Top 20 MATRICULATION lists from high school web sites

<p>A reply a few posts up in this thread asked about socioeconomic diversity at the Ivies if they take a lot of students from elite preps. But the elite preps themselves cast a very wide net looking for students. Exeter, for sure, participates in A Better Chance (ABC) and Prep for Prep, both programs to find low socioeconomic status, usually URM students and bring them into a challenging prep school environment. Exeter and Andover are both a LOT more ethnically diverse than the public high school I attended, for example. Each of those top prep schools ahs a lot of students attending on FULL need-based scholarship. Stuyvesant is of course a public high school, theoretically available to any smart New York City student, although its socioeconomic profile and ethnic profile both differ from those of the city's public schools as a whole. </p>

<p>Top feeder schools are top feeder schools precisely because they can provide a MIX of students who are all prescreened by academic ability and proven to be good, challenging academic environments for almost all of their enrollees.</p>

<p>What about Hotchkiss, no matriculation data? Not a "feeder"?</p>

<p>By the way, PC, Groton is in MA not CT.</p>

<p>no Hotchkiss info available at the time I did the original web perusing, but I just checked again, and lo&behold their matriculation list is now posted, so I'll add that soon.</p>

<p>& I stand corrected on Groton....yes, Mass.......I am sure there are other errors in this info & analysis, so please keep that in mind.</p>

<p>Class size: 152<br>
% Ivy, Stanford, MIT, + SWAP in Top 20: 21%<br>
Feeder score = 11 </p>

<p>This score puts Hotchkiss at a feeder rank of 4th, tied w/ T Jefferson HS & Harvard Westlake.</p>

<p>1 Georgetown University - 30<br>
2 Middlebury College - 22<br>
3 Cornell University - 19<br>
3 University of Pennsylvania - 19<br>
5 Bowdoin College - 18<br>
5 Duke University - 18<br>
5 Yale University - 18<br>
8 Harvard University - 17<br>
9 Brown University - 15<br>
10 Trinity College/CT - 14<br>
10 University of Virginia - 14<br>
12 Davidson College - 13<br>
13 Dartmouth College - 12<br>
13 New York University - 12<br>
15 Boston University - 11<br>
15 St. Lawrence University - 11<br>
15 University of Vermont - 11<br>
18 Boston College - 10<br>
18 Columbia University - 10<br>
18 Princeton University - 10<br>
18 Stanford University - 10<br>
18 Union College - 10</p>

<p>As just proven with Hotchkiss, schools are constantly updating their web sites, and I have noticed that the time many seem to do so is in Sept & October; hence, some of the data posted on this thread are undoubtedly outdated already, but probably good enough for this little exercise.</p>

<p>Catholic universities do give priority to Catholic kids who have been educated in Catholic schools--according to my friends who sit on the executive boards of Catholic universities.</p>

<p>And so they should--if they want to maintain the Catholic mission of their institutions.</p>

<p>Cheers, that's a fair assessment of the admissions philosophy of Catholic universities. That's a little different from saying that the preference is dictated by the Vatican. Actually, many US Catholic colleges are much more liberal in terms of faculty outlook than you might think, and that's where the Vatican may occasionally weigh in.</p>

<p>Georgetown, Holy Cross, and Notre Dame have relied on top Jesuit and other private Catholic prep schools for decades just as the Ivies had a pipeline from the elite boarding/prep schools.</p>

<p>And NOW (by "NOW" one could probably include the last twentyfive years or so) I think you will see that Boston College, Georgetown, Holy Cross and, to a lesser extent (correct me if I am wrong), Notre Dame are enrolling many, as many and sometimes more sudents (especially Georgetown) from the "elite boarding/prep schools" than the Ivies are. </p>

<p>What does that say? More diversity in the Ivies? More diversity in the prep schools? More diversity in the Catholic colleges? Top Catholic colleges on par with the Ivies?</p>

<p>hi PC:</p>

<p>How come Duke wasn't included in your list of feeder "destination" schools? It seems like it made most of the top lists from your prep/private school matriculation lists. In fact, I know a kid from the #1 ivy feeder prep school in NH from your list who goes there..... by choice. :)</p>

<p>Papa, thanks for the interesting (though, not surprising) data. I'm interested in the Catholic school data, as this is not typically written about in the press.</p>

<p>Wall Street Journal ran an analysis similar to your last fall. Interesting to see how their results compare against yours. </p>

<p>Here is their feeder list:
<a href="http://webreprints.djreprints.com/wsj_tuition_040104.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://webreprints.djreprints.com/wsj_tuition_040104.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Here is the accompanying WSJ article:
<a href="http://webreprints.djreprints.com/1263191155902.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://webreprints.djreprints.com/1263191155902.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Everyone has to remember that while you CAN label a school as a Feeder, you can't assume this school does a better job of preparing kids for selective colleges since we would need to look at % of students heading to selective colleges. For a school with 500 in the senior class, sending 50 to Ivy&Co isn't as impressive as another with 100 in the grad class, sending 50 to Ivy&Co.</p>

