<p>Looking at the four schools that have stats for the past 3-4 years, Andover is amazing especially given its graduating class size. SPS is very strong. Exeter is pretty strong too although it’s not on par with Andover as some expected. College placement is just one aspect of BS education, and the IVY+SM is just one way to see it (thanks to prepreview, which ironically provided inaccurate statistics). It is NOT a indication of what kind of quality education you get from a BS.</p>
<p>No, you’re right, but it could be an indication of the quality of the College Admissions Department at that BS.</p>
<p>Uroogla, I count 690, not 725, college matriculations for Hotchkiss. There are 30 kids who took a year off. If we accept this 690 figure, then we have 127/690 or 18.41% Ivy/Stanford/MIT.</p>
<p>PGs are generaly NOT already enrolled in their top choice school - although some are, most are attending BS to enhance their academic and athletic resumes and take full advantage of the college counseling services BS offer in order to gain admittance to their college of choice.</p>
<p>““PGs are generaly NOT already enrolled in their top choice school””</p>
<p>That depends on the school the PG is attending the 5th year at, does it not Sprinisintheair? </p>
<p>Enrolled = to write the name of (a person) in a roll or register; place upon a list; register: It took two days to enroll the new students.</p>
<p>Statistics from the class of '09 at my public high school. Out of the 138 grads, 4 are going to Harvard, 4 to Cornell, 1 to Princeton and a bunch to little ivies.One is doing PG at Deerfield, another at Avon Old Farm. Six will be year long rotary exchange students in foreign countries. As I told admissions officers, we were in a “win-win” position. Great schools to apply to, and a great school to stay if my dd didn’t go.</p>
<p>Our local high school: 1 Brown, 3 Columbia, 3 Cornell and 2 Yale out of 478. There’s an interesting dynamic at work as the first 15 or so get into top schools (also saw Duke, Williams, Vandy, NYU, UVa listed among those kids) but after that it drops off very quickly. Many in the next 20% or so go to good schools (regional privates such as Villanova, Fairfield, et al or large regional state schools such as Maryland, Penn State, UConn, etc.) and will do very well, but there are very few that get into top 50 universities or top 25 LACs. That may be driven by demographics as it is overwhelmingly a white, middle class town with good but not great schools so beyond the top 2 or 3% the grads don’t stand out in competitive applicant pools.</p>
<p>Thanks to those who are checking my numbers - I’ve misplaced my calculator and am thus doing the sums mentally, which is probably the cause of any inaccuracies. I’m going to recalculate now while I’m still fully awake, to fix any problems.</p>
<p>My count for Hotchkiss is 127/694 this time, which is close enough to the number toombs61 got that I think we can accept a percentage around the 18.41% he received.</p>
<p>Redid Exeter as well - I had missed Harvard, for some reason: 265/947 = 27.98%, which is closer to what I expected.</p>
<p>One thing to keep in mind is that in an Exeter booklet for students on the college process, they advise students to consider what sort of financial/merit assistance they would need. On the other hand, at Andover, I was never told to consider schools that would give merit aid because of financial reasons (I did anyways).</p>
<p>Another statistic to consider is where the middle third of the class goes. Obviously we can’t correlate college with grades through these sets of data, but considering matriculation at schools that are very good but not as selective as the Ivies and Stanford/MIT, such as Middlebury, would also be useful (the top however many percent of the students at these schools are hard enough workers and/or naturally gifted enough that they likely would have attended a similar school coming from the “average” public school. It’s the middle and bottom of the private school classes that are worth comparing. After all, while these schools are all highly selective and well regarded, they might not be the best school for the student. Brown’s Open Curriculum gave me what I desperately wanted, but had it not, I would have had no issue turning down Ivies to go to another school that fit my needs better.</p>
<p>I can verify Uroogla’s new Exeter stats. It turns out my 26% earlier left out one IVY by accident (Brown, sorry Uroogla).</p>
<p>That exeter number is still based on 06-08 though correct? Anyone have the graduation edition of the exonian to calculate this year’s percentage?</p>
<p>That would be nice, but the 3-4 year average would be unlikely to change much. Just as with Andover, an exceptionally strong 2009 stats only increased the 4 year overall percentage by half a percentage point or so.</p>
<p>To clarify, those numbers are still 2006-2008. While at one point I held the graduation edition of the Exonian, I neither read it through nor do I have it now (it was a co-worker’s copy).</p>
<p>NoDrama- it may not change things in the 3-4 hr averages much.
However, I would like to compare apples to apples: right now we are comparing one year at Andover (09) with three years at Exeter (06-08).</p>
<p>All the currently available numbers are in this thread or on the schools’ websites. I’m too lazy to go back and add up the original figures, but in post #36 Watertester gave us the Andover stats for 2006-2009. By subtracting the 2009 figures from Uroogla, you’ll get 31.8% for the period 2006-2008. That’s as apples-to-apples as you are going to get until Exeter publishes its 2009 statistics.</p>
<p>Ah, thank you! This is my first year looking at these numbers so I apologize for my ignorance on some of the posting habits of the schools and for posting old numbers for exeter everyone!</p>
<p>Andover has the full matriculation lists for the past six years posted on its website. You can get any year or any combination of years’ stats as you wish. It didn’t take me too long to get the numbers as I copied the lists into a spreadsheet and let Excel do the calculation - quick and easy!</p>
<p>uroogla is dead on spot. Each person looking at BS’s should look at college matriculation for the middle third and even the bottom third of each targeted prep school . When my son and I went through this drill, we found all of the HADES GMC schools fairly strong in this regard but we concluded that St. Paul’s was best in college placement up and down the chain.</p>
<p>This is great. I am glad that the schools we are discussing here publish the college matriculation data on their websites so we can look into and interprete the data in different ways. Please continue to post them here as more data become available.</p>
<p>That may well be true toombs61, but what metric did you use to measure results for the middle and bottom thirds? SPS certainly has an impressive matriculation beyond the (perhaps too) easily measured Ivy+SM statistic but as you noted, so do all of the other top schools. I’m curious if there was some method to your assessment beyond a subjective sense of which list was “best.”</p>
<p>Since I was curious about the “middle third approach” I wondered how far down the USNWR National University and LAC lists I’d have to go before I’d reached 2/3 of Andover’s class. The answer is roughly 25 as the top 25 universities and top 25 LACs combine for 207 out of 313 graduates (66.1%) matriculating this year. [Note: That’s the closest result to 2/3. Add 5 more for #26 Michigan (up to 67.7%) if you want to be anal about clearing 2/3 rather than being closest.]</p>
<p>While there is no precise mapping of a student’s position in the class and one magazine’s simplistic ranking of post-secondary schools (there are many fine institutions with tremendous programs that aren’t in either top 25 list yet will attract top notch students), the message is that if you are in the mid-range of Andover’s class you can expect to go to an outstanding college or university. </p>
<p>Perhaps most importantly, I suspect the results will be similar for other top boarding schools. Whether the corresponding figure is 22 or 33 really doesn’t matter very much. The key is that students who perform well but aren’t necessarily at the top of their classes will still have a host of fine college opportunities.</p>
<p>Big fish/honor student at the local grammar school become little fish at Preps, with only the best of the best getting into the top colleges. Parents get to pay $150,000 to $200,000 for a prep education for their 90 to 97% SSAT kid, only to see that kid in the bottom half of the highly able class, with no prayer of getting into honors classes. Parents need to be emotionally prepared to invest huge sums and then have their kid NOT get into their first or second choice college (one third don’t) and not have a chance in the world to get into a top top school.</p>