Top colleges limit acceptances per school?

Just wanted some more insight or discussion on this, do top colleges (top 20-ish) really accept only 1-2 students tops per high school that students apply from? Is this true to any extent?

No, it is not true.

Not true, Harvard, Stanford, MIT, CalTech and Princeton each accepted between 3 and 5 students from kids graduating class. Columbia and UPenn also accepted 1-2 each.

@bordertexan was that applied towards private or smaller schools? Or does that pertain to public schools large or small as well?

@Lift35 Public magnet school with 177 graduates.

Most high schools only have a handful of students qualified for tip top colleges. But these colleges do not say “We will only accept 1 or 2 regardless of their qualifications”.

They usually only accept 1-2 students as generally a regular public high school can only produce 1-2 extraordinary students. There can’t be too many amazing students in a regular high school as they really wouldn’t be extraordinary. Magnet schools, private schools are different as they some sort of way (entrance exams) to “weed out” the bad students so the quality of their student body is much better.

Some feeder schools like Stuyvesant send a lot of kids to Ivies because of their reputation of having a bunch of exceptional kids.

Depends on your high school. If your school consistently sends 1 kid to Harvard, then don’t expect 10 to go all of a sudden, but 2-3 is plausible.

@rdeng2614 I see. I go to a large public magnet school, we had 1 accepted to Yale, 1 to MIT, 2 to Dartmouth, 1 to Duke, 1 to Georgetown, 1 to Northwestern, 1 to Stanford, 1 to Johns Hopkins, and 1 to both UPenn and Cornell. The trend made me curious

My high school class of 47 had 6 kids ENROLL at brown. 9 were accepted.

Doy you know if more applied to those schools? Sometimes we only find out the number of students attending a particular school, not how many were accepted or even applied.

This is an oft-asked questions. The answer is NO. Top colleges have no reason to set-aside slots for any particular school – thus they have no incentive to limit accepts from any other particular school (sure, there are historical “feeders” but this speaks more of the quality of student than any compulsion a college has to accept . Your school can have 4 Stanford accepts this year and zero for the next dozen. It depends on the individual applicants.