<p>From WSJ study:</p>

<p>"Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell and Brown—supplemented by three of the most exclusive colleges in the West, Midwest and South. These were Pomona, the University of Chicago, and Duke. (We were unable to get data from an eighth Ivy, Columbia University, or from one of the most exclusive colleges on the West Coast, Stanford University)."</p>

<p>I've always thought the Wall Street Journal's selection of colleges for that unreplicated study was really odd. At least the newspaper writers acknowledge that some other colleges could reasonably have been included on the list, but for limitations of data availability.</p>

<p>Interesting to note that many of the super feeders on PC's list are mid sized school schools. Exeter has roughly 1000 students in grades 9-12.</p>

<p>Exeter's senior class is usually about 310 (+/_ ) students. </p>

<p>The senior class may be significantly larger than grades 9 and 10 because of upperclass transfers (in) and PG's.</p>

<p>"I've always thought the Wall Street Journal's selection of colleges for that unreplicated study was really odd."</p>

<p>I didn't think so. They used Ivies (sans Columbia for lack of data). They also omitted Stanford for lack of data. Then they supplemented with top schools from diverse parts of the country - avoiding the NE concentration and inherent biases. I think its interesting to not focus on the NE schools, for once. We have more than enough Ivy and SWAMS data. The WSJ article used % of students rather than total number of students headed to the specific colleges. </p>

<p>Exeter, which is #1 on some of PCs lists, is #16 on the WSJ list (with 322 students in the graduating class). #1 on the WSJ list is St. Ann's with 74 in the graduating class, and 41% headed to the participating colleges. </p>

<p>Bottom line: we can spin these lists a hundred different way and get different feeder results.</p>

<p>The WSJ results would have looked different if Columbia would have been included, I'm sure. Columbia has a hefty "in-state" student population - 27%! That would have changed the profile for the NY schools, I'm sure.</p>

<p>Cheers, Leanid, Par72,</p>

<p>There is a significant number of students from elite boarding schools going to Catholic colleges today. However, I have a different question. Are more of the students from Catholic High Schools going to Ivy League schools than in the past? Are they getting in?</p>

<p>The recent "Enrollment Management" article in the Atlantic Monthly discussed the "Jewish Problem" at the Ivy league schools in the past. In the article they discuss Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Before that there was an associated "Catholic Problem" at these same schools. The response by the Catholic population was different than the Jewish response, they started their own schools, notably, HC, BC and ND (Georgetown was here at the birth of the nation).</p>

<p>The Catholic High Schools have sent many or most of their best students to those Catholic colleges. This results in a lower yield from Catholic High Schools than the yield they get from other prep schools. Because of this I wonder if the Enrollment Management systems at some schools may be substituting a statistical discrimination instead of the overt one practiced in the past.</p>

<p>1sokkermom-- reason I didn't include Duke as a feeder destination (at least for this first round) was shear convenience for me. When I started this thread, I was merely posting Top 20 lists, with a measure of "placement quality" defined arbitrarily by me as Ivies + Stanford + MIT + SWAP, hence I've got a spreadsheet now that is more built around that list. (Well, I admit I did consider adding others like Duke & Chicago to the original destination list, but I did not because that would have meant an extra degree of spreadsheet work.) So when I did the latest Feeder assessment, I had the Ivies, S+M & SWAP for the most part summarized already & it was easiest for me to do the Feeder assessment with those destination schools in mind.</p>

<p>I plan to do the same feeder assessment w/ a set of Catholic/Jesuit schools, and hopefully other top schools in the near future, but that’s going to take some more work.</p>

<p>No slight to Duke intended.</p>

<p>momsdream-- thanks for the WSJ article.....I hadn't seen it. A few comments.....</p>

<p>The biggest difference in the Feeder assessment I provided and the WSJ survey is that mine is based on total numbers of matriculants, not the quality so to speak of destination placement. A big school has more potential to rank high in mine because they have more graduates. Again, my intent here was just to look at the data in a slightly different way to see which HS's provided the mass of matriculants to the defined set of selective colleges.</p>

<p>Another big difference is that the data source for all the info provided on this thread comes from the HS's themselves, and most are averages based on multiple years vs the WSJ data which are only based upon 2003. As I suspect there are some variations year to year, I hope that use of averages based on multiple years of matriculation data provide a slightly better assessment on a HS's track record. Of course, a major problem, relative to WSJ, with my assessment is that all HS's are NOT represented because the data were either not available, or I didn't know to look.</p>

<p>On the other hand, the "% Ivy, Stanford, MIT, + SWAP in Top 20" calculation provided with each individual HS Top 20 list is a closer match to the WSJ survey.....that calcualtion was done because I was curious about the "quality" of each HS's placement. I will tally all of those up soon, & provide a list.....will be interesting to see how it compares to WSJ, although since we are using 2 different sets of destination colleges and I am missing some HS's, it will undoubtedly be somewhat different.</p>