at a yield of around 50%, at least the peddie swim coach said that was the usual for most boarding schools at “their level” they estimated it at around 58%. So, assuming a a 50% yield, a school would need to make 360 offers of admission if they want 180 students (I would assume taft makes less offers since they tend to have a yield in the 60s. I’m really not that sure about SMS though. Anyway, now that there are going to be 360 offers of admission, you end up with an acceptance rate of 20 percent. SMS, on the other hand, would accept 200 out of 800, bringing the acceptance rate to 25%. Since PA consistently has a yield in the 80s and PEA’s yield is usually in the high 60s. They are making more offers of admission in total numbers, but they are expecting more of those students to enroll. Therefore, if Exeter wanted to fill around 200 spots (a low estimate for exeter), they would make around 330 offers of admission, out of an applicant pool that was in the 2 thousands.