One of the common reasons that people talk past each other on CC is that everyone has different experiences. When it comes to high schools and admissions, most of us can only see the experiences from our high school, and we tend to assume that other high schools are somewhat like ours.
For example, at our local public high school, it is typical that one or two kids each year gets into a majority of the HYPSMs each year, and it’s pretty obvious by junior year who those kids are likely to be. Beyond that, there are probably 75+ kids each year admitted into top 20 programs. There might be a small number of open admission public high schools that do better, but it’s clear that most do worse, as many people on CC talk about nobody getting into any Ivy level college from their school for years.
I don’t know how to justify this large discrepancy between schools, because I am a firm believer that talent is widely dispersed.
How much of it is just that the admissions office look favorably upon some schools and not others? And how much of that is actually earned because our students are well prepared for any college they enter? Or is part of it that parents at these schools see what approaches were successful for elite college admissions in prior years, and just model the best approach for their children, perhaps in terms of ECs or the teachers to ask for recommendations, thus perpetuating the cycle.
ETA: For our local public school, the vast majority of these elite college admissions are unhooked.
I would say that preparation is at least part of the answer. The kids from our school who get into a T5 unhooked, end up graduating college with a GPA at the high end of the range – 3.9+ or a 4.
“We show that the vast majority of low-income high achievers do not apply to any selective college”
If the vast majority of a particular group of high achieving kids does not apply to any selective colleges, then the vast majority of that group won’t be admitted to any selective colleges. It may be a given at some HSs that high achieving kids apply to all of HYPSM… ., but most open admission public HSs are very different. At many HSs, high achieving kids tend to favor in area/state options over flying thousands of miles away to an Ivy.
For example, I attended a basic HS in upstate NY. Being in upstate NY, we had a large number of applications to Cornell, a decent admit rate to Cornell, and a good number of matriculations to Cornell. However, relatively few high achieving kids applied to other Ivies, Stanford, MIT, …, so we had few matriculations to those colleges. Instead there were many high achieving kids that preferred in state options, which I’m sure is still true today, with SUNY tuition being fully covered via Excelsior scholarship.
Similar around here, for the very top kids but no 18% like yours. But for the very top few kids who have the rigor etc etc, its over 50% for a top 10 easily, unhooked, maybe for a top5 but those arent as popular here so less data.
Just curious, the only T10 that has clear signs of yield protection for the very top Val/sal kids at our school is UChicago(Waitlists are disproportionately skewed heavily toward top kids, acceptances more common in slightly lower gpa group). None of the other T10 appear to practice it, but there are some schools “lower” ranked in T30ish that seem to. Which T10 seem to yield protect in your area?
The most visible schools that want an ED (and hence practice yield management) are Chicago, Northwestern, UPenn.
I also think Columbia, Cornell, Duke, WashU, Tufts etc like ED. This means on the margin there is some chance of yield management.
If you are not applying ED to all these places, chances are much lower.
Most people that want to go to a school that happens to allow ED, just apply ED to that school. The counseling department really pushes hard on this. Only the tippy top kids take risks by applying to the EA schools – HYPSM. These kids also usually don’t bite the bullet and do a ED2. If they get deferred from their EA, they do RD to the rest of HYPSM and a whole bunch of other schools. A few kids do EA into HYPSM, and if they get deferred, don’t want to take a chance – they ED2 into Chicago or WashU. There is a lot of risk management going on.
People think that applying EA to a school that also has an ED is really a waste. Because nothing much will come out of that EA.
For many students, “diversity” probably means “enough people like me” but “not everyone is like me”, where the definition of “enough” and “not everyone” varies from student to student. Many colleges presumably look at their diversity goals through a marketing lens, in that they want to be attractive to the greatest percentage of prospective students within the students’ desires for what they consider “diversity” (as in, the college wants to present the image that “students just like you fit right in and thrive here”).
The college may also have marketing considerations with respect to donors and politicians, which may be different from students.
However, opportunities to use and apply talents in ways that impress college admission readers at highly selective colleges tend to be much more concentrated.
For our elite public school, we had the same usual (multiple) acceptances to many of the Top 5/10/15 schools. These kids apply ED.
For our school- a feeder for highly ranked UCs, getting into any UC got a lot harder for everyone. Many kids shut out who would normally get an acceptance to UCSD or UCSB or even UCI when UCLA OR UCB didn’t pan out. Cal Poly was more competitive as well.
IMO, if we are talking past each other, it is because most people are estimating based matriculations, and it is very difficult to predict actual odds of admissions based on looking back at matriculations. When a high school has had several dozen acceptances to top schools, it is easy to overestimate the odds of admissions.
This is another area where people talk past each other . . .
Is 75 kids a lot? 50%? 25%? 15%?
More importantly, what does “top 20 programs” mean? Majors? Departments? Colleges? Does top 20 include LACs? If so how many and which ones? How about top publics? Which ones? Cal and UCLA? (If so that’s 10% of your top 20 right there.) And whose list? What methodology? Which year?
The way “top 20” is used around here, I suspect it commonly includes around 50 schools, at a minimum.
Do you have access to information indicating where every parent went to college and graduate school, and/or what other connection they might have" Do have a list of every kid who might have received an admissions boost through fencing or lacrosse or field hockey or swimming or cross country or some other relatively obscure activity?
IMO, if one looked at actual acceptances and rejections at high performing high schools and corrected for hooks, the numbers would not be as many seem to believe. I say this based on seeing the numbers for unhooked kids at a high performing school which routinely sends a relatively high percentage of kids to top schools.
Yes, you are right I wasn’t considering ED as a form of yield protection but indeed it is. For our tippy-top kids only, UNhooked, ours do the same as you describe above. The RD results for these kids do not have mostly WL in the top “corner” of scatterplots, instead they have more admits than the next -tier kids(to me, this makes sense); only UChicago , of these T10 schools, has that type of distribution with WL clustered heavily at the top and acceptances, even RD, shifted.
This is a good takeaway for next year: unless you are near the very top, use ED and use it wisely.
Talent may be widely dispersed but the concentration at different schools varies.
Examples:
NM Commended students are announced at all these schools. All privates.
School 1: averages 3-5% of the class commended or better. Median SAT listed in the 1200s . Less than 20% matriculation at Top 30ish schools.
School 2: averages 10+% commended or better, median SAT low 1300s. 30-35% matriculation at Top30s
School 3: averages over 40% commended. Median SAT at or near 1500. 55-70% matriculation top30s.
Correlation isn’t causation and the use of the junior Psat score as a bar for talent could certainly be debated, but the trend says a lot. These HS all have different concentrations of academic talent.
Takeaway: know your HS and how you compare to the rest in the pool.
I agree about making a very informed ED decision if you are a full pay family.
At D’s HS and my niece’s, the top kids all got into their schools ED.
And you can add Johns Hopkins to the list of selective schools that fill more than 50% of their class in ED. The ad coms have been very up front about that for years.
I didn’t care to know this year. Three years ago I cared enough to know. And yes, I knew who was legacy – whether it is one or two parents, whether there is a grand parent who went to the same place, whether they also did Lacrosse, or whatever else. In granular detail. I have realized since that for the most part none of these things matter. Legacy, athletes and unhooked kids are all in different lanes. You can treat the process, locally (for that year), as if the “grading” is absolute. Not on the curve. Your package matters. Other kids around you in the school don’t matter. At least at our school.
Disagree. It’s actually very helpful to estimate acceptances to a specific school when you have a detailed acceptance history from your school. We know that certain top 20 schools (like Cornell) love our school while others (like Hopkins) seem to reject just about everyone even though the student profiles of applicants are very similar.
It’s about 15% of students, and my definition of “top 20” was the top 20 colleges in the 2017 USNWR top 20 national colleges in 2017 (fyi, there are 22 colleges in this “top 20”, because there were three ties). That’s my mental framework for counting because my first child graduated that year, but the constituents haven’t changed much since then. It does not include LACs, not because they aren’t excellent, but because very few students from our school apply to them. I also kept track of admissions to excellent colleges outside the top 20 like Tufts, Michigan, CMU, UCLA, etc.
For those of you that wondered “Why did you do all this?”, it’s because I am a (now retired) quant, and working with data to figure out things that others miss is something that I enjoy and am good at. For example, at first glance it appears that Penn doesn’t like our students based upon the low percentage that it admits. But upon closer inspection it turns out that the profile of students applying to Penn from our school was worse than those applying to similar schools (in fact the applicant pool to Cornell was stronger). Penn was actually quite willing to admit the really strong students that applied ED. Hopkins on the other hand was very stingy with admits for strong applicants.
For the years when I paid close attention (2015-2020), the vast majority of students that got into top colleges from our high school were children of immigrants. Many of these parents didn’t study in the US at all, and those that did got graduate degrees from places like University of Iowa, or Tennessee.
Their children largely emphasized academics and academic ECs rather than athletics. And I am also aware of the exceptions like the child whose parent is on the Harvard faculty, or the football player recruited by Stanford.
This is a perfect example of what I said in my previous post of people assuming that their experiences are representative of others. For the reasons I outlined above, in my case they are not.
A prestigious school in Bethesda, Landon, just announced 84% of its seniors were attending a college they applied to either ED or EA. Certaiy seems the norm for private schools to strongly push early applications now.
To me, nature defines potential, and nurture helps achieve that potential. My non-athletic son was never going to make the NBA, no matter how hard he tried.
I have said this many times before on here. Very few PRIVATE schools in the T50 and beyond are truly need blind. This has been known for like forever. Even the very top schools need to keep their customers happy, as in people that pay for endowed chairs and buildings.
I am pretty positive that a standard strong kid with 1500 SAT/3.8 UW can get admitted to multiple T50 schools if they are full pay and think strategically or hire a semi-competent college counselor.
There is a reason all these colleges are doing whatever they can to game USNWR rankings. That’s been proven.